Article Marketing
Article Marketing is the art of writing articles to promote your website or to promote affiliate products. You don’t actually need a website to promote affiliate products. You can start without one but I recommend that you do get one eventually. Most of the things you have to do using article marketing could easily be done more easily with a website.
You will need to learn how to write effective articles that will get people’s attention and also get people to click on your links in the article to go to your website or to your affiliate product.
Some good places to start with article marketing is ezinearticles.com, hubpages.com, Google Knol and squidoo.com. The first two are fairly straight forward but squidoo.com is more of a learning curve to use and to get the ‘lens’ found by the search engines. Here is a free guide to using Squidoo that will help you get started. This “How To Squidoo” guide is 50+ pages of step by step instruction. It will show you how to do everything from the very beginning ( setting up a new Squidoo account) all the way to lens creation steps to get their first lens live and online!
The other key to using article marketing is to create articles that are optimized for the search engines. You do that the same way you would for creating a website page. With article marketing you can focus on the ‘long tail’ keywords – long phrases that people would use just before they would buy your product. Like if you are selling a guide to article marketing you would not just use the keyword ‘article marketing’. You would use the keywords ‘how to use article marketing’ or ‘learn how to use article marketing’ or something like that. (That’s not the best example but I hope you get the idea.)
The idea is to create a list of about 10-15 good keywords that you want to use in an article marketing campaign and write about 2 articles a day and submit them to various article directories. Here is a list of more article directories to start with.