The Four Elements Of A Nifty Marketing Article Like The Gurus Do It

You may think that the key to article marketing success is writing a good article. While this is true, there is much more to it than this. You will also need to consider your headline, your article description and your resource box. In many ways, these can be more important than the article itself.

The Headline

By far the most important part of your article is the headline. It is the first thing your reader or potential publisher will see. If you can grab their attention and get them to read your article you are on the road to success. Your headlines should only be between five and ten words, but these few words can be the difference between success and failure.

Write a few headlines, not just one. Also, once you have written a few headlines put them aside and come back to them later. You will then be able to better judge which is the best one.

There are a few tricks you can use to grab the reader's attention. One is to play to people's desires and offer a solution. Examples of this could be:

How to get rich in one month
How to retire before your 50

Headlines that offer to show a reader how to achieve something in easy steps also lead to a good click through rate. So, these could be something like:

10 top tips for getting rich quick
5 easy steps to early retirement

As you submit more and more articles, you will get a better idea of what is working for you both in terms of headlines and content.

The Description

Almost as important as the headline is the description. The description of your article will appear under your headline in the article directories. There is a temptation here to take your first paragraph and cut it into the description box when submitting to directories. This is a grave mistake.

While it is not as powerful as a headline, the description gives you another opportunity to sell your article so word it carefully. Describe what the article sets out to do, how it does it and hint at the great solution it is going to provide. A powerful introductory paragraph in the article may achieve all of this, but it is not always possible so generally you should write your description separately.

The Article

If you have grabbed the reader's attention with your headline and they are reading your article you are almost there. However, your work isn't done yet. The article has to be good, if not excellent. At least good enough to hold the reader's attention for its entirety.

In general, your article should either entertain or inform. Writing entertaining or funny articles is a skill most professional writers struggle at and is very hard to achieve, so you should aim to inform. Either tell the reader about something they want to know about, or tell them how to do something. Also, write about something you know about. "How to" articles are particularly popular. If you can show a reader how to complete a task in 500 or so words you are on to a winner.

When you are writing the article, keep it simple. There can be a temptation to use flowery language but this is a definite no-no. Keep your sentences short, your words simple, and avoid complex grammatical structures. One trick is to read the article aloud to yourself when you have finished. It it sounds good to the ear and flows smoothly it should also read well.

The Resource Box

Ah, the resource box. The forgotten child of article marketing. If you get someone to read your article it is a fair achievement. So do not scupper your efforts by writing a poor resource box, as so many people do. The whole point of the exercise is to get people to click through to your website, so your resource box content is key.

If you wrote a good article related to your website or product your reader will already be interested so you have a lot of the work done. The text in the resource box should include your name but for the most part should be about the reader, not about you.

You need to tell them why they want to buy your product and how it can help them. Remember, you are offering the solution to their problem. Also, be sure you can deliver on your promises. Do not offer something you can not provide. Finally, it can be a good idea to include a plain address for your website as well as a live link.

So, when you are next preparing a marketing article be sure to give each of the four steps the attention they deserve.


Happy Writing!

Stop Working for Google and Start Making Google Work for You

You need traffic, and Google can give you traffic. There are two ways that Google can send traffic to your site: an expensive way and a way to get traffic for free. I'm going to show you how to make Google give you traffic for free.

You don't want just any traffic, you want TARGETED traffic. For those not familiar with the terminology, targeted traffic refers to clicks to your website from people who are actually interested in the topic of your site.   Your marketing will be much more effective if your clicks are targeted.   Here is an example of targeted marketing. Imagine a salesman who is trying to sell dental chairs.  He puts together a flyer describing the great benefits of his particular brand of chair, and he decides to give the flyers to people.   Which group of people do you think will respond better to his flyer - a group women at a scrapbooking convention, or a group of dentists at an American Dental Association meeting?   It's a no brainer!   But better yet, what if he went to a seminar called, "How To Start Your First Dental Practice From Scratch." These guys are already in the mindset to buy dental chairs. That’s targeted traffic.

When I started my first online business, I went straight to Google Adwords.   This is one of the fastest ways to get targeted traffic.   Basically, you pay Google to have your ad appear on the right side of the browser.   You do this by bidding on keywords.   When someone types your keywords into Google, the ad appears.   Just go to Google and type anything into the search box.   If you look on the right side of the screen, you will see little three-line ads.   You probably didn't even know these were ads.  Not only are they ads, but people are paying every time you click on those ads.  This is the perfect kind of targeted traffic because people are actually searching for your topic.

So when I started my first Adwords campaign, slowly but surely I developed a targeted marketing campaign that was sending 40 to 50 visitors to my site.  These people were ready to buy what I was selling.   And they did; but at what price!  I was spending $80 per day in advertising. Way too much! I was only making about $100 in sales per day (and not that each day), so after subtracting advertising costs, my net income was only $20 per day. If I could only get traffic without paying for it, my yearly income would increase from $7,300.00 per year ($20/day x 365 days) to $36,500 per year ($100/day x 365 days). By now you’re probably wondering how you get free targeted traffic – well I'm going to tell you in the next few paragraphs.

When I realized how much I was spending on advertising, I started to research methods of getting free targeted traffic; often referred to as search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. If your site appears on the first page of results for a Google search, then you get free traffic. Not only that, it is targeted traffic because someone has just typed in the phrase or keyword related to your site. So how do you get on the first page? In order to understand this, you need to know a little about how Google ranks their pages. It all comes down to one principle: Google wants to provide high quality search results, so they want to rank relevant links higher than irrelevant links. One of their methods of determining relevancy is to count how many other websites are linked to your site. These are called "back links." The assumption is that, the more links to your site, the more relevant your site must be.

Armed with this knowledge, I went out and bought some links. You may not know this, but there are actually companies that will allow you to buy a link on their web pages. I bought one link for $20 per month, another for $75 per month. It was much cheaper than Adwords, but it didn't get me ranked any higher, and it didn't get me much extra traffic. Two links was just not enough links to rank me higher on Google. What I needed was a way to get LOTS of back links. Then I heard about an intriguing idea: article marketing.

Article marketing is simple. You write an article, you put a link to your website at the bottom of the article (in the author information area). Then you post your article to an "article site." That's it. For every article that you post, you get a link to your site. And not only that, it's a targeted link because the content of your article will be related to the content of your website. It is best to post to as many article sites as you can. Every time Google sees a new targeted link to your site, it will rank you a little higher. There are literally hundreds of article sites and they are all looking for fresh content. Post your article to as many as you can find. Presto! Now you have tons of back links. That is article marketing. It's that simple. And it's free.

At first, I manually posted to about seven article sites. This was fairly time consuming. I immediately notice a few extra hits to my site. But in order for article marketing to be cost effective to me, I needed a way to post to hundreds of article sites quickly and easily. Then I heard about article submission software. Basically, this software has a list of article sites in it and it guides you through the process of mass posting your article to multiple sites. So I posted the article to about 200 sites. Bam! Now my site is ranked #2 for a certain keyword combination. This is effective search engine optimization. This is article marketing.

That's it. Now you know how to make Google work for you. You no longer have to work for Google by paying for Adwords. Plus you can contribute a helpful article to the internet and make tons of money doing it. Put article marketing to work for you today. Write an article, post it, make a link, and make more money!