I recently had to write out a long email to a friend of mine outlining my article marketing strategy. I know a lot of people have a lot of questions about article marketing. I’ve used article marketing as a key part of my strategy to make literally hundreds of thousands of dollars online. I thought I’d share a slightly edited version of that email for anyone who might be able to benefit. I know many fellow forum members have helped me quite a bit when I was just getting started. Before moving forward, I’m here to tell you that, YES, without a doubt article marketing will drive traffic. The best part of article marketing is that it’s difficult to fail. Even if you do it wrong, you WILL still see it results. Master it and you may never need another traffic generation method at all. Here is a step by step summary of what you need to do. 1) Keyword research. Keyword research should be done before beginning any article marketing campaign. If the niche or sub niche has already been determined, it is simple. Start with the most general term within your niche. IE, hot water heaters. Run a search in your keyword tool of choice. a) Always search in phrase. b) Once the list of keywords is generated, analyze them and set the maximum amount of competition to 50,000 competing websites. c) From the list that remains, choose the keywords that have a minimum seot (estimate of clicks per day in the #1 position on google of 10. Obviously the bigger the number, the better. d) You want to have a list of at least 20 good keywords per site you are promoting or driving traffic to. If this original list doesn't contain that many, look for terms within your initial list that are variations of the original term you used, and run a search on those words using the same process. Do this until you hit a list of twenty good keywords. 2) Writing the articles. a) The first thing you want to do is download Article Reviser. It's a free tool and you can get it via my sig below. It will help you research and write 100% original articles extremely fast. b)After you have compiled your list of twenty, you then want to write 3-5 articles for each keyword or keyword phrase. This will give you a better chance of having one of them stick on the first page of google. But as always, the more you write the better. You should have two goals in mind when writing the content. First, you want your article to be appealing so that your readers make it to the end of the article where you call them to action. Secondly, you want to effectively create your content with a maximum SEO value so that you get good placement on google and your article gets seen. 2A) Writing for SEO value. a) Include your keyword phrase in the title of your article. If it's possible, try to include it at the beginning of the title, rather than the middle or the end. b) Use the main keyword once in the opening paragraph. Anywhere in the paragraph will do, just don't use it as the last few words of the paragraph. c) include the main keyword once in the resource box. This step is important. Keep your keyword density below 2%, ideally less. It's very important to use synonyms of the original keyword as much as you can. For example, if the main keyword phrase was “hot water heatersâ€, use phrases like “water heating appliances†and “water heating unit†without being too redundant with the keywords they have in common. The goal is to pull in random long tail combinations that are the result of unique searches. 2B) Writing for the reader. This is basically common sense. Write good content that you yourself would want to read. If you can offer value, you will convert. The short cut to creating good content is to find other articles that are performing well or that you like and use Article Reviser (see my sig below) to rewrite (in your own words) other people’s content. This takes the work out and you don’t even really need to be a great writer. Stay away from article spinners or PLR content. There is a place for this but if you want to stick to a simple strategy that works, stay away from short cuts. Just my opinion. 3) Submit your article to EzineArtciles.com. Though there is a time and place to submit to other directories. 4) Link Building. a) You don't want to waste your time with link building unless the article is showing that is has some ranking power on its own. Check your article reports daily and look for articles that are getting good views. Articles with a view count of 50 or more catch my eye if the article has been live for three days or less. If the article is also getting a decent click through rate (you don't want to mess with articles that aren’t' generating clicks), you want to manually run a search on google for the main keyword of that article. You can also use ezine articles stats tool. b) Make a note of your article’s ranking for a specific keyword and start building links. c) Track it and look for it to rise. If you are not already holding a first page spot or you do not see any positive change within a few weeks, cut your losses and move on. Note) I build links for articles using a combination of profile links, link vana, and my own sites. I also use Squidoo, blogger, hubpages, social media, blog comments and RSS feeds. But any type of non-spammy backlink is acceptable. And that in a nutshell, is it folks. Do this, and you will see traffic. If you have a decent offer, you will see sales. I have had single articles generate as many as 60,000 views. Just think of the equivalent PPC value on that. Hope some of you find this helpful. You can do this. -John
that is really in depth! thanks for sharing that. One article generated 60,000 views!? That's really impressive.
You're welcome Le Dangles. And thank you. I really have had articles generate over 60,000 views. In fact, here's a screen shot : http://www.articletrafficpro.com/images/articlebase2.jpg I've had many articles generate tens of thousands of views with the same basic techniques in the training video.