Article Marketing Made Easy

1. Choosing A Niche

But before you grab your tools, have you decided what you want to grow? This can be tricky, and you can probably bet you’ll make some mistakes or take the long way around at least once or twice. So don’t be overly concerned with making mistakes. Your best bet is to follow one simple rule: follow your passion.

You’ve heard that a million times. And it really applies here. After all, you’re going to be writing terrific, unique content from scratch. Then you’ll promote it all over the web. Finally, you’ll monitor, tweak, add, and subtract. In some cases, you’ll start all over with fresh ideas and a new plan. The point is, if you’re excited about the topic, all this work will be that much more fun!

Not to mention your readers will also dig your articles if they sense your passion. So, do yourself a favor and stop to think about what moves you. For many people this is an easy task; for others it is more challenging. Sooner or later, it will hit you, and when it does you had better go grab a pen!

A final tip for choosing a niche: take time to read articles already out there. You’ll get a sense of effective writing styles, and it will foster more ideas. You might also learn a few things you didn’t already know.

2. Putting Pen To Paper

Well, you probably will not use a pen at all. (Or maybe you will!) Regardless, this is where most people get stuck.

Do you know how professional writers do it? I’m talking about the Agatha Christies, the Stephen Kings and the John Grishams, to name just a few of my favorites. They write every day, religiously. They have a routine, and they stick to it. They may not have a productive go at it on a given day, but that is all part of the process. Other days will be great! And it will be like this for you, too.

General guidelines for effective article writing are:

- Start each paragraph with a topic sentence

- Follow with a supporting sentence

- End with a concluding sentence

If you use a computer to write it will be easy to copy and paste your articles right onto the web, literally. Just make sure you read and re-read the web version because some software tools, like Microsoft Word, leave little “gremlins” embedded in the code. These aren’t harmful in any way. They’re just character mismatches that wreak havoc on apostrophes, quotation marks, and dashes.

Finally, pay attention to the word count of your articles. You will want to keep articles in chunks of around 250-300 words. This improves readability and maximizes your effectiveness. If you’ve already got some articles written but they’re much longer than 300 words, try splitting them into separate articles.

3. Keying In on Keywords

Simply getting 300 or so words down on paper is not the end-game necessarily. The words themselves are extremely important, hence the name “Keywords.”

For a given article, jot down the 10 most popular topics or sub-topics. Then head over to a free keyword tool (see below), plug in your keywords, and carefully look over the results.

What words are most popular this month? Which ones have the highest competition? What new keywords come up that you hadn’t thought of? From this you might easily spot opportunities for new articles.

There are positives and negatives for using the most popular keywords. The positive: your chances of reaching millions of people are better. The negative: getting close to page one of Google’s search results page is going to be very tough!

Keyword research is a never-ending cycle. Make sure each article has one primary keyword that appears more than any other keyword. Support that with a secondary keywords and tertiary keywords. Use them in your page titles and descriptions (called meta tags in html), h1, h2, and h3 headings, and in your resource box. A well-written article is only as effective as its use of keywords.

Here are some free keyword tools to help you get started with your keywords:

- https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

- http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

- http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

- http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/

- http://www.wordpot.com/

4. Outsourcing Writers

If this all sounds a bit too daunting, or perhaps you KNOW you just don’t have time to write, there are plenty of freelance copywriters willing to help. These folks work for you. They may even be better writers than you! (In some cases, they will not be.) But before you enter into an agreement, make sure you’ve read enough of their portfolio to make an educated guess.

How do you find good ghostwriters? Luckily there are websites devoted to connecting you with freelance talent. Most sites take a small fee after all is said and done, but is usually reasonable.

How much will writers charge? It depends on their experience. But in these desperate economic times, you will probably find a good writer for around $10-$30 per article.

Below are just a few freelance connection sites that cater to writers:

- www.elance.com

- www.odesk.com

- www.worldwidefreelance.com

- www.guru.com

- www.bintro.com

5. Putting Seeds In The Bank

OK, so you’ve got a few articles under your belt. Congrats! Now what?

This is where you methodically distribute your seeds, and then… wait, watch, and grow.

There are a bunch of sites that will take your articles and distribute them to all kinds of organizations for non-exclusive rights to reprint. These sites are known as Article Banks.

Here’s how they work: you submit an article to a distribution site, it goes under technical and semantic review, and once it checks out okay your article is made available to webmasters, ezine publishers, newsletter publishers, and offline publications.

Some sites charge a monthly fee, some a per-posting fee, while others are free. New services are popping up all over the place, so head over to Google and search for “article bank”.

Below are 13 Article Banks that will be of tremendous help to you. But before you go signing up anywhere, be sure to read the next section (Leave A Mark In Each Seed) as it plays an important role in your overall marketing plan.

- www.amazines.com

- www.articlealley.com

- www.articlecity.com

- www.articledashboard.com

- www.articledepot.co.uk

- www.articlefinders.com

- www.certificate.net

- www.ezinearticles.com

- www.freesticky.com

- www.ideamarketers.com

- www.prweb.com (paid PR service)

- www.i-newswire.com (free PR service)

- www.pr.com (free PR service)

[A note about the PR services listed above: This is a great way to get in the press release game without paying big PR bucks! If your company did something newsworthy--took on a big client, relocated, or reorganized in some way--let the world know about it!]

6. Leave A Mark In Each Seed

This section is extremely important. Arguably, this is the sole reason you’re writing articles in the first place.

You want to monetize these articles, right? Right! Well each article marketing site or Article Bank recognizes this by allowing you an opportunity or two to take advantage of this mass distribution of your articles.

What do they do? They provide a “resource box” in the signature of every article you submit. The resource box is where you will provide a URL link back to your site (appropriately called a “backlink”). It might look something like this:

http://Your-Company-Name.com/

or

http://Your-Company-Name.com/niche/article.html

This helps you in at least three ways:

a. You receive a backlink from each site where your article lives, thereby boosting your organic search engine rankings.

b. You gain targeted traffic which you can monetize in endless ways, thereby improving your bottom line.

c. Readers may see you as a credible expert in your field, thereby enhancing your reputation cloud and attracting more business.

As you can see, articles are not only sources of news and information. They’re also vehicles for monetization. It’s their job to bring people to you. It is your job to turn this traffic into money. But that’s a whole different topic about which many books have been written!