A Guide to Article Marketing

Most article marketing slogans will try to pull you into the bandwagon with slogans like "You can earn money by blogging!" or "Make your blog generate cash!" However, beginners make a lot of mistakes when they try to submit their articles online. Below are the most common misconceptions about the business of writing content for the web.

Avoid the hype text.

Whether you are writing for a website, or writing an online review about a certain product, you should always try not to sound like a hawker with a megaphone. Putting too many exclamation points (!!!) in your text is a big no-no. For one, it makes your readers feel like you think they are stupid, and secondly, it gives you away. When you write in an exclamatory (!!!) tone, you only end up sounding insincere. This is not the way to gain your readers' trust.

Stick to informative articles.

Whether you are writing for your own affiliate web site or an ezine that pays you depending on your word count, it is always safe to stick to informative topics. How-to articles are big right now. Everyone seems to be looking for self-help tips online, whether it is about carpentry or losing weight. Because how-to articles require a lot of research, it is safer to stick to topics you are familiar with. You would not want to be stuck with a lot of jargon you cannot understand. Writing articles is about translating your understanding of the subject matter onto the screen. If you cannot get anything about what you are reading, chances are, you will give nothing in what you are writing as well.

Do keyword research.

You can do this simply by typing in what you think your prospective readers will search for when they are looking for your topic. This way, you can compare why one page is ranked over the other and what keywords actually reap a lot of results.

Using less common keywords will probably help you rank higher on search engines, although you stand less chance that this keyword will actually be keyed in by any prospective online reader. On the other hand, using common keywords will help you be included in one of the index pages of a search engine, but you will stand very little chance of actually being ranked in the first page.

The best place to start is with the master of search engines, Google. Who better would know what people are searching for than the most used search engine on the web? Google's Keyword Research Tool can give you a list of related keywords in your niche, as well as the search count, competition, monthly trends, etc. You can find it here:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Do not overdo the SEO.

Although it is necessary to know how to manipulate keywords in your articles so it can attract search engine spiders, it is not very good to overdo it. For example, repeating "hypertext inclusion" 40 times in a 400 word article will not only make what you have written sound like gibberish, it can get you banned from the most popular search engines online.

You should write for human readers first. Worry about the search engines later once you have come up with web content that is actually worth reading. There is nothing more irritating than looking at 400 words of garbage. If you are going to occupy a domain's precious bandwidth, anyway, you might as well try to make your text useful.

Try to be original.

Repeating information that has been recycled over and over online will not give you much of an edge as an article marketer. If you cannot get any new information about the topic you are writing about, you might as well try to be creative with your delivery. Again, we do not mean hype when we say creative. Keep your text readable, conversational, and entertaining. You should also never underestimate the power of a well written web article. Proofread your articles before publishing them, and make sure that you do not have any filler text that readers might find useless.

Keep your web content short, sweet, and strong. People who read through their screen do not have the time to filter junk information.