Have you ever wondered how you can get free easy traffic to your site (or affiliated site)? Well look no further! Article marketing is the solution. Article writing is one of the best and easiest ways to get listed in major search engines such as Google and Yahoo and I’m going to tell you how.

Quick Overview

Here is the quick and dirty process of article marketing:

1. Write an article on something you’re interested in or will interest others
2. Submit the article to article websites
3. Wait
4. Success!

That’s it. See how easy? Ok, I’ll give you a little more detail…When you submit articles to different sites you essentially “use” their search engine ranking. Because these sites have so much new content everyday, Google knows that it should crawl the site often so that the new content gets indexed in their database. This new content is one of your articles, meaning it will get crawled, and therefore listed, very quickly, like in the matter of days (or even hours). Getting naturally listed would normally be a task that would take months to years! Why? Because new websites aren’t generally popular, meaning not much traffic is going to them. On the other hand, article submission sites are extremely popular (by search engine standards) and therefore so becomes your article. By article marketing you can get listed very quickly, is [usually] 100% free and anyone can do it.

Article submission also allows your content to be listed quickly under the type of keywords you want when SEO (search engine optimized) optimized. Again, this would normally take a long time just through your own site alone. Now I will walk you through the whole process, from research to SEO to traffic.

Article Research

Before you write an article it’s probably a good idea to determine if it is going to receive traffic or not. If not, the obvious choice would be to find another topic. You’ll also want to figure out how much competition there is on the topic already and which particular keywords you want to hone in on for maximum traffic.

It’s easy to figure out how much competition there is on a topic or keyword. Simply go to Google and search using your keyword with quotes around it. Quoting the keyword returns only exact results matching only that keyword or phrase. Now look at how many search results you get (in the top right). If it’s a high number try another keyword. A lower number of results is usually better because it means there is less competition. Even though there is overall less traffic for this “niche,” your site is more likely to get more traffic if optimized correctly. Say we optimize a site for the keyword “kitty condo” which returns 33,900 results and a second site for the keyword “make money” which returns 93.9 million results. Odds are your “kitty condo”  site will get a better search ranking because there is much less competition, and since you’re more likely to be listed as one of the top search results, you’re more likely to get more traffic. This “niche” keyword  technique can be and is applied to all internet marketing techniques, not just article marketing.

If you’re wondering what’s the highest amount of search results acceptable to decide your niche will be profitable, I’m sorry to say there is no answer. There are many factors that can affect how much competition you’re willing to put up with. A landing page to sell a product probably wouldn’t receive much regular traffic because it really doesn’t have content and so it’s probably best to have a smaller competition niche to get targeted traffic. If you have a site that will be the next big thing, like facebook or twitter, who cares? People will probably get to it anyways by word of mouth and so you can put yourself into that high competition market. As a general rule of thumb, keeping the results under around 5000 would probably work out best, at least to start.

The next thing you can do after you find a viable keyword with low competition is look at the actual results. Determine the top listings’ page rank and see if the site(s) you’re submitting your article to has a higher rank. If so you’re article is likely to show up as one of the top search results. You can determine Google page rankings with the Google Page Rank Tool.

New Products – A quick advantage

A great way to get listed on search engines is to write articles about new products. With new products, there is lower competition (if you are on your game and write about it earlier enough), you will get listed near the top of results (hopefully) and you will get good traffic because your article is listed at the top and people will be searching for this new hot item.

Both Commission Junction and Linkshare display new products all the time. Why not use this to your advantage and write articles about them? Of course you need to sign up first. Make sure you use the product name and description in your writing so when people search for the item they get to your article!

The Dirty Work

Yup. Now’s the time you must do some writing ::shocked face:: ! It’s ok though. I know you can do it. Here are some guidelines to keep search engines happy:

300-500 words – Ideal size for search engines and enough space for real content. If it’s longer try and break it up into two articles
Put keywords in title, description, meta tags and scattered throughout the article – Make sure you don’t use the keyword too many times in the body though or else you become known as spam
Use headlines (<h1> tags) – Allows people to scan your article better and catch their eye and good for SEO
Use [English] grammar/make sense – Don’t be afraid to edit
Have personality – Not for SEO but for your readers. Who likes boring crap? Tell a story perhaps
Connect on an emotional level – Personality is the spice of life
Keep keyword density between 3-5%

Submit Time

Congratulations, you’ve created your first article! Now it’s time to send it to the masses. If you plan on submitting articles to multiple sites I recommend changing each article slightly. Google doesn’t like indexing word for word content from multiple places, and it’s probably in your best interest to avoid angering them. Here is a list of good article submission sites.

-EzineArticles.com
-Squidoo.com
-USFreeAds.com
-Hubpages.com
-GoArticles.com
-Wetpaint.com
-ArticleDashboard.com
-ArticleCity.com
-EasyArticles.com
-Amazines.com
-ValuableContent.com
-ArticlesBase.com

After submitting your articles, get your new article links and head over to http://www.google.com/addurl. Here you can tell search engines, “Hey, I just created awesome amazing super new super cool content, come check it out!”

Profit(?)

There are a few reasons why you’d want to submit articles. Maybe you just like writing and want to tell people lots of stuff or maybe you just want to help get traffic to your nonprofitting website. Well that’s great, but most of us like/want/need money. So here is how we can profit from article marketing.

Promote an affiliate product Simply write an article about a product and use affiliate links to direct people to an affiliate landing page of some sort. This is one of the most common ways of article marketing today. Note that direct links are not always allowed so you may need your own webpage.

Drive traffic to your own product page/site This is almost the same as above except you are sending them to your own website where you have your own product. Reviews and helpful tips are usually good ways to get people interested.

Get opt in email addresses Entice someone to visit your “squeeze” page. This is a page where someone must submit their email address in order to get something – perhaps an ebook, article, guide, etc. There’s so much you can do with a good email list, but that’s for another time.

Send ‘em to a review site Get people going to one of your product review sites by comparing different products in your article. Guess what! All the products you are reviewing you are an affiliate for. A comparison will help readers become interested in probably at least one.

Enticing articles = targeted traffic = sales = profit

Nice. You’re practically an article master by now. All you need to do now is create a bunch more. Try and create at least one a day for the next month. Before you know it you’ll have 30 articles racked up and driving traffic anywhere you want. You can also hire people to do this for you if you’re lazy. It usually costs between $3-$7 per article depending on who writes it. Here are a few places to try:

Freelancer.com
Elance.com
Scriptlance.com

OK, this was a pretty long one. Hopefully you use this information wisely. Just remember that article marketing is not the end all solution for getting traffic. It is simply one free and easy way you should utilize to help your internet marketing business. Happy writing!