This is post #2 in my series on Article Marketing. Go to the "Article Marketing" category on the right to see all related posts.
If you have decided to use Article Marketing as one of your online strategies, you will need to know how to structure each one so that it can be published easily to the various article directories. Although they have somewhat different rules for each, structuring you article the way I tell you will handle 99% of them and keep you from wasting a lot of time re-writing.
Before we start, there are a couple different kinds of articles. Ones that you will write to "rank keywords" with the search engines, and those that mean you just like to write. I'm talking about the first kind here. The others are fun, but if you aren't trying to rank for a keyword, it really doesn't matter how you structure it.
Let's walk through the essential elements of an article, what you should know about each, and what to avoid to do article marketing effectively.
#1 – The Title. A good title will grab the attention of your audience. Feel like high school literature class again? It should. It's common sense. To rank a keyword, you should have your keyword in the title somewhere. It should be fairly relevant to the subject matter and less than 70 characters long. Don't be boring, but don't get too nuts. I've seen people throw out outrageous headlines that have absolutely nothing to do with the article. That will just make people mad. If the purpose of the article is to make them mad, do it a different way, do it in the body of the article.
#2 – The Body. This is the meat of the article, where you show your stuff. Write at least 500 words up to about 1000. A word of caution, if you are going to submit these to article directories, be careful: No Selling! In article marketing, you have to be a little stealthy about. These directories know the score and they will give you the opportunity to sell, but it will be through hyperlinks. Some let you put 2 links in the body, some none. I prefer none, just because it fits more specs and I don't have to re-write anything. So do your best to be engaging, entertaining, and give good content. After all, you want them to keep reading until they get to the…
#3 – The Resource Box. OK, here we are, the reason you do article marketing. The resource box is a little box at the bottom of your article. It is a magic place, because you can usually put 2 links in there. For one link, you should use the keyword or "anchor text". Hyperlink your keyword back to your blog post. That is good link juice for SEO (we'll cover this later). The other one you can use for whatever. If you have a product that is relevant to the content, by all means, link away. This is how article directories get people to submit articles. We trade the prospect of someone clicking our links for the work of placing the article on their site. We get a backlink to our site and some clicks for our trouble. It's a fair trade.
Some directories require Summaries which are usually a couple of compelling sentences from the article or a descriptive summary. You can do either. Not really a big deal, in my opinion. You can just copy out a couple of sentences, usually the first two and be done with it.
Article Marketing is a great way to build long-term traffic flow to your website and create followers for years to come.
Watch this great training webinar on article marketing, just sign in and it will begin playing. You'll also get more info from me on how to make a living doing this kind of stuff…
Next up is the nitty gritty world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Stay tuned…
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