Article Marketing for Niche Marketing

Your first job, before you even begin to write, is to know exactly what you're writing about - and that means Keyword Research. That's a huge subject in itself, but the short version is that you want to write about a phrase or a few related phrases that your target market uses when they search for what you're marketing. Search on "keyword research" for more on how to do it.

Once you have your keywords, you can begin your article. There are four important sections to a marketing article:

1. The Title
2. The Summary or Teaser
3. The Body
4. The Resource Box (or Author bio)

The job of the Title is twofold: to get search engines to list you when someone searches for your keywords, and to get your targets to open the article. It needs to include your primary keyword phrase, and create interest and curiosity in the reader so they'll want to open the article and read it.

The Summary is used in article directories as a short paragraph below the title in a list of articles, and it often ends up being used as the description when your article gets listed by search engines. Its main job is to get the reader to open the article.

The Body is the main part of the article, it contains the "meat" that the reader is looking for. Its job is to convince the reader you have something useful and substantial to say, and to leave them wanting more so that they want to click your links in the resource box to read more of your content.

The Resource Box contains a clear, definite call to action, and a link or links which lead your reader to the "more" that they want to read and that you want them to read.

There are hundreds of "article directories" online, and many other sites where you can post pieces of content similar to articles (right here on Squidoo is one!).

Article Directories:

• EzineArticles (#1 importance)


• Article Dashboard


• GoArticles


• ISnare


• Buzzle

List of Article Directories

Submitting articles manually is time-consuming if you're submitting to multiple directories, so there are also article submission services which will, usually for a fee, do it for you.

Search for "article submission service" or "article submitter" to find ones currently available.

One issue you'll come across when you start article marketing is "duplicate content". The idea here is that search engines, especially Google, discount or ignore multiple copies of the same text when they find it in multiple places. Some people say you should post a unique version of the article in every place you post it. Others say it doesn't matter at all. Personally, I post unique versions on my own website, EzineArticles, and Squidoo, and don't worry about uniqueness on the others.

If you want to be safer, you can use "article spinning" software to create different versions of the text: be extremely careful as some article spinners produce output that is unreadable garbage. One I've used successfully is jetspinner, but there's a considerable investment in setup time for each article.