Article Marketing Basics: The Free Way to Drive Traffic to Your Website

If you’re looking to drive traffic to your website and establish yourself as a go-to person in your field, article marketing is a free (or low cost, in some cases) way to grow your business online. However, article marketing isn’t as simple as throwing together a few thoughts and sticking your article on your website. There are a few basics to follow, which, by the way, do not include being the world’s best writer. To start, you’ll need some good ideas, knowledge of your target market, and a sincere desire to help prospective clients find answers. A spell checker or proofreader doesn’t hurt either, especially since you want to keep the credibility you’ve worked so hard to establish. 

Now it’s time to get down to business. You’ll be following four basic steps:

1. Pick a topic that will resonate with your target audience. For example, If you are a dentist who’s trying to use articlemarketing to grow your business, don’t write an article about gardening.
2. Choose relevant keywords that will show up on a Google search. While you don’t want to go overboard on keywords, try to use them at least once in the introduction, again in the conclusion, and a couple of times within each paragraph of the article—again, without overdoing it. 
3. Use smart writing to grab your readers.  Remember, you are writing an article, not a thesis. You want to compel your audience to keep reading with tools such as short sentences and paragraphs, subheadings, lists, a great title, and a polished final draft. Remember those keywords are important.
4. Publish your article online. The first crucial step is to upload the article to your website, since the search engines love fresh content! Once you’ve done that and you are the author of the article on the search engines, the final step is to submit it to online article directories. These can be found in various free and paid versions. Do a Google search for “article directories”

And there you have it! With a little effort, you can have an article marketing campaign by that is free to low cost—and easy to do. Now that you know these four basic steps you’ll be generating hot prospects and targeted clients in no time.