If you want to increase your credibility within your niche and drive targeted traffic to your website then you can’t go wrong with article marketing. But it’s not enough to write one article and expect to receive a flood of visitors. Here are four steps you should take to build a good article marketing campaign.

Step one: Research your market

The first step in creating a successful campaign is to find topics to write articles about, and this means that you need to research your market.

Visit your search engine of choice and type forum + your niche into the search box. You might be looking for articles on weddings, or fishing or even adoption, just swap the words ‘your niche’ for the name of your niche.

You should be presented with a long list of forums where people in your target niche are talking about their experiences and their problems. Spend some time exploring the forums you find and see what topics people are discussing. What problems do they have? What advice and guidance are they looking for?

Grab a pen and a piece of paper and write down as many questions and topics as you can; these will make the basic foundation of your articles.

Step two: Article writing and submission

Now you know what topics your audience are interested in you can start writing your articles. Scan the list for a problem that you know the solution to and write about it. Add as much value as you can for the reader by being clear about what they need to do to solve their problems and add some examples where you can. Read the rest of this entry

Being one of the many successful article marketers is something that can come easily. There are, however, things that you need to avoid that will keep you from being among the many more who used to be article marketers and are now struggling to make money. Done correctly, article marketing can see huge positive results in a very cost effective way. Article marketing done poorly can be a huge waste of time, energy, and even money.

First mistake…making a boring title.

Realize that the title of the article is going to be mixed in with quite a few others that your potential reader has to choose from. There are many of you competing for the same set of eyes. Don’t let your title be something that will blend in with all the rest. Make is something that will stand out and get noticed. Make sure that you don’t get too crazy and make sure that it is relevant to the topic you want to address, but, still be creative and you will stay competitive with other article marketers.

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Submitting articles to the search engines is a time honored strategy for generating traffic.  It has been used since the early days of the Internet and is still an effective traffic generation strategy even in our Web 2.0 times.

There are a lot of questions over the best method of submitting articles for maximum traffic and effectiveness.  What are the best techniques and which are the most effective?

The first technique is to submit your article to the granddaddy of all article directories, EzineArticles.  This site has built a reputation of being the best article directory in town.  It is loved by marketers and by readers and most importantly, by Google.

It is a source of frustration to many marketers who find it hard to meet the submission guidelines or cope with the timescales for articles to be approved.

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