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How Article Marketing Can Build Your List

Linda Belan — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 13:47:00 +0000

One of the most effective strategies for growing an email list is article marketing—writing and submitting articles to free content directories, blogs, ezines and websites. The potential for branding yourself, adding new subscribers and building online relationships is unlimited.
To use article marketing successfully, you must be able to write a decent article. While you don't need to be a professional writer, you do need to be able to communicate clearly, with relatively good grammar, and without tons of typographical errors. You must also be able to speak the language like a native without making simple mistakes in word usage that serve only to drive readers away.

If you're unable to write reasonably well, hire someone. Because of all the competition online, writers are affordable for anyone who is serious about Internet marketing. And they're worth their rate three times over if they increase your mailing list and make you look good.

For the best article marketing results, write articles that your niche audience wants to read. Choose a topic that your ideal customer might read, and write for her. In other words, if you sell gardening supplies, it's best to write about gardening! While you may enjoy writing about scuba diving, scuba divers aren't the most likely people to buy your products, so write to those who are.

Never write a sales letter and call it an article! Not only will you annoy readers, but you can get your article—and potentially yourself—banned from article directories, especially the best ones.

Instead, write a good, solid, informative article filled lots of beefy information that your readers want, then use your resource box at the end to sell yourself. Include a link to your mailing list sign-up page, tell them what they get free for joining, and make it sound good. Don't add a bunch of hype, just the benefits and what you have to offer.

If your article contains quality content that the reader enjoyed, you'll gain a ton of new subscribers for every new article you publish.

Once you have your article in-hand, having proofread and polished it until it shines, begin to submit it to the most popular article directories online. You can also contact the publishers of large ezines in your niche, or blogs that reach your target audience, and let them know you have a new article they may want to publish.

Some of the more popular online article submission sites are:

ezinearticles.com
ladypens.com
freeaffiliatearticles.com
webarticles.com

After your submission options have been exhausted, begin your next article immediately and keep the process going. Stay within your niche topic, and you'll attract untold numbers of subscribers.

Sometimes, a blogger or ezine publisher will ask you to write an original article, for free. If the audience is a good fit with your target market and the opportunity will build your credibility, it may be well worth the effort.

In fact, many article marketers form partnerships with blogs and publishers of large ezines just so they can reach those audiences free, on a regular basis. You might want to consider doing the same.

If you're afraid you'll run out of ideas, don't be. The topics within any niche that you could write about are endless, so when you think you have nothing else to say, spend some time brainstorming, or surfing your competitor's site to find new article ideas. There are plenty around, which you'll see when you start to look.

If you're still intimidated by the process, there are plenty of resources to help you. Services like articlemarketer.com and isnare.com will submit your articles for you, while easyarticlemarketing.com is a step-by-step course for creating and submitting articles to grow your list.

Using article marketing is a simple, yet highly effective way to grow your mailing list. Just keep doing it… write, polish, submit, repeat… and before long, you'll begin to see dramatic increases in the number of subscribers you've added to your list.

How to Get Your Content Directly in Front of Your Target Audience

Linda Belan — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 13:40:15 +0000

Article marketing is great. I'm not going to deny that. But, have you looked at EzineArticles.com lately? It's a beast! I don't know anyone these days who goes there to find content to publish on their sites. Do you? I sure don't. It's just way too massive, and, frankly, some of the articles on there are disturbing.

Yes, posting your articles at EzineArticles.com is great for getting incoming links to tell the search engines that your site is important. And, yes, you can get traffic to your articles by posting there. But, as far as getting your articles republished by big ezines and blogs? Either you've got to be sending people there to find your articles (which I certainly wouldn't advise doing because of the high level of distractibility on their site) or you've got to have one of the top articles in a category.

The only time I go to the article directories to find articles to publish is if I'm specifically looking for reprint articles by someone. But most of us don't have the name to have people searching specifically for us — yet.

I'd like to present you with three alternatives today to help you to get your articles directly in front of potential customers.

1. Include your reprint articles on your own site and invite your readers to publish them with your bio.
Who better to spread the word about you and your products and services than your fans? You can see how Nicole Dean does this at NicoleontheNet.com. She does it again at her help desk so that anyone wishing to contact her can find her content and spread it virally. Pretty tricky, eh?

2. Give Your Articles to your Affiliates and Others Looking for Money-Making Expert Content.
First of all, make sure you're adding at least some of your articles to your own affiliate center for your affiliates to publish on their websites.

3. Guest Blog at Hot Blogs in Your Niche.
Instead of submitting your articles at the article directories and hoping they get in front of your audience, why not place them directly in front of the people who you're trying to reach? You can accomplish this by guest blogging on relevant blogs. Simply contact those blog owners and offer them your original expert content. If you make your content and your offer good enough, they'll surely say "yes".

No matter whether you choose the options above or stick with standard article marketing, the important thing is to do some content marketing every single day if you want to continue to move ahead. Now get writing!

3 Article Template Ideas for Easy Writing

Linda Belan — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:15:02 +0000

In another post, I told you about how article marketing can be highly effective in driving traffic to your site, increasing sales, and giving you the status of "expert". That said, article writing does not come naturally to everybody. And even writers can run out of ideas sometimes.

A great way to overcome article writer's block is by using templates. You can take a template and use it to churn out articles on any topic or niche. Below are three of the most commonly used templates used in article writing. Try them next time you're trying to write but you keep drawing blanks:

1. Magic 7

There must be something magical about the number 7 because article writers like to use it and readers like to read articles with the number "7" in the title. There are many variations of this:

7 tips to…
7 ways to…
7 steps to…
7 biggest mistakes in …
7 reasons to…

Once you have your Magic 7 article, write one article about each of your 7 points. Voila! You've got 8 articles done!

2. The Review

Here's the kind of article that everybody can write.I mean, you always have an opinion on something, don't you? Do some keyword research to find out what specific things people are Googling reviews for. The outline for this article is simple: Introduce the item. Write what you liked about it. Discuss what you didn't like about it. Finish with your bottom line – do you recommend it or not? If so, who would benefit most from it? Before you know it, you've got another article all finished. You can write reviews for:

Books
Movies
Music
Gadgets
Courses

3. How To

The most popular books are those with the words "how to" in the title. Same thing with articles. It seems we're always looking for the easiest, the fastest, the best way to do something. So why not write a how-to article for your target audience? Some examples:

How to… (a step-by-step instruction)
How to avoid…
How to find…
How to choose the best…
How to get…

These are just a few of the templates you can and should use to make article writing easy peasy. And remember, you can use these templates for your blog posts and Email marketing, too. In fact, there are tons of ways to repurpose and reuse articles.

The One Marketing Strategy You Should be Doing

Linda Belan — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:58:20 +0000

When I was doing my yearly planning for 2010, I listed the five marketing strategies that I intend to carry out. Number one on that list…Article marketing.

In case you're not familiar with article marketing yet, it involves writing informative and useful articles and distributing them to article directories – giving permission to anyone to republish your article as long as your author resource box is left intact.

Why you should consider article marketing:

Free traffic to your site

High authority article directories, like Ezine Articles, enjoy a lot of traffic (we're talking millions of eyeballs every month). Many of those who read their articles invariably click on the links in the author resource box and end up going to those sites. This is free traffic that otherwise they would not have been able to attract to their site!

Increased rankings in Google and other search engines

Search engine optimization (SEO) experts say that one of the most important ways to get high Google rankings for your target keywords is to have lots of links from other sites pointing to yours. The key is the anchor text of those links should be the keywords you'd like to rank high for.

This strategy works so well that a Internet marketer once succeeded in having his website rank number one in Google for the keywords "coolest guy on earth" (or something like that!) – just by having all his buddies link to his site with that anchor text. That's how powerful linking is.

These are the same links you get from the usually high-authority article directories all linking back to your website through the author resource box.

Affiliate sales

Some article directories allow you to link, not just to your website, but to an affiliate product's sales page with your affiliate links. This means that your article gets blasted all over the Internet, thus increasing the chances of somebody clicking on your affiliate links and buying the product. The result? More affiliate commissions for you.

This concept is the essence of the so-called "bum marketing" or lazy marketing, which doesn't even require you to have a website. All you need to do is write and submit articles to article directories and you make affiliate commissions from those articles for as long as they're online. We're talking years here.

Another benefit of article marketing is that you become a published author and, therefore, an expert on the topic. In fact, a friend of mine got interviewed on national TV because the reporter read one of her articles online. That's media publicity that would have cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars! (Unfortunately, I have not had that opportunity – yet)