Beyond Know How

photo credit: zenobia_joy

When you first start out article marketing one of the first things you need to work out is an article marketing strategy.  It is all very well writing heaps of articles and submitting them for publication all over the place in article directories and on web 2.0 sites, but unless you keep track of what you are doing and chart your results you are just going to be shooting into the dark.

A good way to plan your article marketing strategy and to keep a record of all your articles is to start a simple spreadsheet.  Most computers will have a spreadsheet software such as Microsoft Excel already installed.  Start a new spreadsheet for each article marketing project you begin and keep track of all the urls of your published articles.  Being organized is an important part of your article marketing success.

Article marketing is, in my opinion, one of the best things about marketing online. It’s effective, it’s easy and it’s free. What could be better?

The traffic is very highly targeted since the visitors to your site are are actively searching for the same keyword phrase you used in your article.

The only ‘downside’ is that you will need a lot of articles to generate serious traffic. Some people don’t mind this and others will say “WTF”?

If you just don’t have the time or inclination to write at least 30-50 articles per niche you can easily hire a professional to write the articles for you.

But buyer beware. Not all article writing services are the same and you need to be on the lookout for a few potential landmines:

1) No offense to anyone, but if your article is written in English do yourself and your business a favor and have only native English speakers write it. We’ve all been to forums or read articles where the writing seemed kind of weird or odd.

You may have just dismissed it as someone who was in a hurry or just plain stupid but in reality a lot of times it was written by someone who doesn’t speak English well.

2) Don’t pay for an article that is distributed to hundreds of other people. Many sites offer subscriptions and they will re-sell the same article over and over again. This will lead to a duplicate content issue, which is bad.

Make sure any article you buy is 100% original and that you, and only you,  own all the rights to that article once it’s completed.

Follow these simple guidelines and your article writing marketing efforts will pay off big. If you don’t follow them…well you can’t say I didn’t warn you.