How To Do Article Marketing – Make Money Online By Writing Articles

When I first tried to make money online, I didn’t know how to do article marketing. Being a web designer, I quickly put up a website and waited for the money to flow in. Many weeks have passed but not a single dime came through my ClickBank account. I was really frustrated and thought that making money online by promoting products was a huge scam.

The first few Internet marketing guides that I bought didn’t exactly discuss the concept behind article marketing and how to get free traffic from search engines. Thankfully I got to learn how to do article marketing after I joined the Wealthy Affiliate University.

In this article we’re going to discuss the concept behind article marketing and how you can use it to make money online and start your online business.

Introduction to Article Marketing

Article marketing or bum marketing has been around for several years and many people are using it to generate free traffic to their websites. This is one of the best marketing methods that you can use to get your web page listed in major search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing.

Basically you write an article that relates to your product, submit it to free article directories (EzineArticles.com) and wait for the article to show up in search engines for the keywords that you’ve targeted.

Why Should I Do This?

It’s very hard for a website (especially if it’s new) to get listed in search engines (it can take months or even years). This was the mistake I made when I setup my first affiliate site. But if you write an article and submit it to EzineArticles.com (very powerful article directory), you will have the benefit of leveraging their popularity because they’re already established and search engines love them.

How To Do Article Marketing

Use Keywords to Position Your Articles

Keywords are very important and they’re going to be the key to your campaign’s success. There are millions of keywords that people use to search for a solution to their problems or to their desires.

Here are the basic things I look for when choosing keywords:

• Relevancy – Your keywords should be relevant to your customer. Avoid broad terms like make money online, weight loss, dog training, panic attacks, etc. Why? It’s going to take you ages before you can rank for these type of keywords and typically the people who search for these keywords doesn’t have any clear idea yet on what they are searching.
• Traffic – Most beginners think that they should only choose keywords that have huge traffic volume. Personally I like my keywords to have at least 2,000 monthly searches. But I would still go for a keyword that’s very targeted even if it has only less than 500 searches per month.
• Competition – Like I said, you won’t stand any chance ranking for broad keywords. What you want to focus on is getting those long-tail keywords. If you see some authority sites in the top 10 results like About.com, Wikipedia, Amazon and other authority sites… the chances of your article to rank in the first page is slim to none.
• Commercial Intent – Put yourself in the shoes of your target audience and imagine the keywords they would use if they’re looking to buy something. You can also search in forums in your niche and check out what words people are using to find a solution to their problems and desires.

You can read an article I wrote on how to get the right keywords for more information.

Write Articles

Now we’ve come to the fun part! I know most of you hate writing articles but this is also how I felt when I started. But the thing is you don’t have to be a very good writer. Just make sure you get your message delivered to your audience and you’ll be fine.

Many beginners are intimidated on writing their first article and they get to a point where they can’t get anything done. My advice is to just keep on practicing and eventually you’ll get the hang of it. If you really don’t like writing then hire someone else to write articles for you.

Here are some points to remember when writing your articles:

• Catchy Titles – Make your titles very enticing because it’s going to be the most prominent when your article comes up in listings. Please remember to put the keywords in your titles because it’s one of the first places where search engines look in deciding to rank a web page.
• Content – Make sure your content is relevant to your titles. Don’t make the mistake of making your article a sales pitch. Instead, you should provide the reader with quality information that could really help them out.
  Also, if possible put your keywords on the first couple of sentences of your article. Don’t be too concerned about keyword density and stuffing your article with keywords. A general rule of thumb is to put your keywords once every 100 words. Always write for the people that will read your article and not for the search engines.
• Resource Box – This is another important part of your article. The resource box serves two purposes: 1. To entice the reader to click the link back to your website, and 2. To build backlinks for the keywords that you want your money site to rank for.
  Give the readers a good reason on why they should click your link. What’s in it for them? One way is to ask them a question and make them curious. As for building backlinks, put the major keywords in your anchor text in order to build up your page to rank for your keywords (if that didn’t make sense, please ask).

Submit Your Articles

After writing your article, submit them first to EzineArticles.com. Make sure that your article is well written because it’s going to be reviewed by a real editor. You have to wait for a few days before your article gets approved. While waiting you should pump out more articles because you can’t get any solid results by writing a single article.

The key to make article marketing work (if done right) is to write many articles. This is where most people fail because they think that writing 5-10 articles is going to cut it. One thing that I’ve learned inside Wealthy Affiliate is the discipline to work for yourself. You have to set a schedule and stick to it. Think about it… writing one article per day for a whole month will produce you 30 articles. In 3 months, you’ll have 90 articles!

Make Your Articles Stick

Once your articles are published, your work is not yet done. For me it’s a great feeling whenever I see my articles get listed on search engines for my keywords. It almost feels like making a sale. But in some instances, your articles are not going to be in the first page results. In order to get more traffic to your articles, you want them to be higher up those listings.

To accomplish this, you have to build backlinks to your articles. The easiest way to boost your articles is to use social bookmarking. Just bookmarking your article on dozens of bookmarking sites can drastically change their search engine rankings.

Another method that I use is article distribution. I rewrite my articles on EzineArticles and resubmit them to different article directories like GoArticles.com, Buzzle.com, etc. The only difference is the backlinks in their resource box is now pointing to my articles over at EzineArticles.com.

Conclusion

Whew! I hope that you learned something on how to do article marketing. This is basically how the process works and you just rinse and repeat. Like I said, when I first started out I didn’t have any access to this kind of information. I’m hoping that it will help beginners to really get started on their campaigns.

Please feel free to ask me any questions in the comments below and I’ll do my best to answer them. On the same note if you find anything here that you disagree with, then leave your comments as well because I also want to learn from my readers. That’s it for now and thanks for reading.