Article marketing is a great way to generate traffic and connect with potential customers to increase sales. However, those who have not ever attempted article marketing tend to think that it is harder or more time consuming than it actually is.

The main goal behind article marketing is to pre-sell your products and services. If your potential customers see that your article is well written and informative they will see you as an expert. The trust you build through your articles will help prove your ability to provide a good product or service.

There are serveral different ways to write articles, but the fundamental layout of all your articles will basicly be the same. You should always keep the following guidelines in mind every time you write an article:

1.  Position your articles where they can be found. When talking about positioning your articles, it means positioning them in the relevant searches so that they’re more likely to be found by the right people. To position your article you have to choose popular keyword phrases that people use when searching for your topic. 

2.  Write headlines that gain attention. Every time someone searches for your article the very first thing they see is your title in the search listings. Essentially, your article headline can make or break your article.  If your headline does not catch people’s attention it will not get many views and you cannot change it after your article is published.  This is why it is important to pick a catchy headline or title before you even begin writing your article.

3.  Evoke interest in the article body. The main point of article marketing is to steer the reader through the article to your backlink.  In order to make this a smooth transition there are a number of things that the article body must accomplish. First and foremost, you have to create and maintain interest throughout the body.  If you do not do this the reader will not finish reading your article and will never click your backlink.

4.  Call to action in the resource box. A resource box is what you usually find at the end of an article. They ussauly contain the name of the author, a brief description of the author, a brief description of the sponsoring site and a backlink. If a reader likes what they read, they would have the tendency to find out where the article came from to read more.

6. Submit your article to repositories. There are several different ways to submit your articles.  You can submit them by hand or use some an article submission tool or service.  It is cheaper to do it by hand, but running a business is time consuming.  I recommend you look for a highly regarded submission service or a good software program.

5.  Get more visitors to visit your article.  Once an article is written, submitted, and published, the journey is still not completely over. Assuming that you targeted some keywords as per your research, then it should be showing up somewhere on the search engine listings, but in order to get more traffic, you’re going to want to improve those listings. To accomplish this you need to build backlinks to your article.

The last step is the one step that most people either forget or do not know about. They spend several hours writing and submitting their articles, but do not get traffic to their articles. This is why step 5 is one of the most important steps in the process of article marketing.