Well, there is no magic way to have articles appear out of nowhere (unless you hire someone to write them but I’ll show you how I do my article marketing and how I write my articles.

Let me start at the beginning, that is, why do article marketing in the first place.

What is Article Marketing

That one is easy, it is a way (a particularly good way) of promoting your Web site or blog or sales page or whatever it is you want to promote.

That is, it is a good way of getting (sort of) free traffic; this is, after all, a blog about getting traffic!

How to Do It

That’s an easy one also. You get good articles (write them, rewrite PLR, have them written for you, etc.) and make sure you have links to your Web properties in the resource box; some places let you put more links but with some you can only put a link in the resource box.

Then submit the articles to the article directories like Ezine Articles.

That’s it. Pretty simple and easy and, over time, it will make a big difference in the amount and quality of traffic you get.

The traffic comes from two primary sources:

1. People who click on the link in the resource box either in the article directory itself or on other Web sites and blogs who have picked up and used the article
2. From high Google search results positioning from all the back links you have from posting all your articles

The only important things to know are that the articles need to be good content (aim for 500-750 words), you must include your links, and you must be consistent in having a regular publishing schedule with a reasonable frequency (minimum of twice a week but the more the better).

If you don’t follow those rules you won’t get nearly as good results and you may get no results from your efforts.

How to Create Articles Quickly and Easily

Preparation

You need to do several things before you start writing if you want to knock out an article quickly.

Know Your Keywords
Before you write an article you need to know what keywords and keyword phrases you are targeting the article to. You’ll focus the article on those keywords and later we’ll use them.

I do some keyword research to find the best keywords for the topic.

This should take about 5 minutes.

Do Your Research
Do your content research to get ideas and content to use in your article. You can take this content, rewrite it to fit your article using your “voice”.

Do this particularly if it is a topic you aren’t intimately familiar with or you want to check for some hot, new information.

Search for the problem you are targeting in the article, using your keywords, and find your 3-5 points.

I use a variety of tools to help me with the research but you can easily do this research with Google.

This should take 5-10 minutes.

Create an Outline
If you try to write an article without an outline it will probably take you longer because you’ll be trying to see the forest while in the middle of the trees and so you’ll need to make more changes as you go along distracting you from your writing and taking time as you edit.

Spend a few minutes before you start to come up with the 3-5 main points of the article and any key sub-points you want to be sure to include.

Structure your article and outline as follows:

1. Start with an introduction where you take about an issue or problem that needs to be addressed. For example, this blog post’s “problem” is how to do article marketing quickly and easily.
2. Come up with 3-5 main points that talk about solutions to the problem, turn these into your section headings. For example, in this post I’ve used “What is Article Marketing?”, “How to Do It” and “How to Create Articles Quickly and Easily”. If you have key sub-points then make them sub-section headings, for example, the section I’m writing now has “Know Your Keywords” and “Create an Outline” so far.
3. End with a conclusion where you summarize the solutions detailed in the article

Use this outline as a blueprint for writing your article.

This should take about 5 minutes.

Writing the Article

With your outline and the information you got from your research, writing the article should go quickly. Remember to include keywords but it is more important to write a good article than worry about stuffing the article with keywords.

Introduction
Introduce and explain the problem, emphasize the “pain”. This should just be a couple of paragraphs.

Sections
Put in the section heading at the start and then write 2 or 3 paragraphs talking about the point of the section.

Point out how this can address the problem or how it can help the reader.

Conclusion
Summarize the problem and how the solution discussed can solve the problem.

Using bullet points is a very good way to clearly review the major points, use one for each major point.

This should take no more than 10-15 minutes.

Reviewing the Article

After the article is complete give it a quick run through, read it aloud, to make sure it read well.

Then use your keywords and make sure they are used properly in the article. Rewrite any sentences necessary to add the any keywords that need to be put in; make sure the sentence and paragraph still reads well.

This should take 5-10 minutes.

What to Do With the Articles

After you’ve got your articles written you need to submit them.

There are a lot of places to submit articles, my favorite is Ezine Articles.

Take your articles, find the place or places you want to submit your articles to and submit them.

There is software that will help you as well as services but those places who will submit to thousands of sites for you are worth the money at best, and harmful at worst.

If you put the same article out to hundreds or thousands of different places the search engines may well see this as spamming and penalize you.

Even if they don’t they won’t give you any additional credit for your backlinks.

There are 10-20 places that have real value as far as article directories so doing anymore than that wouldn’t really get you much, if any, benefit and, as I said, may hurt you.

Do It Over and Over

Then you just do it over and over. You’ll find that it gets faster and faster to create articles, in fact, I’ve actually create a completely new and unique article in only 8 minutes, although that was a special situation – I was trying to see how fast I could do an article.

In addition to doing it over and over, I also write an article, then rewrite it several times – each one taking about 10 minutes – and submitting them to multiple places.

I also get other people to write and rewrite articles for me to greatly accelerate my article marketing results.

Conclusion

Article Marketing is a very powerful way to get good targeted traffic but directly and indirectly from getting higher search engine ranking.

To get articles to use isn’t magic but there are a lot of options: outsourcing, rewriting PLR and writing the articles yourself.

To write you articles follow these steps:

1. Keyword Research: get the best keywords for your article
2. Content Research: get good and recent applicable content to use for your ideas
3. Write an Outline: create an outline that contains: an introduction, 3-5 sections, and a conclusion
4. Write the Article: take your outline and content and write the article
5. Review the Article: re-read and review the article and make sure it reads right and have the keywords in it
6. Submit the Article: submit the article to article directories or other content sharing sites

The total time it should take you is between 30-45 minutes for the main article and about 10 minutes to rewrite it. So, in one hour, you could have 4 copies of the article to submit to various content sharing sites like article directories.

Do that every day and think how many direct links you’ll have — that’s almost 1,500 in just one year!

Using articles is a fantastic way to get free traffic but it doesn’t happen overnight and requires a consistent and frequent plan to get good quality articles out at least 2-3 times a week; the more the better.

Do you do article marketing? If not, you should! Leave a comment about your results and how you do it; or leave a comment telling me why you don’t think it’s good.

Talk soon,

The Shameless (Ethical) Marketer
http://www.Twitter.com/DavidHusnian
http://www.8-8-8Sale.com
http://www.MusicForInternetMarketers.com
http://www.SecretsOfGoogleAdWords.com
http://www.MadMondaySale.com
http://www.2ForTuesdaySale.com

O.Y. Tools that help me write, rewrite and research articles are Answer Analyst, Instant Article Wizard and Market Samurai.

O.O.Y. Services I use to write and rewrite articles for me are NeedAnArticle and ArticleZ.

O.O.O.Y. You can get PLR content, books and articles, at http://www.StreetGuideToResellRights.com/Recommends/888sale and PLR articles on a variety of topics at http://www.StreetGuideToResellRights.com/Recommends/111107Articles

This post from: Street Guide to Web Traffic. To read more post like this, head over to Street Guide to Web Traffic

Fast and Easy Article Marketing