Article Marketing Has Been Making a Big Splash

But before you jump in with both feet, there are a few things to consider. What do you want to achieve with your article marketing? Who is your target audience? Exactly how will you go about using articles to increase traffic?

Let's target the first question: what do you want to achieve? There are many different things you can do with articles that produce the desired results - which are more traffic, more sales, and more opt-ins.

You can create a blog and post your articles, adding credibility and having a positive impact on your search engine rankings. You can submit them to article directories for backlinks to your site. You can send them to your list as content in a newsletter. You can even sell them in PLR article packs, and turn them directly into a product. Each one of these uses for articles requires a slightly different strategy, so you must decide this first.

For an example, lets say you were going to use articles on an Adsense or affiliate site as content. Who is your target audience? In this case, you actually have two audiences you are going to target. Your primary audience will be your readers, as they will be the ones actually reading your site and clicking your links. But you also want the search engines to like your site, so that you can receive organic traffic (free traffic from search engine listings, instead of PPC or other methods).

So, essentially, you want your content to be search engine friendly, targeted, and of a high quality to gain readership.

How will you use these articles to increase traffic? The simplest way in this example is to be search engine friendly, and let their organic listings bring you traffic. But you could also encourage linkbacks to your site, provided it contains quality content. With the other examples, you could submit the content to article directories, post them to a blog and provide an RSS feed, or even just send them to a subscriber list as a newsletter.

The most important thing to remember with article marketing today is quality. Search engines are penalizing sites with poor quality articles that were written just to get organic listings. Readers are penalizing them by not viewing them anymore. If a human being won't enjoy reading your articles, chances are your success with them will be minimal.

Before you start marketing with articles, remember to plan. Ask yourself these questions, so you know exactly how to write and use your articles. Your pocketbook will thank you.