Pauline Bennett - A Guide To Articles

What is article marketing?

It is a form of advertising wherein a
business hires a writer or does it
themselves to write short articles in
the hopes that this will promote their
business. These articles are made for
distribution and publication which
means this can viewed by just about
anybody both in the print and online
form.

So people will know who wrote the
article, at the bottom there is usually
a bio box and byline which shows the
references and contact person of the
one who wrote it. If the reader liked
the article so much, they can get in
touch with him or her which, translates
to increased sales.

Article marketing has been around for
quite awhile. Some say this was first
used when mass print became available.
In the print form, this type of
advertising was used by entrepreneurs
as a means of obtaining free space.
This is given to a newspaper free of
charge in exchange for the business'
contact information with the article.
Most newspapers are happy to accept
this kind of arrangement because their
budget was very limited in compensating
writers for their work.

The setup is not that different for
online article marketing because
writers may post their work in
different websites as well as put it in
their own. Articles that are posted
elsewhere are known as an article
directory.

The reason why articles posted in such
sites are free is because the directory
owner puts advertisements on the side
and collects revenue from it. As more
traffic is achieved, both the directory
owner and the writer gain something
from it.

Some websites give the writer the
option of choosing the kind of
advertising to be displayed on the
page. If you don't like the options,
you can always go for the page without
any advertisements.

There are differences though between
printed and online article marketing.
For one, it is much faster to look for
a certain article online because
keywords are often used for search
engine optimization. This means if you
are looking for a certain topic, you
will be able to see what you are
looking for in just a matter of
seconds.

If you think that the articles posted
can only be seen in sites such as
www.ezinearticles.com or www.about.com,
think again because some have now used
social networks to their message
across. Examples of sites include
Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendster. This
strategy is known as Web 2.0
generation.

Some people say that the rise in the
number of people who use article
marketing has a negative effect because
it has brought down the quality in the
articles written. To prevent this from
happening, you have to post articles
that are relevant and informative.

Article marketing is just one way of
promoting a service or product. If you
don't have enough money to market it
using other means, this will be a good
way to get started. In posting
elsewhere or in your own website, the
most important thing to do is to use
relevant keywords so it will be easy
for visitors to see your site.

For that, you have to think what words
will a person likely type to see your
site. If you are able to figure that
out, it won't be long before you will
get a lot of traffic which translates
to additional sales to your business.

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Writing an article doesn't just mean putting down thoughts into words then typing and writing it. You have to capture the interest of your readers and get them to keep on reading. To send your message across you have to get the attention of the reader and have a firm grasp of their interest and pique their curiosity.

So just what do you have to do when nothing comes to mind? There is no surefire ways to get the perfect ideas but there are easy ways to get your creative juices flowing. No one can guarantee you of having the perfect mindset but many methods may aid you in achieving that state of mind.

Here are five easy ways for that.

1) Keep a diary or a journal with you always. Ideas can be triggered by anything you may hear, see, or smell. Your senses are your radar in finding great ideas. Write all of them into a journal and keep it with you for future reference. You may also write down anything that you have read or heard, someone's ideas could be used to develop your own ideas and this is not stealing. Remember that ideas and creativity can come from anywhere; it's the development of the idea that makes it unique.

2) Relax and take time to sort things out. A jumbled mind cannot create any space for new ideas. Everyone must have a clear mind if one wishes to have their creativity in full speed. Get rid of all obstacles that can be a hindrance to your creativity. If you are bothered by something, you cannot force your mind to stay focused.

Try to relax every time that you can and think about your experiences and interactions with others. Your experiences are what shape your mindset and your opinions which could be reflected on your writings. Try to discover yourself, find out what triggers your emotions. Discover what inspires you and what ticks you off. You can use these emotions to help you in expressing yourself and your ideas, with this you can grow creatively.

3) Create a working place that can inspire your creativeness. Your working place can be quite a hindrance if it doesn't make you feel happy or relaxed. Creativity comes from being in a good state of mind and a messed up workplace that causes distraction won't be conducive in firing up your creative flow.

Surround your working place with objects that makes you happy and relaxed. You may put up pictures, or scents, objects that inspire, or anything that can get your creativeness cranking. A clean and well organized workplace also rids of distractions and unwanted hindrances. With a good working place, you can work in peace and never notice the time pass by.

4) Set the mood. Setting the mood requires you to just go with the moment or to induce your self to feeling what makes your mind works best. Finding out what makes you tick could help you find ways to get your creative juices flowing. Set the pace and tempo for your mood and everything else will follow.

There are many ways to set the mood. Some writers have been known to use alcohol, a little sip of wine to stir up the imagination. Some would like some mood music while others let the lighting of the environment create the mood.

5) Go on a getaway and just do something unlike crazy. Letting yourself go and have fun produces adrenaline that can make your imagination go wild. Take an adventure or a solemn hike. Whatever it is that is unusual from your daily routine can take the rut out of your schedule. In no time at all, your creativeness will make use of that experience and get your imagination to go on overdrive.

One way of promoting your website and product can be achieved for free. As an additional bonus, this "free" method can boost your sites and sales, doubling and even tripling your income.

Articles. One of the easiest ways to promote your website in order to generate traffic and increase your earnings.

How does this work?

Write articles relating to your website and submit them to "free content" submission sites. Easy to do, takes little time and can increase your website traffic, sales and of course, your income.

How can article writing boost traffic and income?

The article on the free content site contains a link to your own website. Readers, after reading your articles, may choose to click on the link and pay you an unexpected visit. Having them on the free content sites is also making these articles available to other webmasters who may wish to publish that article on their site.

If they do, your article will include a link back to your site. And anyone who reads the article on that site can still click on the link to visit your site.

As the list of your published articles grow larger, and more and more of them are appearing on different websites, the total number of links to your site increases also. Major search engines are placing a lot of significance on incoming links to websites so they can determine the importance of a certain site.
The more incoming links the website has, the more importance search engines attaches to it. This will then increase your website's placement in the search results.
If your site is into promoting a product or service, the links that your articles have achieved will mean more potential customers for you. Even if visitors only browse through, you never know if they might be in need of what you are offering in the future.

Search engines do not just index the websites, they also index published articles. They also index any article that is written about your own website's topic. So once someone searches for that same topic, the list of results will have your site or may even show the articles that you have written.

And to think, no effort on your part was used to bring them to your site. Just your published articles and the search engines.

The good thing with articles is that you can write about things that people would want to know about. This can be achieved in the lightest mood but professional manner, with a little not-so-obvious sales pitch added.

If you think about it, only a few minutes of your time is spent on writing one article and submitting to free content site. In the shortest span of time also, those are distributed to more sites than you can think of. Even before you know what is happening, you are getting more visitors than you previously had.

If you think you are wasting your time writing these articles, fast forward to the time when you will see them printed and wide-spread on the internet. Not to mention the sudden attention and interest that people are giving your website and your products or services.

Try writing some articles and you will be assured of the sudden surge in site traffic, link popularity and interest. Before you know it, you will be doubling and even tripling your earnings.

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"How to Write an Article in Less Than 30 Minutes"
Plus 8 Tips!
By Frank Jones

Introduction
Article writing is a technique used by Internet marketers to
drive traffic to their sites.
You can submit articles to sites like Ezine Articles, Article
Geek, and Articles Base for publication on the Internet. You are
not paid to submit articles. But, this type of Internet marketing
doesn't cost you anything either - it is free advertising
available to anyone.
The articles will, in time, indirectly contribute to your sales.
The advantages come back to you in traffic and sales, not in
initial cash when writing the article.
Choose an article site and create an account. It is free.
Read the guidelines for article writing on the particular site.
The word count requirements will differ. Some sites publish the
article immediately, others take time to process your work. Be
familiar with the site before submitting articles so that you
will know what to expect.
Write and submit your article, making sure to follow all of the
guidelines and restrictions on the site. You don't want your
article to be rejected due to a technical error.
At the end of the article, be sure to include a resource box.
If you want to really make your article "SELL" then you've got to
craft the perfect RESOURCE BOX. This is the "author bio" that is
below your article body and it's also known as your "SIG" (short
for SIGnature).
Here are the essential items that should be in your RESOURCE BOX:
Your Name: You'd be amazed at how many folks forget to include
their name in the RESOURCE BOX. Your name and optional title
should be the first thing in your resource box.
Your Website Address: in valid URL form. Example: http://Your-
Company-Name.com
Your Elevator Pitch: This is 1 to 3 sentences that encapsulates
the essence of what makes you and your offering unique. Also
known as your USP (Unique Selling Proposition).
Your Call To Action: You've got them warmed up and now it's time
to lead them to BUY from you or visit your website. This is where
you "Ask For The Sale." Best to only give (1) specific call to
action.
Just like you can expect different guidelines for article
submission, you can expect these same sites to have varying
guidelines for the resource box.
----
These articles are indexed on search engines and used on blogs,
newsletters, and Ezine's. The point here is that you want others
to use your articles, and spread your links around the internet.
Article writing is free viral marketing.
Article writing exposes you to prospects that are actively
looking for what are selling. They've come across your article,
likely from some type of Internet search, which makes them the
best type of prospect - they are eager and serious!
You want to establish yourself as an expert, gain the trust of
your readers, and establish a rapport with them. If you appear
knowledgeable, professional, and genuine, readers will see you as
an expert, trust you, and possibly purchase items from you later.
Continue to submit articles on a regular basis. The more times
you put your links out on the Internet, the greater chance you
have of someone clicking them.
NOTE: Don't say you can't write articles. It's an excuse for
failure. I couldn't do a lot of things either, but I was so
determined to succeed, that I learned.
If you truly want to succeed, "can't" won't be in your
vocabulary. There is simply too much information available
online, on every subject under the sun, to not have enough help
and advice to get anything accomplished.
My 8 Tips and How I Write an Article in 30 Minutes or Less...
1 - I start with a list of ideas and concepts I want to cover.
Usually I write this list in point form. For me, I do this the
old fashioned way, with a pen and paper.
2 - I often "incubate" an article for a few days (that does not
count in the 30 minutes). What I do is start roughing out some
topic ideas then leave it. Because I have thought about it, ideas
tend to come to me that I frequently add to my points. Of course
I always carry a notebook for ideas.
3 - I often need to reduce the number of ideas that I cover.
Sometimes they do not fit with the angle of the article or do not
flow with the other ideas. Sometimes I have to give up a point to
write a good article.
4 - Never save a good idea. It is tempting to "save" a few good
ideas for later. New ideas will always come so always give your
best ideas.
5 - Develop tricks to get past writers block. One way I do this
is "warm up" writing. I just sit down and write for 5 minutes.
This tends to help subsequent writing to flow. Another way I do
this is to go for a walk, cycle or a run (although sometimes I
think I might use this to procrastinate a bit too). Another trick
I use is to make a game out of the deadline I have set - say I
will do it by X. Perhaps I am simple but this motivates me.
6 - Come back to it later. My best articles are written partly,
revisited a few times, then finished. I spend the same 30 minutes
or less, though only 5-7 minutes per session. Of course if the
ideas are flowing well, I do keep writing.
7 - I often write 3-4 articles at the same time. Spending 5
minutes on one, 7 on another etc. When I am really in writing
flow, this works well.
8 - One trick is using bullet points or numbered points as in
this article. People seem to like this technique and it helps
articles flow for me.
Frank Jones, The Home Biz Whiz

Owning, running and maintaining an internet based business or a site needs articles. Plain and simple, every who has a site knows this. Even those who don't have sites but are frequent internet users knows this as well. Articles quench the thirst for information and knowledge of the people. Plus, the articles provides many other benefits for the site.

The benefits that articles provide are putting a site high in the ranking in search results of keywords and keyword phrases that pertains or are relevant to his or her site. They also provide attraction to website visitors when they are appreciated and is linked to your site from another site or newsletter. Articles provide for the increase of the confidence and trust levels of customers to your site and company.

So ok, we have established that articles are very important to a site and to business. Articles are crucial and to keep ahead in the game, a site must have an article, it is imperative. There is one dilemma though, not many people like writing articles.

Many website owners would rather spend their time on something else, and unless you're a big time company, you don't have the necessary resources to use on a pool of article writers.

So what are the other options?

Well, for starters if you hate writing articles and you can't afford to hire people to write for you then don't. Get free articles. The first place to look at for free articles is the public domain.

Public domain articles are articles freely given to the public for public use. You can do whatever you want with it. You can place it on your site, name it as yours, put it in a newsletter its you decision. Always remember though that you will have to choose articles that is very relevant to your site.

The downside to public domain articles is that since it is free for everybody, many of your competitors may have access to them as well. Since every site needs to be original and unique even though you have the same niche, this could be a predicament. You may also have to edit them a bit to place more keywords and keyword phrases to make them better.

Another way to get free articles is to allow other sites which has the same subject or topic as yours to submit articles to your site. This would be only to augment your existing content or else all your articles would be leading to other sites since these articles would have resource boxes with them that could link or direct the readers to their site. That's why it is important to have your own articles; you could use them to link your site to other sites as well.

But, to truly feel the impact of what a good article to you, go for original ones. There are many article writers who do part time and freelance article writing jobs that charges only minimal fees. You can get good articles that have all the keywords and keyword phrases you need and people are looking for.

The investment you made for these articles would be worthwhile because you could use them for all the benefits you could offer. You hold copyrights to them and you will be able to use them anyway you want. As your articles help you in building your business and your site, you will have more articles to write and maybe then you wont be having second thoughts about articles.

For those of us who write and submit articles to various content directories, we do so primarily for one reason: To get the link back to our site.However, it's important to keep in mind that not all links are equal in the eyes of the major search engines. How your links "appear" to the search engines can be nearly as significant as the number of links that actually point to your site.

As you cultivate links to your site, the goal is to have as natural a link structure as possible. What this means is that search engines like to see links presented in a manner that does not appear to be phony, or an effort to fool the search engines into thinking your site is more popular than it actually is.In our efforts to do this, it is important to keep in mind the following:

First, your incoming links should increase gradually. Search engines see a sudden jump in links as artificial and not an indication of your site's popularity. When you submit your articles to an article directory, your links generally increase gradually as they are picked up over time and published on web sites and archived ezines.

Second, whenever possible, your incoming links should not be reciprocal.Many of you are now saying, "easier said than done". Perhaps, but submitting articles to article directories is a great way to build these types of links.

Search engines view sites that rely heavily on reciprocal links as not necessarily containing sought-after content that others want to voluntarily link to. That is, pure link reciprocity implies that the only purpose of the link is to build links and has nothing to do with the quality of the content on the web site.

Third, it's very important to be consistent in how the link to your site is published. The following example will illustrate this point:
The following URL's all point to the same page, of course. However, as far as the major search engines are concerned, they are all different:
http://articlelists.com
http://articlelists.com/
http://articlelists.com/index.html
http://www.articlelists.com
http://www.articlelists.com/
http://www.articlelists.com/index.html

Therefore, if your incoming links vary as listed above, your page rank is being watered down by up to a factor of six. So if you are not already doing it, be sure to be consistent in how you have your incoming links published.

This last item discussed here concerns anchor text. Anchor text is the actual text that appears for a particular hyperlink, and is perhaps one of the most important issues to consider when building your incoming link structure. For example, in the following link, Free Article Directory, the words "Free Article Directory" constitute the anchor text. However, when you place your cursor over the link you will see the destination site, www.ArticleLists.com, displayed in the status bar.

There are two important rules of thumb to remember about your anchor text. The first is that your anchor text should vary. That is, the incoming links to your site should not all have the same anchor text. This creates a more natural appearance to the search engines and will help in your rankings. The second rule is to place your keywords into your anchor text whenever possible. The reason this is important is because search engines view the anchor text as an indication of the topic of your webpage. So you get a two-for-one effect: You not only get the desired inbound link, but you also create a more natural-looking incoming link structure which will be viewed more favorably by the search engines. Of course, you would first want to do some keyword research to determine the popularity and importance of various keywords relating to your web site, and then use the ones for which you are trying to rank well.

When you begin to view your inbound link structure from the perspective of the search engines, you begin to see the logic of what needs to be done to rank well. For the search engines, it's all about content and delivering the most relevant web pages possible for a given search term.

Creating an inbound link structure that appears more natural, or voluntary, will indicate to the search engines that your content is indeed something that their users would find useful. Assuming your site publishes quality content, you have, in a sense, helped the search engine do their job; and in the process you've gone a long way in making your web site more visible on the Internet.

And the answer is SUBMIT.

What am I talking about? I am talking about submitting articles to article submission sites. I am sure you have seen them, they are places to go to submit your original articles about topics you are very knowledgeable about and also sites to visit to acquire some fresh content for your site, blog or eZine.

Let me give you a handful of reasons to add your articles to these sites. First off, and to me most important, is that it gives you credibility, you are now the Subject Matter Expert (SME) so your article must reflect that expertise. Make sure your articles are well thought out, flow well and get your point across.

Second, along with your article, you will now have links all over the Internet. The reason for this is you add a small "resource box" at the end of the article with some info about you and a link to your web site. This will help with search engine indexing and also with popularity in the search directories.

The next reason for submitting articles is free advertising, your articles, along with links to your sites will now be everywhere giving your site the visibility it needs - and the best part is - all of this is free.

The fourth reason to submit is money, you can earn cold, hard cash with AdSense ads, income from the products on your site, and affiliate links. You will have more visitors that will result in more money, you may even receive requests from eZines to write articles for them.

Finally, you will gain the trust of your customers. They will consider you an expert and be more likely to visit your site and purchase your products.

So, you can't lose. It doesn't take much time to write an article and submit it to many article sites. You will have fun, get visibility and get to show off to your friends about what a great author you are.

A great way of driving traffic to your site is by writing articles which link back
to your lens in the bio box. Two of the best are EzineArticles and ArticlesBase.
Articlesbase isn't a 'dofollow' site for your links, however their readers will
reuse your articles on their blogs and this will then add backlinks to your lens.
Below I have outlined 10 of the best article directories.

Ezine Articles
ArticlesBase
Go Articles
Bukisa
ArticleDashboard
ISnare
SearchWarp
Buzzle
ArticleCity
ArticleAlley

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