Getting Started with Article Marketing

Have you heard that article marketing is a low-cost, relatively simple way to get your name out there and grow your business? Maybe you’ve heard of the benefits, and you might have even read about business owners who claim that their businesses have exploded thanks to article marketing.

Let me tell you – the stories are absolutely, 100% true. The potential for success with article marketing is enormous. In a nutshell, here are the steps to a successful article marketing campaign:

•1)      Pick a topic. Easier said than done, I’m sure you’re thinking. To make things easy on yourself, just think about the problems you solve for your clients (or will solve, if you’re new in business and don’t have any clients yet) and start giving them helpful solutions. In bite-sized chunks, of course…you don’t want to give away the farm!

•2)      Choose relevant keywords. Find a keyword popularity tool online and research the keywords your target market is using to find your competitors. Then be sure to use those specific keywords in your article marketing campaign (more on that in the next step).

•3)      Start writing! Get started on the body of your article.

• Save the title for last – that way you can be sure you capture the essence of the article in the title. Once you do get to the title, put some thought into it. You want your article marketing titles to stand out and entice people to read your articles!
• Keep your sentences and paragraphs short and sweet to accommodate your readers’ short attention spans.
• Use subheadings and bulleted or numbered lists often to break up the text and help skimmers find what they’re looking for.
• Don’t forget your keywords! Include them in your text as often as possible without negatively affecting the quality of your article – you want your articles to have an equal blend of helpfulness for your readers and optimization for the search engines.
• Proofread your articles! I can’t stress this enough…you don’t want glaring typos or grammatical errors in your article marketing pieces.

•4)      Publish your articles.

• First, publish your article on your site. Your primary goal with article marketing is to drive traffic to your website, and what better way than to have them find the article on your site in the first place?
• Next, submit your articles to article directories. There are a lot of options out there that offer free and paid versions, so find a few that work well for you and, if you don’t have a Virtual Assistant to complete this time-consuming task for you, start submitting your articles!