Article marketing is hands down on of the best ways to get targeted, ready-to-buy traffic to your website. Not everyone has success with article marketing, however. In this article, we’re going to look at what separates winning article marketing strategies from ones that don’t work out as well. Below are four tips you can use to take your article marketing right to the bank!

Tip 1: Write your articles like sales letters. Now, you don’t want it to sound like a late-night infomercial, but you do need to understand that your article is more than just information. Your goal is to get the reader to click on your link, either in the article body or in your bio box.

Tip 2: Write a headline that arouses curiosity and makes people want to read your article. In general, readers find your articles via a search engine search. In other words, when they decide if they want to read your article, they can’t see the whole thing. They just see a headline and also a description. You want your headline to be a call to action…something that’s going to interest people.

Tip 3: Make your articles at least 400 words long. If you want to publish your article on a lot of article directories (and you should), it needs to be at least 400 words long. A lot of directories don’t publish articles that are shorter.  An article that’s less than 400 words just seems a little unsubstantial.

Tip 4: Make your bio box look like it’s part of the article. At the end of an ezine style article, there’s an author’s bio box. Although you can try to put links back to your website in the body of the article, not all directories allow that. The place to put your link is in the bio box. So, don’t think of the bio box like it’s an afterthought for your reader. Your bio box needs to fulfill the same function that a call to action does on a sales letter.

This is what you don’t want (but what you usually see):

“Joe Johnson is a career animal lover who has spent countless hours learning the ins and outs of the lives of ferrets.”

From the reader’s point of view, this blurb makes it seem as though the author is more interested in themselves rather than the reader. Unless you’re the inventor of the South Beach diet or someone with as much authority in your given niche, who you are and what you’ve done is secondary.

What’s primary is this. If you did a good job with your article, your reader should be thinking…”Hmm…I liked that…I wonder what else this author has to say about all of this.”

That’s the kind of response that gets the click. That’s what we call “pre-selling”! And, that’s what article marketing is all about—pre-selling your reader so that they click through to your money page.

A better idea for the bio box would be to make it essentially just the last sentence in the article, with a text link embedded in it. For example:

“Check out Raising Ferrets for Fun and Profit to learn more about these wonderful critters.”

The underlined text would be a link to your site.  If your article directory doesn’t allow text links (and there are still some that don’t), then just include the whole website address so that your reader can cut and paste it into their browser window.  And in some cases, it’s good to include both the text link and the full website address in the bio box.

There’s certainly more to know about article marketing than just this. But these four tips will make this type of technique start to work like gang busters. Apply these tips and watch the traffic start rolling in!

For more tips on writing articles that “pre-sell,” take a look at Article Bully.

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If you haven’t been doing article marketing, then you should. Some people think it’s fringe or passé. It’s anything but that! Some people are quietly making fortunes with not much more than article marketing, a squeeze page or two, and an autoresponder.

Articles can do two things for you. They can: 1) help you rank another site higher in the search engine results; and 2) they can drive traffic directly to your site.

Either way, you’re going to get more juice from your article marketing if your articles rank well for the keyword terms you’ve optimized them for.

There are several important issues to consider when optimizing an article for certain keywords terms, but we’re not going to get into that here. Instead, we’re going to talk about something much more fundamental, and which, over the long haul will make your articles make you even more money.

You see a lot of internet marketers forget that the Internet is not all about Google, or Yahoo or MSN. It’s about readers. The whole rationale behind Google’s mysterious algorithm for ranking pages is to get quality content into their users’ hands.

Content is actually more important than search engine optimization. So, let’s talk about what goes into making a quality article.

Preparation and Planning

Some article marketers just sit down at the computer and start writing with no thought as to what keywords they’re targeting or exactly what they want their article to do. That’s okay. It’s even part of a known article marketing strategy, which depends on volume, rather than search results. But unless you want to write, or have written, a thousand or so articles, you need to start thinking in terms of what your target market wants to read about, and, of course, the keywords they’ll use to get there.

Passion

Now, this is not a “do what you love and the money will follow” article. But having said that, passion is one of the keys to writing great content that your readers will want to click on, download to their site, and perhaps even bookmark. Passion shows. Lack of passion shows, too. Have you ever read an article or blog post that seemed like it was there just to take up space or rank for some obscure term in Google? What was at fault? Research? Grammar? No. It was probably written by some article marketing hack that just sits in front of their computer and cranks out articles all day long.

With these three “P’s,” you can dramatically increase your articles’ readership. So, don’t worry about Google. If you’re churning out quality information that your audience loves, search results will follow.

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Article marketing is one of the surest ways to create traffic and start making money online. You don’t have a large cost as in pay per click and you can create a steady stream of traffic to your website. What’s even better is you don’t even have to know how to write to be successful in article marketing. You can easily hire someone to do your writing for you.

Below are some tips about article marketing, which will help you be a successful article marketer.

Tip 1: Article Length

Your articles should be 400 to 500 words long. Although some authors write articles, which are less than 400 words, you’ll get your article published in more article directories if they’re longer than 400 words. Also, your readers will have a better experience reading your articles and feel like they’re learning more, if your article is longer than 400 words.

Tip 2: Article Topics

Basically, you should provide content that is of interest to your readers. Whether it’s a “How to” article, “Tips” article, or “Secrets” article, research your target audience and “fill in the blanks” for them. Also, since your article is going to be published on one or many article directories, you probably want to write your article around certain keyword combinations. These would be the keywords that you feel like your potential viewers would use to find your article. You can get plenty of keyword possibilities from Google’s External Keyword Tool.

Tip 3: Article Structure

Generally, you should write your article in a manner that will lead reader to take a desired action. In most cases, you probably want to use your articles to drive traffic to a website, squeeze page or affiliate offer. So, you want your reader to perform some sort of action when they finish reading your article. In other words, you want to “sell” your reader on taking an action – clicking on your link. You want to nudge them to take the next step.

Tip 4: Websites You Can Promote Using Article Marketing

You can promote all kinds of websites. You can use article marketing to drive traffic to a blog. You can use it to drive traffic to a squeeze page, or some sort of single-page, mini-site that’s selling an affiliate product. You can also use article marketing to drive traffic directly to a merchant’s site, which you happen to be an affiliate off. (This is called Bum Marketing.)

Tip 5: Outsource, If Necessary

You might think that article marketing sounds great, but you either can’t write that well, or don’t enjoy it. Well, guess what? You don’t need to be able to write. You can easily outsource all the writing you’ll ever need. Outsourcing is easy to do. You can find great freelancers on Craigslist or Elance.

All in all, article marketing is probably the easiest way for someone to drive a lot of traffic to a website. Unlike pay per click, you’re not going to lose a lot of money while you’re learning. All you’re going to lose is some time. The thing about article marketing is this: you can write (or have written) a few hundred articles that drive traffic to a certain website. Once you get these articles published, they’ll be sending you traffic for years to come.

For a more detailed guide on article marketing, check out Article Marketing Domination.

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If you’ve been to any internet marketing seminar, you were probably told that writing keyword-rich articles will maximize search engine optimization. While this strategy holds true, oftentimes articles are so focused on attracting the search engines that they forget about the readers. And if you follow the adage that “You never get a second chance to make a first impression,” articles written primarily for the search engines will turn off readers, leads and ultimately, customers.

When choosing an article for your website, make sure that it is a length that is optimal for search engine optimization efforts. Articles that are as short as 200 words or as long as 500 words should fit into this category. Even if search engine optimization is not your goal, it is still a good idea to keep your articles at this length for your reader’s sake. They are likely to not finish your page if it is any longer. This could leave them with only half of the information you wanted them to have or leave them with the impression that your site is too “wordy.”

Most Internet readers do not read a website page as they would a book, so the shorter the better. Even if this means splitting one long idea into 4 or 5 pages. Be sure to label them so that the reader can pick and choose which part they want to read and know what is coming up next to help them determine if they want to continue reading.

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