Try This With Article Marketing If You're Struggling

Get good at finding underserved keywords. Learn how to dig around in your niche with a free tool (Wordtracker, Google AdWords External Tool, etc.), then learn how to figure out the level of competition at Google for the keywords you choose. If you want to speed this process up, buy a good tool like Micro Niche Finder (there are others, but I use this one) so you can find solid keywords quickly.

You're looking for phrases that get a decent number of searches every month + don't have much competition on Google. The higher the searches and the lower the level of competition, the better. If you're persistent, you'll uncover some real golden nuggets every once in a while.

Which is what led me to post this thread. I found one the other day. It's a 3-word phrase in a niche I want to dominate. It gets 1,600 searches/month, and it has an unbelievably low level of competition. GOLD! It's so underserved that there are NO articles on EzineArticles that use this phrase. Not one. And the top 10 sites on Google only deal peripherally with this phrase. And they're all deep links (not homepages).

OK, so once I discovered this tasty little morsel, here's what I did...

First, because the domain and site I've built in this niche are so new (less than 3 months old), I decided to write and submit an article to EzineArticles using this golden phrase. In case you're wondering why, it's really pretty simple. Googlebot hits EZA several times a day... probably several times an hour. So, my article will get picked up by Google much much faster than if I simply put it on my site. And then there's the fact that Google loves EZA so much. Probably because they have pretty strict approval rules and real human eyes look over all submissions.

Now, if my domain and site were older and more established, I would probably post my article there first. It really just comes down to getting it noticed and "loved" by Google the fastest.

This article will probably rank #1 for the phrase in question without me doing anything else, but to be safe, I have pointed a handful of good links to it. It just got approved at EZA, so it's too soon for the results to come in, but I already know what will happen. Within a few days, my article will be #1 at Google (and probably Y and MSN too) whenever someone searches that phrase.

Of course, at the end of this article, I've got a couple nice keyword rich links pointing to my main site in this niche, along with a strong call to action to get readers to click on over.

And that's your blueprint, folks. Especially those of you who didn't know about this strategy or who have never tried article marketing with any real strategy in mind. Look, you can write articles until your fingers turn blue and your mind freezes up. More power to ya! But if you're going at it willy-nilly, without doing some research first and using phrases that matter, you're spinning your wheels.

It's not rocket science. Get a keyword research tool. I highly recommend Micro Niche Finder (and no, I don't know the maker or have any affiliation with the product... I just use it and love it). It's about $100, so if you can't afford that right now, then use the Google External Keyword Tool (free) and then search Google for the exact phrase competition count (put quotation marks around the phrase before you search). It takes longer and you'll get a lot of hit-and-miss, but it costs you nothing out of pocket.

Once you find a phrase that has a good number of monthly searches AND has relatively low competing pages for the exact phrase, do what I outlined above. I have a bunch of EZA articles that rank in the Top 5 for the phrases I wrote them around. Each one is a little traffic vacuum, sucking in visitors to my sites. If you really want to jack up the ranking, get a few good links pointing to your articles and be sure to use the phrase you're targeting as the anchor text in those links.

Rinse, repeat. Never stop. DOMINATE! Class dismissed.