Last week, I talked about some of the benefits of article marketing. Now, let’s talk a little about the basics of how to get started.
Just about anyone with minimal writing ability can publish articles on various article directories. If your articles are the least bit interesting, they can be picked up by webmasters and bloggers to use as information on their sites.
It all starts with keywords.
Keywords are the words and phrases that people type into search engines. To maximize the chances that someone will read your article and click through to your website, you’ll want to base your articles on frequently searched keywords related to your business or hobby.
Great. How do you know what keywords are most frequently searched?
There are dozens of free and paid tools. Perhaps the best (and easiest to use) free tool is the Google Keyword Tool. I would also suggest WordTracker, which has a free and paid version. If you are serious about building an online business, the paid version is a must have. WordTracker is great for finding “long-tail” keyword phrases.
No matter what tool you use, you are looking for keyword phrases with a relatively high search volume. If you are selling low-priced items or services where you need volume, you probably want to focus on keywords with at least 30,000 searches per month. If you are promoting a more expensive, lower volume product or service, you can go as low as 3,000 searches per month.
For example, let’s say you want to promote your website that sells dog training educational materials. You would type “dog training” into the keyword tool of your choice and it would return a list of hundreds of related keywords, along with the number of searches for that keyword.
What to write about
The keyword phrases that have enough search volume become the subjects of your article – one keyword phrase per article. One of the keyword phrases that came up in the Google Keyword Tool for “dog training” was “dog training school.” So, you write an article about how to pick the best dog training school.
There are three parts to your article; the heading, the body, and the author box (the most important part). Your keyword phrase MUST be in your heading. To do this, you would title your article something like “How to pick the best dog training school.” You will also want your phrase to appear throughout the article.
Too much of a good thing
You need to pay attention to the keyword density in your article. Keyword density is just the percentage of all the words in your article that are keywords. Anything over 5% is pretty likely to get your article flagged as spam and deleted from the directories. You should try for something in the 1% to 3% range. The key criteria you should apply is “does it sound natural?” If the answer is yes, you’re probably ok.
Here’s an example of a “keyword stuffed” sentence; “When deciding on a dog training school, you will want to make sure that the dog training school has a low ratio of dogs to teachers and that the dog training school can provided testimonials from previous dog training clients of the dog training school.” Don’t do this. Deleting all but the first use of “dog training school” will make the sentence much more natural.
If you put your keyword phrase in most paragraphs one or two times, you will probably end up in the 1% to 3% keyword density range.
Getting traffic from your article
The most important part of the article for getting traffic to your site is the author box. This is a short paragraph at the end of the article that talks about the author. This is where you will want to include some short, compelling copy about why you’re an expert on your subject and a link back to your website.
As your articles are indexed by the search engines, more and more links to your website will be counted toward where your site appears in search results. So, not only will the article which is on the article directory site appear in search results, it will help your site rank higher in search results as well.
One key to being successful with article marketing is to write a lot of articles. To be blunt, that can take a lot of time. Here are a few shortcuts.
Get thousands of pre-written articles that you can edit or use as-is
Article marketing is an incredibly effective, low-or no-cost way to promote your online (or offline) business on the web. Get started today.
