Article Marketing Strategy

How to Use a Simple Article to Create an Avalanche of Traffic

If you’re an information marketer, then you already are well aware of just how valuable your words are.

After all, people are willing to pay handsomely for them.

But your words are also worth a fortune in traffic… no matter WHAT you’re selling. And one of the ways to turn your words into traffic is through the power of article marketing.

When most people think of article marketing, they think of writing articles and submitting them to article directories in the hopes of picking up a few click-throughs.

But article marketing is much bigger than that.

It can be used to:

• Pull in search engine traffic if you optimize your article for long tail keywords.
• Gets tons of targeted traffic to your site if a publisher picks it up and reprints it online or offline.
• Establish yourself as an expert in your niche, which boosts both traffic and sales.
• Get backlinks from high ranking websites, which helps you with your own search engine optimization efforts.

And article marketing isn’t just limited to the article directories, either. You can post your articles on other content sites such as Yahoo! Answers, Quizilla, Zimbio, Xomba, Livejournal and a lot of other social media sites, niche forums and more.

However just posting the same article on many different article directories and web 2.0 sites won’t bring you a lot of traffic.

You MUST do your keyword research first. After you’ve got an idea on the topic you want to write about go to your keyword tool and do a search for relevant keywords. You also can use Google’s keyword tool or a tool like Micro Niche Finder which I personally use and I can highly recommend it.

When you’re doing keyword research for your article marketing, go for long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are keywords with 3 or more words in it.

After you’ve found about 5 keywords related to your topic you want to write about go to google.com and do a search for these keywords but put your keyword into “quotes” before you do the search. Write down the results google shows for the chosen keyword (you can see the number at the top right side). Repeat that for all the keywords.

Now take the keyword(s) with less than 10,000 results from Google and write your article about it. When ever possible use the keyword at the beginning of your article title and then about 1 time every 100 words. Be careful with using your keywords too many times because ezinearticles.com doesn’t allow you to use your keywords more than 2 times per 100 words.

But just writing and posting an article in an article directory or on another site won’t have buyers scurrying to your site.

You have to give them a reason to click through to your site. And that’s the purpose of your author’s resource box.

Your resource box (also known as “author bio” or “byline”) is that little space at the end of your article where you have an opportunity to tell the world about what you offer (benefits) as well as a compelling reason why the reader should click on your link now.

Many beginning marketers, however, make a grave mistake when they create their resource box.

Instead of giving the reader a compelling reason why they should click on the link, the beginning marketer just talks about himself.

I’m sure you’ve seen it. How many resource boxes have you see that are basically a short author biography?

You find out the article author’s name, where he lives, what sort of degree or other credentials he holds, and what kind of dog he has.

That sort of resource box leaves the reader shrugging and saying, “that’s nice.”

That’s because the reader does NOT care about you – he only cares about himself and his problems. If your resource box doesn’t tell him what benefits he’ll receive if he clicks on your link, he’ll be clicking the back button instead of your link.

Your article got him this far – he read all the way through to the end. DON’T lose him in those final few lines by talking about yourself.

Instead, offer him a freebie such as a free report or even “Part 2” of the article he just finished reading.

Tell him in no uncertain terms what benefits he’ll receive if he clicks your link.

Arouse his curiosity by telling him about a benefit but not quite telling him HOW he’ll receive that benefit.

For example, the resource box for a weight loss article may include something like, “Click here to discover what common diet food is actually making you fat!”

The benefit for the reader, of course, is that by clicking on your link he can find out what diet food he needs to avoid. And he will click, because you’ve also aroused his curiosity about whether he’s eating something that’s making him fat.

Try to use your keyword you want your website to rank for to link back to your website. I’ll take the example about weight loss from above to show what I mean. You own a website about weight loss and you try to get your website ranked for the keyword “easy weight loss tips”. Your resource box or author bio could be something like, “Check out these easy weight loss tips and discover what common diet food is actually making you fat!”

Use the keyword easy weight loss tips as backlink for your website just like I did in the above example.

Now submit your article to several different article directories.

If you want to get out the most of your article marketing you should rewrite your articles and make them about 30% unique. If you’re rewriting your articles before submitting to the different directories, Google will rank all of your articles much higher and you’ll receive much more free targeted traffic to your website.

However rewriting and submitting articles to many different article directories and web 2.0 sites can be extremely time consuming or it could cost you a lot of money when you want to outsource that work.

A much easier way would be using a software like ArticleBot. This software makes submitting articles to over 400 different article directories extremely easy.

That’s it for today. My next post will be about “How To Get Your Articles Indexed And Ranked In Google”. I’m showing you my strategy and I’m going to use one of my articles as a case study. The mentioned article does rank at position #2 in Google, out of more than 1,500,000 results.

I hope you enjoyed today’s post and I would love to see some of your feedbacks and comments or recommendations on article marketing.

Check out my follow up post here.