Article Marketing For Blog Promotion And Traffic

If you own a blog or a website you are trying to monetize them the most important thing is to have as much targeted traffic as possible. To start making money online with your blog or website using advertisements or promoting affiliate programs you will need to use many available methods for promotion to reach your target audience that will be interested in products and services that you will be offering.

One of the methods that is used frequently for promotion and driving traffic is article marketing. Article marketing is writing articles and publishing them on other websites on internet with the objective of driving targeted traffic to your blog, website, business website, e-store etc. Every time you publish your articles on other websites you can include link to your site and when readers click on the link will visit your site.

Article marketing has many advantages. One most important reason why blog owners and webmasters use it is that it is free and fairly easy to implement. Article marketing can be a great way for bloggers to establish their reputation as experts in their field.  There are many sites online that have decent amount of traffic where you can publish your articles and reach your target audience. Writing and publishing articles can be done by yourself or you can outsource the work by hiring freelance writers to write article for you. Publishing articles on other websites in the past was one of the best ways to build backlinks to your website for SEO purposes, but today after recent Google updates that can be counter productive and can even have your blog or website penalized if you build backlinks on low quality websites.

Step by step guide for effective article marketing

1. Determine the niche of your articles. First step is to determine the niche of the articles you will write and publish. You should write articles that  your target audience will find useful and informational. Good written and informational articles that are centered around certain narrow niche can help you in building your reputation as expert in your field and convincing the visitors to purchase products and services from your site.
2. Research relevant keywords. Use of proper keywords is essential for any content marketing campaign. Using words and phrases that your target audience use to search online and using those words in the title of your article and several times in the article body is critical for your articles to rank high and help your future customers to find your articles when they search on internet for information. Because some more obvious keywords are used by competition you should probably optimize your articles for search engines using words that have less competition and good number of searches. There are many keyword research tools you can use to find relevant keywords and optimize your articles for search engines.
3. Write articles. Once you have determined you niche, target audience and keywords for your content you should start writing articles you will publish on other websites. The process of writing begins with article titles. To improve the search engine optimization of your articles you should include your main keyword in the article title as well as several times in the article. Your title is the most important part of your article and much attention needs to be dedicated to choosing a title that will attract the attention of the audience and contribute to them to continue reading the entire article. When writing articles make sure you provide some value to your readers. By giving your audience information that will be useful to them you can reach the goal of your content marketing strategy, like establishing your reputation as expert in your field and increasing the sales of affiliate programs you are promoting. If lets say you have a website where you sell shoes you can write article about  which shoes are best for winter snow etc.  When writing your articles use your keywords throughout the article body but don’t spam by using them too many times or your articles will seem unnatural. You should insert the links to your website or blog in the article body if possible, or in the resource box. Aside from writing article yourself you can hire someone else to write them for you. You will need to provide keywords and other guidelines to the authors and they will write articles for you. You can find freelance writers on online freelance marketplaces like Odesk, Elance, Guru and others, or you can order articles to written for you on content mills like Textbroker, iWriter and others.
4. Publish your articles. After you have written articles ready to published you should find websites where your target audience can find them. You should find websites that are established, have lots of traffic and high page rank. One of the best places to publish your articles are article directories like Ezinearticles, GoArticles, Squidoo, Hubpages etc. To become publisher join them, read their guidelines and submit your articles in the appropriate category. Your article will need to be reviewed, and after that they will be published. Another way to publish your articles is by being a guest poster. You can find high traffic blog from your niche and ask blog owner if you can publish your article on their blog. If you get an affirmative answer you can send your article to be reviewed, and if the blog owner likes it he will publish it on his blog.
5. Promote your articles on social networks. Once your articles are live you should let the world know about them by sharing them on websites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Tumblr and others.