August 4, 2009 in Affiliate Marketing, Article Marketing, Basics, Free Training, Guides by MatthewDC

Step 1. Article Marketing

Article Marketing in my mind is the most important part of traffic building. It can get you sustainable, long term traffic, for a very small up front workload. For the basics of what article marketing is, check out my SEO & Article Marketing 101 article. Basically what your going to do is write 500 – 700 word articles based around the keyword of your choosing, post them to various article directories, and then wait and watch the traffic build. A lot of people will try to sell you a “secret formula” to use article marketing to “dominate any niche”. Ignore all of that hype. The one thing you HAVE to understand about article marketing is that it works very well, but it takes a LOT of ACTUAL WORK on your behalf. If you have the money you can outsource, but for the purposes of this training, I am going to keep it as cheap as possible.

The process basically works like this. You always have to start with Keyword Research. You want to find a keyword that meets our criteria to where we think we can get a first page listing on Google. Once your keyword is selected, you really have to focus and make yourself do some manual labor. I try to do at least 1 article per day for at least the first 2 months of any new campaign. It sounds like a lot of work, I know, but that is because it is. We aren’t talking about easy money, or free money here, we are talking about a real business. Real business requires blood, sweat, and tears.

Writing the Articles

When you write your article, make sure that your keyword is in the title and somewhere in the first paragraph. After that, I don’t care how many more times it shows up. You will hear tons of experts tell you that you should have X amount of keywords or Y percent density. Forget all of that. Make sure it’s in the beginning of the article and then don’t worry about it. Just write an article that people will want to read and that will entice people to check out your other articles. This is how you build real, lasting traffic.

Let me get this off my chest before we move on. A lot of people will tell you to do re-writes of your articles rather than write completely new articles every time. To just change some paragraphs around or a few words so that ezinearticles will accept it as a new article. Whether you want to do this or not is up to you, but I refuse to use this tactic. Let me explain why. I am trying to build a legitimate business. One that people trust, will come back to again, and believe is worth their time. If they start re-reading the same article, do you think they are going to trust you? It’s ok to write 2 articles on the same topic, as long as they take a new angle, or address some new aspect, but please don’t just move some paragraphs around. Yes that will work and get you in Ezine. Yes that will probably get you decent traffic. But honestly, it tarnishes your name and we want to build a brand with legs. Ok, now that I feel better, we can move on.

This isn’t going to be a workshop on how to write great articles. I might cover that in a later article or module, but for now, we are going to focus on the traffic generation part and the process we will use. Once your article is written, you need to do 2 things. First you need to make a squidoo lens that contains the article itself, along with an affiliate link to a product of your choosing, as well as a link back to your main squidoo lens (that’s the one we made in module 6). Once that is set up, you need to submit the article to article directories. I have a list of the Top Article Directories here on the site you can use to start out. This can also be outsourced but since your just starting, I recommend doing it yourself.

The Resource Box

The key to building traffic from these articles is by properly utilizing the resource box. The resource box is where most sites will allow you to post your links back to your site. We will use EzineArticles as an example because they are the largest and most well known article directory. EzineArticles will allow you to post 2 links in the resource box of your article. We want to use these 2 links for specific purposes. First we want to make a link that reads something like this “For the original article, visit Your Keyword Title Here”. In this link, Your Keyword Title Here would link back to your new squidoo lens of the same name. This will be the one that you just made containing your article. For the second link, we are going to link back to our main lens (the one from module 6), with something like this, “For more articles like this one, visit Main Site Keyword Title”. That is all their is to it!

Most of the sites will take up to a week to list your article, so the traffic is going to take a while to show up. Be patient and you will see a steady increase once the articles start going live. Like I said previously, I try to do an article a day for almost 2 months when I first start out with a new site. I might miss a day here or there, but the important part is getting those articles out there. Give it a shot and see what you can come up with.

Our next module is Module 7.2 – Traffic Generation with Social Bookmarking