Magnetic Real Estate Leads
A 5 Step Plan For Driving Traffic Using Article Marketing
Oct 04 2009
Posted by Greg Reed as Article Writing
Article Marketing Strategies
By Rob Benwell
1. Do Your Research
When it comes to article marketing, writing articles loosely tied to your nice or subject and pointing back to your website is really not going to cut it. You need to research your keywords and then you need to research your topic. Here are some excellent keyword tools you can use to generate ideas for article topics:
http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
The 4 keyword tools above should give you enough of a clue to see what you want to be writing about. You could also take a little time to check out the most viewed articles in the category you are targeting and look at the titles and keywords used in those.
Once you have done the above, depending on the topic or keyword, you might have to do some research. Again, you could use ezinearticles to get a flavour for what is topical, but you could also visit news sites, or read books from a local library to study up on the topic. If you are genuinely an expert in your niche though, chances are once you have some keywords, you’ll have an idea for the kind of content you will want to be producing.
By now you will have a list of keywords you could potentially use, and some ideas for content. You want to find the “long-tail”. This is typically a keyword phrase that extends beyond two or three words.
To find the best keyword candidates, do a search in Google for each keyword, and always put the keywords in “quotation marks”. This will show you the true amount of sites you are competing with. If you find search phrases with under 60,000 competing sites, chances are, you are on to a winner and it’s going to be easier for you to rank your article in the SERP’s for that keyword.
2. WriteThe Article
It’s time to put the fingers to the keyboard and type out your article. Here’s a quick note on how to use keywords in the article:
When writing an article, you don’t want to overload it with keywords and make it look spammy and crummy to the search engines, you want the use of the keyword to look natural and evenly distributed in your content. So try and follow the following pattern:
A) Keywords in headline/title.
B) Keywords in first paragraph.
C) Keywords in body of content (even just once)
D) Keywords present in the conclusion.
E) Use the keyword you are targeting for your site as anchor text in your author’s bio box
Don’t overdo it. Try and have the keyword in each of the above section just once.
Keep your article tight. Keep it between 400-600 words max. Remember, we’re using this article to encourage people to visit our site. We don’t want to give away everything in this article or it leaves no incentive for the reader to click on your sig link.
3. Submit the Article
If you’ve followed the above steps to this point, you are through the worst of it and ready to start submitting your quality article to the directories.
The most important directory is eziearticles.com. Some times, it can seem like an age before your article is approved, but when it is (and only after it is approved) you can then go on to submit your article to multiple directories. Here is a quick list of article directories you might submit to below:
The above directories should give you something to start with, but there are hundreds of directories out there that you can use, it’s just a case of firing the old search engine up and giving it a search.
Here is another tactic we have started to use in the office lately. To make the work load lighter, occasionally we’ll pay and post our articles using services such as http://articlemarketer.com and http://isnare.com . These services for a small or monthly fee will add your article to hundreds of article directories for you. This cuts down on your workload considerably. This tactic is only for those with a budget to work with.
Alternatively, you could use one of our recently discovered secret weapons if you are looking to turbo charge your backlink efforts. Go to http://articlemarketingautomation.com sign up for the $47 a month package ad start submitting your articles with their system.
Have a look for yourself; the above link is NOT an affiliate link. This is just a straight-up, shoot-from-the-hip endorsement and recommendation. They have got an excellent network of websites, which they put your relevant content on. So say yours is a real estate article, then your article will be included on all the websites in their network in the real estate niche. That is simplifying it admittedly, and you also get some good training on how to use the system when you purchase. It’s a cool approach though and one you should most certainly check out. Using their network (which is always growing) they got on to page 1 in Google in 12 days! Check them out!
4. Promote the Article
This is something that is really not talked about a lot. In order for your article to climb the SERP’s and sit on the top spots for the keywords your targeting then you are going to need to do a little work on the article itself in terms of SEO.
One really quick way to get started with that is to social bookmark it. Now a lot of the social bookmark places won’t allow bookmarks on domains of article directories as this tactic has been slightly over and improperly used. There are still social bookmark sites that do this however, and the trick is not to be overly “spammy”. Remember you are trying to provide, good quality, helpful information.
It is also useful to build some backlinks to your article and you can use pages that you have setup on blogger or Squidoo etc to achieve this.
5. Don’t Spin it, Video it!
Get out the PowerPoint software; get out the screen capture software (camtasia, camstudio, jing, screenflow etc) and video a short 3-5 minute presentation covering the content of your article. Upload your video and distribute it on the main major video directories (includingsites like youtube.com etc) at tubemogul.com. It is a free service and makes mass submission of videos ridiculously simple. Now you have more opportunities to attract traffic to your website/offer!
Video is an under-used medium by Internet marketers and some people have said to have doubled their article marketing results with this little tactic alone.
So there you go. Five steps (with some unique twists) to help you take your article marketing to the next level and generate some insane traffic for your squeeze page, landing page, whatever. I hope you have enjoyed the content of this post and got some actionable tasks out of it that you can take away now and apply to your business.
The main thing though is to stay consistent and try and get 100 articles out as quickly as possible. If they are of decent quality, you’ll get an influx of qualified traffic and leads to your site over the next few months you decide to implement this with.
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