Article Marketing Newbie? Beginners Start Here...

[Allen Graves]

Article Marketing Warriors,

I have recently received several PMs asking about what article marketing is on a very basic level. So many, in fact, that I thought I would start this thread so that I could direct future inquiries here.

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It's no secret that article marketing has quickly become one of the hottest ways to market your website. This is because when it is done correctly, it can create huge amounts of highly targeted traffic to your website. Just ask Warriors like Steven Wagenheim or Tim Gorman. And since it is free to submit your articles to the thousands of directories, ezines and websites that accept articles, it is by far the most cost effective traffic building strategy as well.

Anyone can start an article marketing campaign. All you need is basic grammar skills and an internet connection. Of course, you will need a website, service and/or a product to market as well.

The information below explains the general idea of article marketing and how it is done. For detailed information on article marketing and secrets to make your article marketing efforts really pay off and how to take it to the next level, just do a search on this forum and you'll find plenty of information. Just be careful to check out who you listen to.

How Article Marketing Works:

Your job:

• You'll begin by deciding on a topic to write an article about. It should be a topic related to your website, service or product.
• Write a 300-700 word article on the topic you chose in the previous step.
• Write an About the Author line (aka: resource information section or resource box) which includes a text link to your website.
• Using your internet browser, visit article directories, ezines and other websites (within your niche) and submit the article to them, making sure that your resource information section is also submitted.
• Repeat the steps above with a new article.

Their job:

• Once your article is submitted, it is reviewed and either accepted or declined.
• If declined, you will receive an email with the reason it was declined. Simply fix the problem and resubmit the article.
• If accepted, your article will be posted on their website in the category or page that was suggested by you or decided upon by the website administrator.
• Your article is then available for redistribution to other websites (via RSS Feeds or manual retrieval) or to be sent to email lists and to be indexed and ranked by the search engines.

The result:

• If done correctly, your article will begin to propagate across the internet. People will find it, read it and click through to your website from the link you placed in the resource information section. This equals more traffic.
• The traffic that you receive in this manner is highly targeted and can be immediate. This traffic will consist of hungry consumers looking to purchase what you have to offer. Conversion rates can easily double, triple or climb even more.
• People will begin to see you as an expert in your particular niche. Trust will be gained which facilitates follow-up and future purchases by the consumers. This also increases traffic.
• The search engines will begin seeing one-way backlinks to your website all over the internet. This will cause your website to jump considerably in the search engine results pages, leading to even more traffic.
• Massive increases in traffic and resulting sales.
• (See a traffic pattern there?)

Let's Discuss the Sections Above

First of all, you need a website, product or service. Since you've been reading to this point, we can assume that you already meet this criteria or that you already know what you will do.



So what are you going to write about? Basically, anything you can think of that is related to your website, product or service. The main point here is that the article must be related in some way to your niche. There are two main reason for this:

• You want the readers of your article to go to your website and purchase what you have to offer. If you are selling herbal supplements and you write an article related to light fixtures, you're not going to get many click throughs to your website, not to mention sales.
• Search engines are smart...and getting smarter every minute of every day. If they see an article written about herbal supplements and see links to a website called lightfixtures.com they will immediately know that the links are unrelated and either not give your website credit for the link or, worse yet, they will see it as a form of article spamming...and that would mean bad news for your online business!
  
  (Article spamming is a new term recently coined by article directory owners and is considered a very serious problem)

Make sure that when you complete your article that it is between 300-700 words. If you fail to meet this requirement, your article will be declined by just about every website you submit to without ever even being read. It is OK to go over 700 words, however try not to write more than 1,000 words and NEVER submit an article under 300 words. (Yes, I know - EZA accepts 250 words)

The same goes for your "resource box" section. Make sure that you follow the policies of each site or your article will be declined before ever being read.

You see, as article marketing continues to quickly grow in popularity, directory and ezine editors have more and more articles to review every day. Some of them have thousands upon thousands to review daily! I can tell you, first hand, that the very first thing they do when reviewing your article is to look for obvious problems such as the ones discussed above (and other things) simply so that they can decline the article without having to spend their time reading it.

Remember this!

Now that you have submitted your article, there's nothing you can do about it except sit back and wait to see if it is accepted or declined. It is at this point that you should get your creative juices flowing again and start creating your next article. In general, it can take anywhere from 24 hours to several weeks to get a response from an article submission. Do not stop and wait to see what happens. It is crucial that you continue writing and submitting articles. It is also a good idea to keep a log of each article and each directory you have submitted it to. There is some great software out there that will keep track of it all for you if you want to pay the price...but you still have to enter all the info - so if you can use Excel, that's just as good in my opinion!

If you ever have an article that is declined, PLEASE do not get offended or aggressive toward the website that declined it. They are by no means required to accept your article, nor are they required to correct a simple error or typo on your part. Simply make the changes that (they say) need to be made and resubmit the article. If you respond in a negative way, directory and ezine owners will have no problem whatsoever in deleting your articles and wiping out your account altogether.

For other tips and general submission guidelines, it would be a very good idea for you to read through this thread --> Beginning Article Marketers - Must Read and follow the guidelines you'll find there. Doing so will guarantee an almost 100% acceptance rate for all of your articles, provided they are free of grammar and spelling errors.

The ideas discussed above are general article marketing ideas and are far from the total picture. Like I said above, you can find some really valuable hidden gems within the Warrior Forum. But be careful (and remember that writing and submitting one article that make some sales does not make you an expert...it makes you lucky).

Those who have been paying their dues in the article marketing industry for several years and who have the uncanny knack to actually test different strategies on a grand scale - or those who consistently hit "home runs" on a regular basis - are definitely worth listening to...at least on THIS forum they are!

There's a very handy 'Search' feature at the top of every page here - if you want to learn effective article marketing, use it!

Respectfully,
Allen Graves

[Ross Kenny]

Great post Allen...

but have you been over doing it on the coffee again..

[Allen Graves]

Coffee?

Yup...