One of the easiest ways to get traffic to your website is by article marketing. It is not the fastest, but it is easy and cheap. When you are first starting in the internet marketing business, you need things that are easy and cheap.
If you’re anything like I was when I started out, you have already blown your budget trying to get your website built, buying all the books under the sun, and you probably still haven’t had your first sale. When the reality finally sets in that the internet work week is a pipe dream, you don’t have any money left to drive traffic to your website.
It is a given, that PPC will drive traffic to your site faster than any other method, but if you have already blown your budget, you need to find ways to get traffic to your site for free, and this is where article marketing comes in.
Now, just about anyone with moderate English skills and minimal writing ability can write articles and publish them on the various article directories. And if your articles are remotely interesting, you can have them picked up by various webmasters and bloggers to use as information on their sites within hours of being published.
But just exactly what needs to be done to have these articles point back to your website? Most experts will tell you that you need to have the all important keywords in your article point back to you website. Well, if you are a newbie, just what is a keyword, and how is it used to point traffic to your website.
And then the expert will tell you that you need to use the long tail keyword and throw in latent semantic indexing. Then the expert tells you that you need to pay attention to back links, reciprocal links and the next thing you know, you will probably need a witch doctor and a human sacrifice are two. At least, that is what it felt like when I first tried to break into internet marketing.
This didn’t include building a website, learning html, php, css, or the whole alphabet of website jargon, it is no wonder that most people throw up their hands and quit. If you try to take in everything that you need in order to start an online business, you can quickly get overwhelmed.
There are some assumptions that we will make in this report:
- You have a website. (It can be html or a blog)
- You want to drive traffic to your website.
- You have blown your budget getting your website put together and you cannot afford PPC.
- You have basic writing skills.
- You have a burning desire to succeed.
Before we get started, there are a few basic things that you need to understand in order to implement article marketing.
- Keyword
- Back link
- Long tail keyword
- Headline
- Article body
- LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing)
- Keyword density
- Signature file, About the Author Box
What Exactly Are Keywords and How Are They Used Effectively?
One of the primary uses for the internet is searching for information. There is a wealth of information online about virtually every topic known to mankind. It doesn’t matter what you are searching for, you can find it online, the problem lies in finding it.
This is where the search engines come into play. When a person tries to find the information they are searching for, they type in a word or phase that describes the information they are searching for. This is known as a keyword. The search engines try to match the search phrase with the millions of websites that contain the information being searched for.
The spiders (or bots) search the websites and compare them to the search phrase. The website that has the most information (or the best matched information) will rank higher in the search engine results. Most people will not search further than the first two or three pages of results, so it is important to get listed in the first 20 or 30 listings. There are lots of things you can do on your site to help improve your website position. But that is not the purpose of this report.
How do Back Links Help Your Site?
As important as the onsite optimization is, the offsite optimization is much more important, and will provide better results for your website. One of the best things you can do to improve your search engine placement is to get back links pointing toward to website.
There are two basic types of back links, reciprocal and one way. A reciprocal link means that your website and anther website have exchanged links pointing towards each others site. A one way link means that the other website points at your site, without you having to point back at their site. Obviously, a one way link is much better.
The more links that you have pointing back to your website the more importance that Google and the other search engines will place on your site. There are numerous ways to get back links, you can join an exchange, buy them, find websites that are similar in nature to your website and exchange links with them, or you can write articles.
How Does Article Marketing Work?
Earlier we touched on using keywords or phrases to find things on the internet. The secret to article marketing is pretty simple; you write an article about the keyword in question.
But how do you know what the keyword is? That is really a simple question, and if you get it right, you can make a lot of money marketing online. Get it wrong, and your efforts are doomed from the beginning.
People don’t just use one keyword or phrase to find the information they are looking for. They use a multitude of other words to search with. These are what are known as long tail keywords. And this is one of the secrets to article marketing.
Let’s take dog training as an example. The keyword here is dog training. But how do you know what the competition is, and how many people are searching for this particular keyword?
There are several “Free” tools available to perform this search. Personally, I like to use Keyword Elite to perform this search, and Keyword Elite isn’t free. It is a great tool, not only for finding keywords, but telling how profitable the market will be. One thing I really like about it, you do the work of both of the other tools at the same time. But if you have blown your budget, these free tools will work just find. After you make some money, you can always get the other tools to help you with your research.
The two free tools for this research are Good Keywords and Google. With Good Keywords you type in your primary keyword, and it will give you related search terms, or long tail keywords. With Google, you can find out what the competition is for the keyword you are working with.
The main keyword has over 100,000 searches which is quite a few. However, it has over 26 million competing sites. This is pretty massive competition, and for most people, you will not be able to compete at this level. But don’t give up just yet. This is where the long tail key words come into play. These are keywords that are searched on fewer times per month, and more importantly, have less competition.
For example, “search and rescue dog training” has 814 searches, and 10,200 competing websites. This is a lot easier to rank for.
I told you earlier that article marketing was one of the simplest and easiest ways to get traffic to your site. Well here is the secret, you simply write an article about “Search and Rescue Dog Training”. Then you publish this article to the various search directories.
Your article needs to include a heading, the body, and the about the author box (the most important part). The heading needs to include the keyword or key phase you are trying to rank for. In our example the title would be “Search and Rescue Dog Training Made Simple”, or “How the Police Train Their Search and Rescue Dogs”.
The search engines use Latent Semantic Indexing, so you want to use words that are similar to you key phase, but they don’t necessarily have to match the phase 100%. This allows you to write your article more normally, that people will be able to read and understand more easily.
How to Determine Your Keyword Density Level
I think this is one of the more misunderstood parts of article marketing. I’ve heard the keyword density should range from 0.5% up to 6%. Personally, I think 0.5% is too low, and 6% will probably get your article classified as spam, and you could get your article de-listed. I’ve had the best results when I keep the keyword density between 1% and 2%. The search engine bots can figure out what the article is about, and people are able to read it without it appearing forced.
Basically, you need to include the keyword in your title, and you should include the keyword in each paragraph. You also want to include the keyword in the About the Author box as well. This will normally get you between 1% and 2% keyword density level, which is where you want to be.
About the Author Box
This is the most important part of your article. Here you provide the link back to your website. Without this link, your article may have the best information available on your topic, but if you don’t provide a link back to your site, all your effort has been wasted.
Your link needs to contain the full URL and not just a hidden hyper link. For example http://www.mysite.com not just mysite.com as this allows the spiders to identify the link to your site and find it.
Every time your article is used, it will provide the all important one way link to your website.
Conclusion
The final secret to article marketing is to write lots of articles. There are nearly 70 keywords that have over 500 searches a month. Write 70 articles, one for each keyword, and point them towards your website. Eventually, you will start getting traffic to your site, and it will not cost you anything.
Now, if you don’t want to take the time to write the articles yourself, you can outsource the work, and hire someone to write the articles for you. But however you do it, you need to write a lot of articles and have the About the Author Box point back to your website.
Remember to do the necessary keyword research, and target your articles to your website.
