Building Your First List

Article Marketing – 10 Top Tips to Success

Article marketing is still one of the most effective free ways to generate traffic and advertise our business on the internet. There’s no substitute for unique quality content that’s interesting, useful and informative.  If we can make it entertaining as well, then we’ve got it made and we should be way ahead of the game.

Writing our own articles puts us in control of our online business.  There may be the temptation to use PLR material we’ve collected over time, but if we use it at all, we should never try to use this sort of content straight out of the can (some of the  lower quality PLR stuff actually sounds like it’s been translated from Chinese – it may well have been!).  I’ve found even re-writing some of this material is tedious and time-consuming and as the content often has little structure or continuity it’s usually easier to start from scratch with a new outline.

So if we’re going to take the time and effort to put together our own articles, let’s make sure we get the most out of them by using the quick and easy checklist below:

1. Use our own name and photo – this will reassure readers that we’re real people and goes a long way to building trust and confidence.  It’ll also serve to brand us and will support any other internet presence we have. If we use the same photo everywhere we appear on the net, this’ll make it more likely people will remember us.

2. Stick to our area of specialisation and make a niche for ourselves. Writing good articles, particularly if we specialize in a subject that we are familiar with will build our authority in that field.  If we’re active in a lot of different areas it’s more difficult for people to recognise us as experts in any given field which is what we want.

3. Avoid posting the same article on article directories that we have used for our own website. Our website may be penalized by the search engines for duplication of content.  Ideally we want to build our own websites with original on-target material which can’t be found anywhere else.

4. Remember we’re writing for human beings – don’t be tempted to compromise the quality and readability of the article by trying to optimise for search engines and trying to include too many key words which don’t naturally fit.  It’s of little value for your article to get good search engine ranking if the result is hard to read and doesn’t provide any real value.  Readers are not going to be inclined to click through!

5. Don’t try to write a book – shorter articles, ideally 400-600 words with concise relevant content, do the best job.  Most article directories won’t accept articles of less than 400 words on the basis that the article needs to be a certain length to have some value – We do, however, need to leave some things unsaid as an incentive to get the reader to click through to our website or squeeze page.

6. Submit articles consistently. We need to decide our strategy at the outset. We can decide how many articles we want to submit at what intervals and then stick to it. Consistency is key – we get far better exposure submitting regular articles rather than a large batch every now and again.

7. Provide value for our readers – People usually read an article to answer a question or solve a problem and to keep their interest, we need to make sure we deliver.

8. Use a snappy title that’s compelling or intriguing to grab initial interest – we need to stand out from similar articles.  We often only have a few seconds to grab our readers’ attention and we should make the most of it.

9. Develop an informal, easily readable style which helps to keep the reader’s interest.  Again, if we can be amusing and entertaining, that will pay dividends.

10. Format the article with short paragraphs and numbered lists. This will make it easy to read and for the reader to quickly get the gist of the article.  Add emboldened text at the start of each paragraph to emphasise points and draw the reader down the article.

There’s a lot more I could tell you about successful article writing but that’s just 10 quick tips to get you started!

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