Getting Started- Step 5- Article Marketing

Congratulations, you have a website that is ready to make you money.  But in order to make money, you need to get traffic.

Traffic is a term meaning visitors to your website.  After all, you can’t make money unless someone visits your site and clicks your affiliate links.  So after the research phase and the website building stage, you are ready for the next step: traffic generation.

There are many ways to get traffic and I will discuss multiple techniques later.  But for now we will discuss article marketing, since that is one of the best ways for beginners to start getting free traffic to their website.

Similar to Squidoo and the other sites we discussed that let you make free webpages, there are also article directories online.  These sites let people sign up and write articles and submit them for free.  There are dozens, even hundreds, of directories out there, but for now we will discuss my favorite one- Ezine Articles.

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To begin, go to EzineArticles.com and sign up for a free account.  You need to use your real address because they want to keep things legit and they also like to send you a free gift (coffee mug) after you write so many articles.

Ok, now pull out that list of long tail keywords you made earlier.  Your website only focused on one keyword phrase, so we will be using the other keywords to write different articles.  First, you have to pick the correct category for your article (like health, dating, etc) and maybe a sub-category too to make it more specific.

Now for the writing…make a catchy title that uses your keyword.  For example, instead of something plain like “Golf Swing Tips” spice it up with something like “6 Secret Golf Swing Tips From The Experts.”  Use your keyword, and try to get people’s attention.

Next, you have to write an abstract/summary for the search engines.  This is just a very short paragraph that will show up when someone does a search and finds your article.  It is only a sentence or two, but make it relevant to your article so they will actually want to read it.  There will also be a box for “tags” where you can write some relevant keywords.

Now you have to write your article.  It has to be between 250 – 5000 words.  Generally, short simple articles are best, so stick to about 3oo words or so and you should be fine.  Try to use your keyword in the first sentence or two to make it relevant and so the article ranks well for your keyword.  Use short paragraphs to make it flow well and look nice (bullet points are nice too).

Last is the resource box, or bio box.  This is where you can write a short bio about the author (yourself)….or you could use it to drive traffic to your site.  You aren’t allowed to put links in the main body of the article, so you have to put them in the bio box, which is the last part of your article.  You can put two links in the bio box, so use them wisely and use good anchor text (use the html code the same way you did for squidoo) when you link it to the webpage you already made.

Try to have your article flow into your “call to action,” which is where you try to get your readers to visit your site using your link.  Make it something interesting so they will actually want to check it out.  Don’t just put “for more information click here.”  Instead, make it more intriguing like, “Don’t make the mistake of not knowing what to do next — click here to find out the final step.”

Now you just submit the article and you are done.  Here is another video to show you more about how to submit an article at Ezine Articles:

Writing articles is a lot easier than making lots of webpages, so you can write lots of articles targeting different keywords.  The article directories are popular, so you should get some people to read your articles right on the site, and hopefully they will go over to your webpage and make you some money.  But if done properly, these articles should also rank well in search engines and continually get you traffic.

So you have a webpage now, and articles that are linked to it, driving traffic your way.  Hopefully you will get your first sale soon, and that will really pump you up.  Wouldn’t you like your website and articles to get even more traffic, though?  Imagine what it would be like if they all ranked even better in google?

Here’s how…Step 6- Search Engine Optimization

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