For article marketing there are basically two steps, find a keyword, submit after writing the article. Finding the keywords is the real challenge. You want to focus on keywords that have a decent number of monthly searches but not too much competition.
Hint, stay away from the keywords that have hundreds of thousands of monthly searches. These keywords will be guaranteed to have high competition ( if they don’t it means that the niche they are in isn’t a profitable niche and you wouldn’t want to be in that niche anyway).
You’ll notice that I glazed over the whole writing of the article. Why? Because, as long as you are writing your article around a certain keyword phrase, make sure that the spelling and grammar are acceptable and offer some valuable information, the writing will pretty much take care of itself. Having a keyword phrase that you are writing your article around is like having a blue print, it’s pretty easy to follow.
If you don’t want to write, hire someone to do it for you. Make sure that you don’t overpay, though. Most of the time a well written, 500 word article shouldn’t cost you more than $5 -$10. If your article is on a highly technical subject where your writer has to do a lot of research it will cost more, but for fairly general articles that is a good rule of thumb.
Keyword research really is the first step to having a money making article. If you don’t target the right keywords your article either won’t get a very good ranking in the search engines or it won’t have enough searches monthly to make it profitable. Either way, it’s not good.
There is kind of an art to finding the right balance between a decent number of monthly searches and not a lot of competition. Generally I advise people to shoot for at least 1,500 searches a month and competition of less than 20,000. These numbers aren’t written in stone and it can vary from one niche to another. Find the parameters that work best for your niche, but when you’re just starting out, these guidelines are a good place to start.
OK, now that you’ve got your keywords picked out and your article written, it’s time to submit it. Many people get freaked out at this point. They feel like they’ll get a lot of rejection letters and that their article won’t get published. Actually, if you write a well written, informative article and you follow all the terms of service requirements, your article will get published.
There are probably hundreds of online article directories where you can submit your original article to for publication. One of the most highly regarded is EzineArticles.com. This directory is almost always at the top of everyones list when it comes to quality article directories. For article marketing, the strength of the article directory is very important since you’ll basically be riding on that reputation.
So, even though someone will have to actually write an article, there are still two basic steps to online article marketing, finding a good list of keyword, submit to your writer or you write the article. Do it right and you’ll be amazed at the results you can get.