Internet Marketing offers limitless opportunities for income creation by accessing the power of the World Wide Web. With access to the online masses, you have the potential to reach an unimaginably immense audience with your products, marketing and promotions. But how do you begin to tap into the power of the internet? PPC, or pay-per-click ads, although popular, are expensive. Used incorrectly, these can result in a tremendous loss of money and the traffic can dry up as soon as the investment capital does. Enter article marketing – a free way to reach thousands of people very quickly, bringing long-term traffic to your website on a daily basis.
So what is article marketing? Put simply, article marketing is the writing of free articles that point back to your website or product. These articles are submitted to article directories across the internet, and from there they can be used by other people for content on their websites, with the condition that your author bio box remains in tact. This is the true beauty of article marketing – a few minutes of your time can yield months of results!
Let’s look at the basics. An article is approximately one page of text, using Microsoft Word. Articles generally contain between 400 and 700 words, and are informative and helpful to the target audience. You can find word count programs on the internet. My favorite is here - you paste your article into the box, click “Calculate Words”, and it immediately tells you how many words are in your article. You can even take the code from this site and put it onto your own website. It’s completely free.
When writing articles, stick to topics you know well. Or find an article similar to the one you want to write, read it a couple of times, and then rewrite it entirely using your own words. You can also get some ideas from several articles, and then combine them into a totally new article. You can even purchase PLR (private label rights) articles and use them on your site as-is, or alter them and submit them to article sites (be careful with this one – you must change them enough to be unrecognizable from the original, or you will be flagged for duplicate content).
To get your articles circulating on the internet, these are the most important sites available: Ezine Articles, Go Articles, and Article Dashboard. These three, in my experience, have the most users and the most clout with Google. They are all free to register with and submit articles to. Just be sure to follow their rules (especially EzineArticles), to keep from having your account suspended or your articles rejected.
Finally, make sure you create a bio box that will draw readers to your site. Your author bio should give a little info about you and give the reader incentive to come to your site. This is where the traffic comes from, and the amount of traffic good articles can generate will blow you away! Write useful articles, and you will find ezines and websites beginning to publish your articles, bringing in more traffic from their readers/visitors.
So what are you waiting for? Go write your first article, and get that traffic flowing!
