Use Article Marketing to Promote Your Product

Posted on : January 2, 2010

Article marketing is a very effective mechanism for online promotion of your website or affiliate links. As we reveal in our Paidin14Days.com program, article marketing can also be a way to make money and be a business all by itself.

What is Article Marketing? Article marketing is the practice of posting keyword-focused articles on article sites that then syndicate your…content. Having your articles syndicated by certain sites that have a large readership following will propagate your expertise and links throughout the web.

How to Write an Article for Marketing? Some people are very intimidated about writing. Their fear keeps them from starting at all. However, the most important step to article writing is to get started. First, pick one topic to to write about and keep the article to 400 words or less. Second, write down your thoughts and don’t worry about search engine optimization or perfection for that matter. Third, go back and edit your draft now looking for keywords and good writing style. Remember that passion beats market trends. Therefore, write on topics that you know and are passionate about.

Keyword Research is Important in Article Marketing. Before you write your article, you’ll want to spend some time doing keyword research. Keyword research is the action of discovering those keywords which users actually use to find specific content on the Internet. It can also be described as balancing the popularity of a keyword (or search phrase) against how competitive that keyword phrase is. This is important because if you spend a lot of time and money targeting the wrong keywords and phrases your return on investment will not be maximized. Alternatively, if your keywords have a significant number of results you may have a difficult time getting ranked for that competitive of a keyword.

So after investing the time to uncover the keywords you want to focus on the subject of your article will be obvious. Choose the placement of your keywords strategically without spamming. Do not turn your article into a sales letter, but you can also use your keywords as the anchor text (the words clicked) for any links in your article.

Article Syndication. Recently I submitted an article to Ezine Articles called “How To Make Money Online Using YouTube.” My article was accepted in less than 24 hours because it was original content and it was well-written. I also noted that my article was picked up and reused by several other sites and was getting views and reads. (How do I know this? Google Alerts.)

There are several good article syndication sites on the Internet and most allow you to post your article for free. However, these sites have guidelines and are stringent that you follow their rules. When your article is published, your content becomes available for anyone to read – and hopefully reuse. This is important because if another site reuses your article then your name and links are distributed on the web, which increases your exposure. In many cases, blogs or other sites that post your content have large viewership, which increases traffic to your site.

Some article submission sites will allow you to include links in the body of your articles. By doing this you can link your keyword phrases and promote your products with that keyword. This is a very effective search engine optimization technique. Other sites won’t allow you to include links but you can always include links in your your profile or signature information box. This also adds important one-way backlinks to your blog or website.

Article Sites Want Good Material. Syndicated article sites want good material to publish. However, many of these sites won’t publish your content if it’s not well written. So make sure to do the obvious like proofread your articles and have them spell checked before submitting them. Even if an article site accepts a poorly-written article for publication, you will want to project a positive impression to your readers. By making your article compelling and grammatically correct you will shed the best light on your products and encourage others to link to your article and even republish it.

Outsourcing Article Marketing. As you probably know, most business activities can be outsourced to others for perhaps less than the cost of you doing those activities yourself. But even if you have to a ghost writer write for you, it’s a good idea to be familiar with the content and review any work that will have your name attached to it. The good news is that its usually fairly inexpensive to have a good article written by a talented ghost writer, but you still get the credit!

Finding Good Article Sites Using Google Alerts. I discussed earlier using article syndication sites. You will be able to find several that you like to work with that are also effective in getting your article noticed after doing some research. I recommend using Google Alerts for your targeted keywords to see which articles sites are getting good exposure in Google.

With Google Alerts you will specify the keyword or keyword phrase for which you want alerts sent to you. You can choose to receive alerts for various categories like news articles, web pages, blog postings, groups, or you can select “Comprehensive” or “Web.” Comprehensive will give you the alerts for all of the selections combined while Article sites are included with the Web selection. Your designated alerts will arrive via email and you can choose to be notified as it happens or in increments (daily, weekly, etc.). You’ll see a listing of items that include your selected keyword phrase. Among the listings you’re likely to see one or more article syndication sites. Click the news item to visit the site where the article is posted, sign up and you’re ready to go.

Take the Article Marketing Plunge. If you haven’t tried it yet to promote your product, website, links and/or your home business website, you will see that article marketing works and it is a powerful way to get traffic and positive public relations exposure.