Article Marketing

What Is Article Marketing?

Article marketing is the simple process of writing 500-600 word articles to attract targeted prospects to your website in order to either have them check out additional information, sign up for some type of free subscription (e-book, report, e-course, newsletter, etc.) to build your list, check out your products and/or services, and so on.

Why Is Article Marketing Important?

Article marketing is important to your business for several reasons, but according to the Jim Edwards, of “Turn Your Words Into Traffic”, “Other than free search engines, publishing articles represents the last truly effective “FREE” way to get valuable, targeted traffic to your site. And, unlike free search engines, promoting with articles doesn’t require any special skills, programming or “magic spells” to make it effective”.

How Can Article Marketing Help You Grow Your Home-Based Business?

The question you should ask is, how can article marketing not help you to build your home-based business?

The reason I say that is because there are no downside to writing articles that specifically targets your idea client.

To keep this short and sweet, let me ask you another question.

Who would you prefer to purchase from, someone who provides you with useful information or someone who just puts up a blatant sales letter that screams, “hey you, come and buy my product because I’m only concerned about taking from you and not giving anything until you show me some dollar signs!”

Of course you’ll most likely trust and purchase from the person that’s looking out for your best interest, rather than the other person that doesn’t provide you with anything.

Remember this, “you must give before you get.”

That statement is so simple, yet so profound and extremely powerful, but most of us tend to forget the wisdom that’s packed within it.

Okay, let’s get back to how article marketing can help you to grow your home-based business…

Below are just a handful of the ways article marketing will benefit your business:

• Allow you to establish yourself as the most trusted expert with your target market.
• Allow you to automatically build incoming links to your website because other sites will link to you if your content is beneficial to their visitors.
• You’ll create more content that you could add to your autoresponder series that will form the basis of moneymaking e-courses.
• As you become better known and people begin trusting you, they’ll seek you out to set up potentially profitable Joint Ventures.
• The more articles you create, the more you’ll have indexed within the search engines, thus creating more targeted traffic for your website.

If you create high quality articles, other sites will request your permission to publish them, which also translates into more traffic to your website.

High quality articles can be added to your affiliate resource center for your army of affiliates to use to promote your products and/or services.

Wow, and those are just a handful of the benefits you can gain if you incorporated article marketing into your marketing strategy.

When Should You Use Article Marketing?

After the above list of benefits, I don’t see why you wouldn’t immediately add it to your marketing strategy.

That’s all I’m going to say about it.

Are There Any Dangers or Challenges Associated With The Use Article Marketing?

The only warning that I can give you is to avoid what’s called “Keyword Stuffing.”

Keyword stuffing is including the keywords you are trying to get traffic for too many times in the information your are sharing in a very unnatural way, in an attempt to persuade or trick the search engines.

Lets say you are writing a article and trying to optimize for the keyword, weight loss.

Okay, what if your opening paragraph stated, “Are you tired of all the fad diets that are floating around?

Are you ready to discover the natural and permanent way to a healthy weight loss?”

That’s the correct way to include your keyword weight loss into your article.

Here’s an example of keyword stuffing:

The U. s. is becoming increasingly overweight, and fad weight loss diets are on the rise, and these weight loss diets are really unhealthy and could create health problems.

In the above, there’s no need to include the word weight loss twice within the same sentence.

This practice is frowned upon by the search engines and can get your web pages penalized and keep them from being indexed (stored in the search engines’ databases).

The best possible practice is to write first for your target audience, and then second for the search engines, and as a result you’ll satisfy both.

The only other warning is to make sure you always include your contact information at the end of your articles called a resource box or signature file.

You must include this resource box so prospects can visit your website and/or contact you.

What Tools And Resources Must Be Used To Implement Article Marketing?

The tools and resources you have to choose from are endless, but I’m going to narrow it down to those that I personally use.

Keep in mind, having too many choices can be a negative thing, as you’ll allow yourself to get caught in the all too familiar scenario of “paralysis of analysis” syndrome.

Here we go…

Here is a powerful downloadable software program you could check out:

SEO Elite 

You will love the power this software gives to you right at your fingertips. It allows you to easily submit your articles to article directories without having retype or with slight modification to your account info (huge time saving benefit), search for link potential link partners that shows you their page rank, request links using personalized letters, spy on my competition, reverse engineer their web strategies, and so on.

SEO Elite has so many awesome features and benefits that it truly is the ultimate Article Submission tool!
Click Here for more details.

Turn Words Into Traffic by Jim and Dallas Edward

After learning the techniques and strategies contained within Turn Words Into Traffic, I went on to writing approximately 30 articles for my previous fitness membership website. It’s well laid out in a very step-by-step manner that if followed, you’d be cranking out your own high-quality articles.

I highly recommend this product!

Click Here for more details!

• Here are a few articles directories you could manually submit your articles to:
  
  http://www.ezinearticles.com/
  
  http://www.goarticles.com/
  
  http://www.articledashboard.com/
  
  http://www.amazines.com/