Developing an effective article marketing strategy is a great way for you, as an affiliate marketer, to drive search engine traffic to your own web sites and to merchants that you are affiliated with, all at little or no cost. In this series of tutorials, we’ll introduce you to the concept of article marketing and then go through the steps of developing a successful article marketing strategy that you can use to  help build a powerful affiliate marketing business.

What is Article Marketing?

Article marketing is a promotional technique that has been around for decades.  Even before the development of the internet, article marketing was used as a way for business owners to obtain free space in printed media like newspapers and magazines.

Traditionally, a business owner would provide content to a local newspaper free of charge and, in exchange, the newspaper would include a description of the author’s business and contact information with the article.

This type of  arrangement would allow the newspaper to develop content at no cost and provides the business owner with free publicity.  For example, a law firm might market itself by providing an article entitled “The Top 10 Ways to Protect Your Small Business” or a stock broker might provide an article entitled “5 Ways to Profit in a Bad Economy”.  Readers who enjoyed the article and wanted to learn more could contact the author of the article thus, generating new leads for the author’s business.

Online Article Marketing

With the rise of the internet, article marketing has spread to the online world and provides affiliate marketers with the ability to gain free media coverage and publicity for their business.  Instead of writing articles for a newspaper, the affiliate marketer posts articles to an online article directory such as Ezine Articles or Article Base.  The articles are posted free of charge and the article directory earns revenue from advertising.

Unlike off-line article marketing, a good online article marketing strategy has an added dimension – the targeting of specific “niche” keywords which serves to bring in targeted traffic.

For example, let’s say that an affiliate marketer named Bob promotes an ebook on dog grooming at his site “BobsDogGroomingTips.com”.  In order to generate sales, he wants to capture search engine traffic from internet users who are searching for advice on dog grooming.  Bob does a little keyword research and determines that “Dog Grooming Tips” is a good keyword phrase for him to target.  So, he writes an article  called “Top 5 Dog Grooming Tips of the Stars” and submits it to Ezine Articles.

When Mary, a huge dog lover, does a Google search for “dog grooming tips”, she comes across Bob’s article at Ezine Articles.  She reads the article and finds it  entertaining and informative.  At the end of the article, she notices Bob’s bio and a link back to his website “BobsDogGroomingTips.com”  She clicks on the link, is taken to Bob’s site and sees that Bob is promoting a great ebook on dog grooming tips.  She purchases the book and Bob earns his affiliate commission!

Why Article Marketing is Powerful

If Bob had simply written his article and posted it on his own site, he probably would have received very little, if any, traffic to the article. That’s because it generally takes months or even years to obtain a decent search engine ranking for specific keywords, especially if there is a lot of competition. Unfortunately, BobsDogGroomingTips.com simply isn’t a popular enough site to generate high search engine rankings for its content.

By contrast, Ezine Articles is a very popular site which ranks highly in the search engines.   By posting at Ezine Articles, Bob’s article inherits some of Ezine Articles’  high search engine ranking and Bob’s article shows up within a few days near the top of the search engine results.  This strategy allows Bob to generate natural search engine traffic in a very short period of time!

Now that you have a basic grasp of the concept of article marketing, the next few tutorials will introduce you the specifics of developing your own effective article marketing strategy.

Up Next: Finding Hot Topics for Your Articles

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