The Cheap Internet Marketer

Article Marketing

However, there is a knack to writing a successful article.  After all, if it was simple, every article would be a hit.  If you fine tune your articles to reach their intended targets each and every time, you’ll have amazing results.

 The Basics

If you break article creation down to the basics, each article has a general structure.  First there’s the title, which is used to grab the reader’s attention.  When you read the Table of Contents in a magazine, you skim the titles of the articles to see if any grab your interest.  The title tells what the article is about, but with a twist, so the reader will be intrigued and want to read it.

 The article is divided into paragraphs.  On web sites, paragraphs are kept fairly short, usually just a couple of sentences, to make the information easier to read and absorb.  A paragraph that has too many sentences is  difficult to read and will lose more than one reader.

 The first paragraph is the introduction.  It states the reason for the article, and needs to be interesting.  If it leaves the readers scratching their heads, they won’t continue to read.

The next few paragraphs are the body of the article.  This is where you state your case and give examples to illustrate your subject.  Try to always give useful information, and make sure your examples make the subject clearer to the reader. 

The last paragraph sums up the main points of the article.  Always be sure your aticles have a conclusion — an article without a conclusion ends abruptly and doesn’t reiterate what you want the reader to remember. 

 Skills You Didn’t Learn in School

 Each article has a purpose.  If you don’t know that purpose, your article won’t reach anyone.  Know your target audience — if you are trying to reach gardeners, then the article shouldn’t be about cars.  That’s an obvious point, but some articles can be about gardening and still miss their target.  Why?  It could be lack of understanding of the topic or lack of the skills needed to convey your thoughts successfully to the audience.

Know your writing style and give it a convincing voice.  Trying to write humorous articles when you do not have a funny bone in your body will not work for someone trying to instruct potential comedians on breaking into stand-up comedy.  You may need to pass on that assignment.  Writing styles that are not compatible with your voice will come across as insincere to the reader.  They need to hear and feel your passion and expertise through your work.

Make your writing format easy to read.  Use bullet points and numbered lists when possible.  Both of these techniques break up the look of the article and make it easier on the eyes.  Readers can digest an article faster with changes in text like this, and they can skim the bullet points and numbered text to see if the article meets their needs.

Use numbers in your title whenever possible. Which title do you think will get more attention:  How to Sew a Pillow  or  5 Steps to the Perfect Pillow? Numbers let the reader know exactly what they are getting and in how many parts.

Try to incorporate these tips in your articles, and be sure you are creating articles that reach their audience.  A successful article can drive traffic to your site or an affiliate site as well as increase your sales.

Let’s just say it right now — a web site without traffic is a business that is doomed to failure.  If you’ve just started your first web site, don’t make the mistake of worrying too much at first about how many sales (also know as conversions in the IM field) you’re making.  Instead, concentrate on learning how to drive traffic to your site.  You must have traffic to get conversions (sales). 

There are a lot of different methods of generating traffic on the Internet.  Some that immediately come to mind are article marketing, buying Ads on Google, Yahoo, MSM and other sites (this is called PPC or Pay Per Click), posting ads on Free Ad sites, social bookmarking and Web 2.0, Forum Posting, Publicity Releases, Viral Marketing and others. 

If you are just starting out you will want to pick one or two of these methods and concentrate on learning how to use them effectively.   Each method has pluses and minuses, each has its own nuances you’ll have to learn.  If you know what you’re doing, each method works very well. 

Article Marketing is a very popular method of gaining traffic, so we’ll start our Traffic discussions with it.  Basically, you research and write short, informative articles and post them to free article directories.  Quite a few people go to these sites and read the articles and hopefully click on the links you are allowed to enclose, and these links take them to your website.  

More importantly, publishers of ezines and newsletters go to these article directories, looking for good, free content that they can publish.  The ultimate goal of article marketing is to have your articles published in newsletters and ezines, this can bring significant amounts of traffic to your site. 

There’s a lot more to know before you can successfully start an Article Marketing campaign, so stay tuned and we’ll discuss  more details about article marketing, plus some other traffic generating techniques.