Article Marketing Tutorial For Newbies

First, you need to choose what you will write about. If your niche is Acne for example, you can write on acne causes. This will be your general topic. Then, pick your main keyword for your article. Here are the 3 golden rule to pick a good keyword:

- pick a long-tail keyword
- pick a keyword that has enough searches but not too many (150 to 300 searches per month is good)
- pick a keyword that is not too competitive

To choose your keyword, you can use the two following free tools:

1/ Google keyword tool: for the search volume

2/ Traffic Travis: the SEO analysis will help you determine the competition level of your target keyword

Now you can write your article. Make sure you put your main keyword in your title, once in the first paragraph of your article (in the first 50 words), and once more in the body.

Write naturally, make your title interesting and attention grabbing and try to provide valuable information in your article.

At the end of the article, add a resource box with a link to your website. This link can be with anchor text, or it can be the full URL of your website, or both if you are allowed 2 links.

Pick a short list of top article directories you wish to submit your article to. You can submit manually or with the help of an article submission software. Be sure to check each article directory's posting rules and editorial guidelines and abide by their rules or your article will get rejected.

Among top article directories are ArticlesBase, EzineArticles, Article Dashboard, and many more. GoArticles is said to be one of the top directories but it also contains a lot of crappy content, so you can publish your articles elsewhere if you think it will be better.

A great way to get more exposure is to submit your articles to web 2.0 sites and blog networks. There are many blog networks that will accept your content. This is more useful if you are doing SEO, though.

Web 2.0 sites are great to attract a targeted audience. These include sites like LinkedIn (you can join groups and post your article), Zimbio, Xomba, Quizilla, Wordpress.com and Blogger (on these sites you create your own free blogs). These sites should definitely be a part of your article marketing strategy.

This last step is overlooked by 99% of article marketers. However, it is a crucial step if you want to have any success with your article marketing campaigns.

Promoting your articles means you will build backlinks to them. Bookmark your article on several bookmarking sites like Delicious, Stumbleupon, MisterWong. This will give you backlinks. Tweet your articles, put them on Facebook. If your article is good (it should be!), people will share it, resulting in more backlinks. The more links your article will have, the higher it will rank in the search engines for your main keyword, and the more readers you will have.

If you follow the 5 steps carefully, you'll be ahead of your competitors and on the path to article marketing success. Be prepared for some hard work, though, as it requires some efforts to dominate this marketing technique, just like any other technique.

And now, get instant access to a more advanced free online article marketing tutorial.