How To Succeed In Article Marketing

One of the best ways to drive traffic to your site or blog is article writing. (If you do not have a website, you can build a free blog or a free Squidoo & HubPages page where you can put your affiliate’s links)

However, it is not just about stuffing your blog or site with articles; they should have a number of requirements as well.

Below you will find out 4 things all articles should have if you want to drive traffic and make a profit from them.

•              Article Content

The most important thing in article writing is to give useful information to your visitors. Try to make unique articles by adding a personal touch. Additionally try to use statistics, figures and facts, people respond much better when they read real facts and numbers in your article.

•              Keywords and key phrases

An article should always focus on specific keywords and key phrases. These keywords should not be too generic; instead, they should be specific to a few subjects of your article. Preferably, you should use key phrases instead of keywords because there is a lot of competition for generic keywords and it would be too difficult to rank well in search engines.

Of course, you should choose key phrases that will bring traffic to your site, a very good free tool which will provide you with data about the traffic and competition of each keyword or key phrase is Google Keyword tool.

•              Keyword Density

The next thing you should focus on, after you choose a keyword, is keyword density (how often a keyword or key phrase is used in the content of your article).  As you probably can understand, the more times you use a keyword the better, but you should remember that the most important thing is the quality of your article, so do not just repeat the keyword inside your article without a reason. It is highly recommended to put your keyword inside the first and last paragraph of your article so try to use your keyword 2-3 times on each of those two paragraphs.

•              Link Building

Finally, another critical factor if you want to get traffic to your site and articles is link building. If you just submit your homepage to website directories, you will probably get only a few visitors if any and it will not increase your rankings in search engines. The reason behind this, is that search engines will see that your links drive only to your homepage and will understand that this is not organic linking. On the other hand, if you link each article to sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and article directories like EzineArticles and GoArticles you will see your ranking increase steadily.