I am kind of bias when it comes to the subject of article marketing. But in my opinion article marketing is the best way of generating traffic online. It is cool how much free traffic you can get by simply writing and distributing articles. But there are tons of article marketing strategies you can choose from.

Article marketing is probably the most cost effective way of generating fast and long term traffic online. It is probably the least expensive way of getting traffic but you will still need a couple of tools. So what I would like to do is show you some awesome article marketing strategies one of my secret strategies as a matter of fact.

Here are some of the things you should have:

- A Blog (Preferably a WordPress blog) That’s where you want to drive traffic!

- Google Keyword Tool (for finding keywords to target) Or A Tool That Does The Dirty Work

- Some Knowledge about Backlinking, So You Can Start to Rank Your Blog PostsArticle Marketing Strategy

The Foundation

Now first you must know, in my strategy I put a real emphases on developing very good, vary valuable pieces of content. Its kind of like the foundation of a building. You need to have a good foundation to have a structurally sound building. Anyways just do your reasearch and put together good and valuable articles. Just remember that article marketing is about quality and quantity if you want traffic to your blog.

Keyword Research

You want to setup your blog so it’s ready for content. In my strategy, we first post a piece of content on our blog. but before we actually write an article there is a very important article marketing strategy that must not be over looked and that is Keyword Research. Before you even write, you want a good handle what keywords you are going after.

You can gather keywords from Google keyword tool, that is what I start off doing and is really my first task. I decide what direction I want to go then just brain storm. I use a keyword tool similar to Market Samurai, but you can use a free tool called Traffic Travis.

The topic of Keyword research is quite complicated so that is best left for another article. The point is you should learn as much as you can about the topic of keyword research so that you can optimize your efforts and find the best keyword for what you are writing about and one that will get you traffic.

3 things you can do:

  • Do a Google search using: allintitle:”keyword” (look for less than 75,000 competing sites)
  • Do a Google search using: “phrase match” (look for less than 100,000 competing sites)
  • Analyze the top 20 ranking websites with Traffic Travis (free equivalent of Market Samurai)

Using the plugin from SeoQuake for your Firefox browser to determine page rank of competing web sites.

Post Your Article To Your Blog

You have your blog all setup and you are ready to start feeding it. Once you have published, tagged and key-worded your article to your blog its time to start submitting your article. Now your post  on your blog is the piece of content you want to rank in the search engines.

A good tip for blogging is to really research what other bloggers or website are doing in your particular niche to get some ideas on how to set up your blog. Once you’ve got an article done, you need to publish it on your blog. As you should already know, there are some onpage SEO factors to consider before publishing an article. To make the most of onpage SEO you should have your keyword in header 1, h2 & h3 tags. You should also have the keyword in your image alt tag, and a keyword density of like 3-5%. Lastly, make sure you carefully place your keyword in the title and description. That’s all you really need to do, then publish the article. As it stands, it has a small chance of ranking in the search engines.

Getting Traffic From Your Articles

Backlinking and Distribution of your Articles

Backlinking is the second most important activity that will get your pages in your blog ranked.  Here I am going to give you one of my best secrets to article marketing. Some would have you spin your article and submit them using and automated spinner. You can do this but I would not bother unless you are not ranking well after you do what I am about to tall you.

Ok so here it goes, Get your articles published on high profile, high page rank websites. You want the links to your blog post to come from the highest page rank websites that you can. So concentrate on finding sites that accept articles from other writers. This is a very effective way of getting high quality backlinks. Now the next question is, where do I do that! I will show you next how to find high page rank web sites that will publish your content.

Finding Publishers

I mentioned a plug in for fire fox earlier called SeoQuake. Go to there web site and download this tool and go thru the videos they have on how to use this awesome plug in. SeoQuake is a tool I use to find high page rank publishers by in the way that SeoQuake displys the page rank of the web sites displayed when you do a Google search. Once you have SeoQuake installed and have learned the basics of how to use it, now to start searching for these sites.  I will show you how below.

In your Google search type one of these three at a time:

  • Do a Google search using: Keyword+”write for us”
  • Do a Google search using: Keyword+”guest post”
  • Do a Google search using: Keyword+”submit your article”

In the search results you pick from the highest page rank sites by using SeoQuake results. Here is an example.

Article marketing traffic

Getting Your Article Published

Here is some guide lines to follow when submitting to a publisher.

  • Put out Good Content, Huge Value! Do your research on the subject you are writing.
  • Adhere to the Publishers Guidelines
  • Articles Should Be At least  700 – 900 Words Long
  • Don’t Over Promote Yourself In The Resource Box. (The Resource Box is usually a brief bio and a link to your website or Blog, located directly below the article.)
  • Benefit Driven
  • Lead the reader into the resource box, Give a call to action

On the point of resource boxes, again I am all about optimizing for maximum benefit. We want to achieve a high click thru rate from our resource boxes, because when we are publishing our articles on authority sites we potentially can get a large amount of traffic to our article from all of these high page rank sites. Powerful stuff!

There are many other strategies when it comes to article marketing. I always start out buy using this technique first then moving on to other link building methods. I want to list for you some other link building strategies I employ below, so here it goes.

  •  Article Directories
  • Article Spinning
  • Blog Networks
  • Web 2.0 Backlinking
  • RSS Feeds
  • Social Bookmarking
  • Press Releases
  • Blog Commenting

These are the most popular and the type of article marketing strategies I use. I am sure I left some out, but you get the point.

Something else to consider is blog networks, like Unique Article Wizard, My Article Network & SEO Link Vine. They are paid membership blog networks. You pay them and in return for your money, you’re able to submit your articles to a network of high pagerank blogs. Blog networks are a great addition to article directory submissions.

You can also take advantage of web2.0 sites like HubPages.com, Squidoo, LiveJournal & perhaps Blogger. You can take advantage of high pagerank sites like them. You can sort of “hijack” their authority to instantly rank in the search engines. The same concept applies to web2.0′s. Post the article; include the keyword in the title and throughout the article. They are great backlinks that actually boost rankings.

Some people think Onpage SEO is seriously overrated in there opinion. I disagree, I think every little bit counts. Do you research on blogging if you are inexperianced learn more about word press blogs, buy some good blogging courses. You can learn quite a bit about onpage seo and off page seo just by searching the net and visiting forums. My point is learn as much as you can before hand so you don’t waste your efforts.

God Bless, Hope The Best to Your Efforts

Steve Geysbeek

P.S. If you want to learn the real secrets to successful article marketing and how you can take your internet marketing efforts to a new level, put your email in the form on the right.

P.P.S. Feel free to leave your thoughts, questions and comments in the box below.