Article marketing is only one of the many effective ways to advertise your business online. It can also be used to advertise an offline business online to supplement your offline advertising.

So how do you write an article that is an effective marketing article? Here are a few tips to help you write your marketing articles.

Main Keyword or Keyword Phrase.

Effective articles need to be targeted to keywords or keyword phrases to be effectively picked up and ranked high by the major search engines. So select a main keyword or phrase to use when writing your article.

Articles themselves need to be written a bit different if they are for article directories, blog posts, web pages, ezines and so on. So determine the main reason for your article before you begin to write it.

Article Title.

This to me is the most important part of your article because people determine whether they read your article or not based upon it’s title. It should be written to catch peoples attention and should include your keyword phrase so that it gets picked up in searches. So in a nutshell it needs to catch the attention of not only readers but the search engines as well.

To get some good ideas for titles you can check out article directories for titles that catch your attention because they will catch the attention of others as well.

 What Do People Want to Know About?

Do some research to find out what people want to know about regarding your business, products or niche. Discussion forums are one good source for this information. Check out what is hot in the relevant forums as this information can form the basis for some good articles. Read the rest of this entry

Bum marketing is a term that was conceived from the idea that affiliate marketing was so easy that any bum off the street could walk into a library, use a computer and make money online. It is basically a low cost form of affiliate marketing or marketing other people’s products online for a commission.

So is bum marketing a great low cost way to make money online from home?

Yes if you are prepared to put the work into it to get results. Unfortunately it is not a matter of turning on your computer and the money flows out your DVD drive like it does out of an ATM. Do not laugh but I am sure sometimes a few other marketers want people to believe it does.

Bum marketing or low cost affiliate marketing uses free methods to promote other people’s products to earn a commission on each sale. The commission can be as high as 75% so it can be very lucrative.

The bum marketing method can be used to sell anything online from physical products such as clothes, shoes, books to digital products such as ebooks, scripts or software. The commission rate on physical products is generally only about 5 to 10% but on digital products it can be as high as 75%. This makes digital products far more lucrative than physical products. The other great thing about digital products is that people today want things immediately so their instant download to their computer is very appealing to them. Read the rest of this entry

For any given keyword a search will usually produce tens of thousands, if not millions, of page results. Many of these results will be articles which have been written around this keyword, and this is why articles are such a powerful technique for driving traffic to a specific website.

You may have heard of the phrase ‘content is king’; this is not some kind of throwaway line, and is key to why so many online marketers use articles to drive traffic to their sites. Quite simply, internet users just can’t get enough information on a vast range of subjects, and providing information on these subjects through articles is a surefire way to drive traffic to your website.

Here are four specific benefits of writing articles:

1. Zero Cost

There is no direct cost in submitting your articles to reputable directories – of course, this assumes you are already online and have signed up for a hosting service. Note that it is very important that you comply with the authorship requirements that each directory stipulates, to avoid rejection of your articles.

2. Automatic Back Links

The directories allow the author to include a link in the article resource box and it is your aim that readers click this link in order that they be taken to your site. Take care when wording your resource box; you need to provide a compelling reason for readers to explore what you have to say further. The terms of service under which you publish allows your article to be placed on other sites should other webmasters so wish. This is a good thing of course – your written work gets seen by more readers and, importantly, you have an SEO friendly one-way link back to your site.

3. Rapid Results

The article directories receive many visitors – people searching for information. As such, once your article is approved, it is likely to be read in a short space of time and you may well see a rapid increase in traffic to your site immediately. It is worth repeating though – take care when writing the content of the author resource box as this is critical in getting people to click on your link. Read the rest of this entry

Writing a marketing article can seem like a difficult thing to do if you aren’t accustomed to it but it can become a very natural extension of yourself. It can be quite intimidating but, once you have learned the basics, it can come quite naturally.

The first thing that you need to do in writing a marketing article is to study your subject matter. Become truly interested in it. It helps if it is something that you are passionate about in the first place but if there isn’t that passion, you can still educate yourself.

The second thing that you need to do to writing a good marketing article is to ask the questions that you would be asking if you were interested in the product or service. Ask the WWWWWH questions: Who, What, When, Where, Why, How. Ask the basic ones but also look for questions that people really have. This might require some research on your behalf to find out the most asked questions if you aren’t intimately familiar with the material. Also make sure that they are questions that you can not only answer adequately, accurately and authoritatively, but that make the reader want to know more about what you are trying to offer them.

You also need to keep in the forefront of your thinking that the goal of the article is to get them to want to go to wherever it is you want them to go or to take the action you want them to take. Most of the time an article is going to have the intention of making them click a link so they can go to another site where you ask them to buy. Answer most of the questions but ask more questions than you answer in your article and let them know that to find the rest of the answers they are going to have to follow that link. Read the rest of this entry