Article Marketing Guide

Article Marketing Guide - Part One

Writing articles and publishing them on article directories like EzineArticles.com is a very common - and important - method to generate traffic to a website or blog. Writing articles and publishing them is an important traffic generation strategy. This little article marketing guide explains everything you need to know, so pay attention...

What you do, is writing articles about topics related to your business and submitting them to article directories. Once your articles are accepted at the directories, the articles are posted on their site and published on the internet.

Why you would do this, is mainly to attract visitors to your website (or blog). Publishing articles on the internet generates traffic both directly from your articles, and eventually from search engines as the number of backlinks to your website increases. That's what this article marketing guide is all about.

When people are searching for information on matters you have written about, they may come across one of your articles, read the article and eventually click on a link leading them to your website. Besides, Google often picks articles from article directories to be displayed on its first page, and some day your article may show up on that distinguished (and profitable!) spot.

Here's what your articles can do for you (and your business):

• Attract visitors to your web site
• Generate backlinks, thus increasing search engine rankings and traffic
• Generate traffic for years to come
• Establish yourself as an expert in your field and build trust
• Help preselling a product or service you are offering
• Bring more returning visitors to your website
• Build a mailing list

So the benefits of article marketing are huge; that's why so many website owners are doing it, and why lots of article marketing tools and services have been created to make writing and publishing articles easier and less time consuming.

Very few article directories allow you to have links in the article text, so any links you would like to display to the readers of your articles should go into the resource box. The resource box is made up from a couple sentences at the end of the article where you tell about (promote) yourself, your website, or a product or service you might be offering.

This article marketing guide can't cover everything; for an in-depth explanation on how to create and use the resource box, please refer to Building Backlinks Basics (scroll about half way down the page).

Here's an example of an article (published on EzineArticles) with a resource box at the end: Make Money Writing Articles

Lessen the Work
Writing and publishing articles on the internet can be a tedious and time consuming task. However, as mentioned above, there have been created tools and services that can take care of a great part of the article marketing process.

Firstly, there are PLR (Private Label Rights) articles you can use as a basis and rewrite so they turn into your own unique articles. Here's a place you can get free PLR articles.

Secondly, you can take a few articles from EzineArticles.com (or any article directory) and use these articles as an idea, or basis, for a completely new article (don't copy or scrap - the content ought to be unique).

Thirdly, you can outsource the task - have professional authors write articles for you. Believe it or not, you can have high quality articles (500 - 600 words) for around $6! Recommended services:

Need-an-Article
GetAFreelancer
Elance

Last but not least there are two article writing tools that I recommend. One of them is simply named Article Builder. It can actually create articles "at the push of a button". See a review of Article Builder.

The other tool is a system that assists you writing articles (it doesn't write them for you). It is a template based system that gives you ideas and inspiration on what to write about, and walks you through creating web content in dozens of categories. It's called Jiffy Articles and is free at the time of writing this.

Publish On Quality Sites
When your article is ready to get published, you have to find article directories and publishers to submit your articles to. The directories all have different editorial rules, so be sure to read their guidelines before posting your article. Here are a few high Alexa and Google ranked article directories:

EzineArticles
GoArticles
ArticleDashboard
ArticlesBase
Buzzle

There are many more, but we can't list all in this article marketing guide. Just do a Google search on "top article directories", and you will have lots of websites listing the top ranked directories for the moment.

You should submit your articles to multiple directories, for various reasons:

• Find those who give you the most exposure
• Different directories have different users (readers)
• Spread your links as much as possible
• Search engines may not count all links on the same directory

You can publish the same article on several directories. However, to avoid the 'duplicate content' issue (meaning that Google recognizes identical content on different directories and won't count all of your links), you need to rewrite, or "spin" articles before submitting them to multiple directories.

This way you send different versions of your article to each directory, thus receiving as many backlinks and getting as much exposure as possible.

It's recommended that you submit your articles to EzineArticles first, and have them approved and published before submitting to other directories. The reason for this is that EzineArticles won't take articles that they consider as 'duplicate' or 'spun' content.

Article Marketing Guide - Part Two

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