Article marketing is reputedly one of the easiest and fastest way to drive traffic to your website be it a hobbyist or business website. It does not require you to mess with search engine algorithm or html, php or any other webpage design language. In essence, as long as you can write, you can pen an article and start seeing instant traffic. And the best parts are the traffic is targeted and absolutely free! Article marketing has other indirect benefits such as letting you establish yourself as an authoritative figure in your field and in search engine terms, improve your website link popularity and search engine ranking. Now is it starting to make sense to you to use article marketing in your website promotion strategy?

Article marketing has three parts to it. First part is keyword and content research. Second part is of course writing the content, and lastly article submission. Now among the three, I would prefer to write, but some people simply hate writing. But we know without a doubt that everyone hates the process of submitting articles. Fret not. We will learn some tips and tricks about article marketing and how to work around the article submission part.

Article Marketing Tip 1 - Keyword and Content Research

Go to forums and read the posts there. You are sure to find out about the market needs and what are the people's demands and problems. Next find a solution in the form of a product to meet that need or problem. If you already have a product, simply write from an angle of meeting that need. Article directories are also great places to do your market research. By browsing through the categories and looking at the articles written, you can grasp a brief idea of the current market demands.

Keyword research is very important. It makes your article look targeted to your audience and also improves your chance of getting the article indexed and ranked high in the search engines. This is what we call using indirect organic traffic or borrowed traffic.

Article Marketing Tip 2 - Writing Article

As mentioned earlier, forums and article directories are the best places to find content. Other places include the search engines and offline resources like your local library or magazines. Magazines have done their own research so it is likely that their content is relevant to readers. Tap onto this opportunity.

If you hate to write or feel that your command of English is not strong enough, you can always pay a ghostwriter to write you an article. But don't get too lazy. You still need to give the guy your target keywords. You can find good writers at affordable rates at Scriptlance and Elance. The good thing about this is you get unique content.

Article Marketing Tip 3 - Submitting Article

The power of article marketing is enhanced many fold by mass submission to numerous article directories, probably in the tune of hundreds.

You have basically three options to do so. One is to do it manually which would take tons of time and brainless monotony. But it is free. The second option is to pay an article submission service such as iSnare or The Phantom Writers to do that for you. But be mindful that it can add up quite a bit and strain your budget. The last option is still the most preferred - using article submission software.

Nowadays, article submission software are affordable to almost everyone. In the long run, it is most cost effective to use an article submission software to expedite the submission of articles. Read more about article submission software at my blog and find out which are the most popular software in the market today.

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