How to Use Article Marketing to Build Your List – My Top Ten Tips

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The phrase “article marketing” can be a bit confusing the first time you hear it, as it seems to suggest that you are writing articles and then somehow selling them.

Actually, when you do article marketing, you are not selling your articles at all, you are giving them away for free. In fact, the more articles you give away, the greater you will benefit! Let’s get a closer look at how this works, then I’ll give you ten of my best tips to build your list with articles and take your article marketing to the next level.

Here’s the basic idea: you write an article between 400 and 800 words on a topic of interest to your target market. That article should be informative and educational, but “incomplete.” In other words, although you provide your reader with information that is useful and relevant to the topic, your reader should be left wanting more information.

You then place a resource box at the bottom of the article, along with a live link to your website, inviting the reader to come over to your website for more information.

Once the article is ready, you publish your article on places such as your blog and at article directories, which are clearinghouses for articles on almost every topic imaginable.

People come to the article directories and read your articles and a percentage of those readers will click back to your website from your resource box and opt-in to get more information, building your list in the process.

Here are ten of my best article marketing tips to help you get up to speed…

One: Increase the speed of your article writing by using an informal outline: topic, brainstorm points you want to be sure to cover, expand on each point, pull the article together with an introduction and conclusion.

Two: Re-read your article several times over a couple of days. You will be pleasantly surprised how letting an article “mellow” for awhile can help you to see how to improve it.

Three: Put your article writing on an auto-pilot schedule. Pick a day of the week that is your article writing day. If you do your best work early in the morning, then block off that time, or whatever time is best for you, to do your writing. Each month, brainstorm a set of article topics. This way, when you sit down to write, you already have the topic in mind. This will save you a lot of time and unnecessary headaches.

Four: Ask yourself what are the ten most frequently asked questions that my customers or subscribers ask me? Then address each one of these questions in a separate article.

Five: Use “List” articles when you are having trouble coming up with a topic. Examples: 3 Proven Methods for ______, How to ____ In 5 Easy Steps, The Top 10 Reasons People Don’t Succeed At _____, and so forth.

Six: Look in magazines related to your niche for article ideas. You don’t need to look at the actual articles, just jot down the titles and go from there!

Seven: Re-purpose your article content for more mileage. Reworked articles can be posted on your blod and you can record them to use as podcasts. These audios can even be paired with a slideshow and submitted to video sharing sites such as YouTube.

Eight: Avoid targeting the same keywords every time in all your articles. Overuse of keywords may alert Google that you are trying to game the system.

Nine: Consider turning a series of your articles into an informative ecourse as a gift for opting in to your email list.

Ten: “How To” articles are very popular with readers and with the search engines because how-to information on nearly every niche topic is exactly what they are searching for!

The key to excellent results with article marketing is consistency and quality. If you take action, start writing and apply the Ten Tips, you will get results.