Article marketing is a great way to promote a product, service, website or blog. The name says it all: article marketing means marketing yourself with articles and it’s easy to do if you know how. Here’s how to create a good article marketing article.
The Title
The title of your article is the most important part, because that’s what will grab the reader. The golden rule is to tell readers what the article offers and tell them quickly – within the first three or four words if possible. If you’re writing about buying a second home, then use this:
Buying A Second Home: Five Tips For Success
rather than this:
Five Tips For Success When Buying A Second Home
The first tells readers straight away what they will get from your article; the second focuses on the number of tips.
The Body
Article marketing articles are used on websites and blogs, so follow the rules for writing good web articles. Put the most important information at the top, keep sentences and paragraphs short and make good use of subheadings. And if you promise five tips, make sure that’s what you deliver.
I usually start with a rough plan which outlines my main points and then I expand on each of those points in a single paragraph. I don’t make these too long, as the average article marketing article is between 250 and 500 words long.
The Resource Box
The resource box is where you get to sell your product or service. It needs to contain your name, the address of your website, your elevator pitch and a call to action. The elevator pitch is a couple of sentences that say what you have to offer. It briefly answers the question ‘what’s in it for the reader?’ The call to action aims to get readers to your site to buy, join, signup or whatever you want them to do.
Other Important Information
Once you have completed the article, write a summary of between two and five sentences to hook the reader. This may be a repeat of the lead or something completely different that points out what the article has to offer. If you like, include an invitation to the reader to read on. Finally, craft an author bio that shows your expertise and you’re ready to submit your article.
Where To Submit
There are hundreds of article directories, so the choice can be daunting. Some of the best ones I’ve used are:
- EzineArticles
- GoArticles
- IdeaMarketers
There may also be article directories specific to the niche you want to target, which may be a better option for some people. Once you have written the first article, it’s easy to write more. I have more than 40 articles on EzineArticles and they bring traffic to my site and serve as examples of my writing. Good luck with your article marketing efforts.
Thank you for this post!!
My Web site is about to drop beta in a couple weeks, and I’ve been looking for ideas for marketing the site to business and HR professionals. Now I have one!
Thanks again!
OK! Nice tips, will take care of that.
As Sharon notes, article marketing can work well,for certain purposes. Buying syndicated articles, however, usually doesn’t increase search engine popularity. If Google can tell that it’s the same article that appears on other sites, it won’t bother to include it in its index. It’s redundant.
I have been an “expert writer” for Ezine Articles but since I felt that it is not helping me a lot, I stopped submitting.
Unfortunately, I just saw my account has been suspended due to “invalid author name” and I do not feel like recovering it.
I also submitted to other directories like GoArticles but totally got lazy. But then, I am starting to submit to Helium hoping that the results would be better since they are buying them and there is also a link to my blog.
By the way, I was convinced with your tip about the title and it makes sense to me. However, isn’t it harmful for an articles to use colon or dash in the title? I mean not being friendly to search engines?
Hoping to receive a valuable response from you, as always.
Thanks!
We experimented with writing blogs with titles that describe the exact search in google and had some luck wioth that.
Russell
Sorry it’s not worked out for you Angel, but article marketing has really helped me. As a writer, I get double benefit from the strategy and I know others have had equal success.
No regrets, Sharon. I think it was my fault as I am not really a good writer I suppose.
That is why now, I am reading a lot and realized that my older posts really need a lot of improvement. This is what keeping me busy now as I learned my lessons well.
This time I hope, they will do good at Helium. By the way, I have a pending question here about using colon and dash in writing titles. Are they SEO-friendly too?
Thanks for the concern.
Really liked your tips on article marketing. I am just starting out and submitting to ezine articles. Do you recommend using an article submission service or are they spam?
I’ve used Article Marketer before, Jeff, which submits your article to online article groups and so on. While this can be useful, I get more value from limiting my submission to a few major ones.
Great Tips on Article Marketing…and a nice site. I agree with Sharon, I was mass submitting with some software and did not see the value. However, I did get some exposure. After some testing I found that submitting to the top ten was good enough.
Check out the “Article Marketing Blueprint” as well. It is a free report
that is jammed packed with some great Article Marketing Strategies
Cheers,
Sean
Thanks for the tip, Sean.
Thanks for the tip.
bye
Nice siple tips thanks for the insight now how to get our articles or blog to the top of the listing like you did is the key
I vote EnzineArticles .
Thank you very much for the tips. I am going to try it soon.
In our articles, we’ve had some success talking about quantified numbers of tips of suggestions. “10 Tips for moving” or “5 tips for packing before your move”. These “tips” often draw more readers than more generic articles. Thanks for the advice!
I’ve hear that if you submit the same article to many sites, they will ban you. However in my experience, that isn’t the case(so far!). Any thoughts on that?
thanks!
Great article. I’m not familiar with Idea Marketers, I’ll have to check them out. I’ve used Go Articles and Ezinearticles, though, and they are really great for driving traffic to your site.
Thanks for this great article. I wanted to learn more about article marketing and your post was spot on. Thanks Greg Ellison
I have just started with Ezine articles and literally my first article wouldnt submit and says that my account has been suspeneded due to invalid author name. Im not sure why or what to do about this, can someone help me? I dont know what other name I should use other than Destiny Peoples?
One of my articles ranked on Google’s 1st page search results, before my actual blog, that I’m trying to promote. Bit concerned that visitors may navigate through the article directory rather than my blog. So I will redo the resource box to actively promote visits to my related blog.
@ Destiny, You have to use a real name, not a nick name.
You have some great stuff on your blog. Your insight and expertise would be a welcome addition to our new community, i hope you will consider joining, and thanks for sharing!
Article Marketing can help you get huge traffic for your site if you do it in a right way. Thanks for the helpful writing tips!
Great general information on how to write a good article for the purpose of article marketing. Our backpacking and travel blog (backpackingaddictz.com) have incorporated very similar techniques and have seen good results through ezine for traffic flow but even better result in our google listings. We have just recently realized how inserting links in the article back to your website is imperative for link building and subsequently getting better google results.
Good luck guys
backpackingaddictz.com
I guess it’s fortunate that Google still includes articles for back links – but I read from a Google employee (source: Digital Inspiration Blog: ) that people should write for their own sites – not elsewhere.
Also their are now too many similar articles for some categories per article directory, little alone similar variations in many other directories. Though generally well written, but thousands of articles are surely cluttering up the web, particularly from those that are using article spinners.
I have cut back on article marketing – and rather concentrate on keyword mining, content title research, SEO optimization etc, and just write for my own blogs.
That’s a real nice general overview to article marketing. I have some additional free tips on my site if you’re ready to make it a primary marketing strategy for your biz though.
The link would have been helpful huh? 🙂
Excellent. I have a tip for getting more clicks on your article that is quite simple. If you put a word of your title in quotes the eye is drawn to it, and it results in more clicks. For instance: “Blackhat” Seo Techniques
Nice post. I really be trained another thing more difficult in not the same blogs and forums day to day. It will all of the time turn out to be revitalizing to see written content from several freelance writers in addition to see a little bit some thing at their store. I’d opt to use some with the content material on my small blog page whether or not you never head. Natually We’ll offer url in the web site. Many thanks for sharing.
Thank you for this article, it seems very helpful and was certainly well written.
I’d like to ask a question though: how do you recommend that you write such articles for a very small niche (my hometown)?