Article Marketing: A Guide to Your First Article Marketing Campaign

Conducting your first article marketing campaign can appear daunting to the tyro. It is easier than many beginners think, but you do need to have a plan. This article sets out a simple six step strategy over a four-week cycle to get your content marketing career off to a flying start. More experienced authors can also use this method to jump-start their careers.

Some article marketing basics:

My experience editing an article directory has demonstrated that many new authors, and even some experienced writers, do not understand two of the fundamental principles of article marketing. These are:

Write for your target audience; andYour article must be educational and not sales orientated.

Your article marketing campaign has two primary purposes:

To establish your credibility and reputation as an expert in your niche; andTo pre-sell the reader so that only those people who are interested in what you have to offer will visit your website by clicking on the link in your resource box.

Having reminded ourselves of these basic, but important, points it is time to show you the six step strategy for your first article marketing campaign. This is...

The Plan:

Step #1. Write three unique articles relevant to the product or service your website is offering in each week for four consecutive weeks.

Ensure that the body of your prose (excluding your resource box) is between 400 words and 800 words in length. If your subject requires more than 800 words, consider splitting it into two unique, stand-alone articles.

Proof read your prose at least twice, if not thrice and correct all spelling and grammatical errors and eliminate all extra spaces.

Step #2. The next step is to add those articles to your website. It is important that you do this so that the search engines credit you as the author of the work. Use one or more of the free indexing services to ensure the search engines re-index your website quickly.

Step #3. Publicize the articles on your website by tweeting about them, mentioning them on Face Book, MySpace, Reddit, Stumble Upon, Tumblr and other social networking and book marking sites. Do not forget to include a link back to your article.

Step #4. Now that your three articles have been added to your website and indexed by the search engines, you need to submit your articles to some of the free article directories.

There are many such directories to choose from. Novice authors will not err by submitting their work to the top five directories. The only exception being that if you are aiming for a very specialized market, it would be wiser to submit your work to a directory that specializes in that niche. Although specialist directories have a lower number of searches than the top five general directories, all their readers are interested in that niche and you might have a larger potential audience.

Step #5. As it can take up to seven days to get your articles approved, use this time to write your next three articles and post them on your website and publicize them as before. Submit your second batch of three articles to the article directories when your first three articles have been approved for publication.

Step #6. Repeat steps 1 to 5 above and consider adding another five directories to the list of those to which you submit your work.

Article marketing is most effective over the medium to long-term. If you follow this plan and repeat it over 13 four-week cycles you will gain a significant presence in your niche. You will have the added benefit of all of those articles working 24/7 directing visitors from a warm market to your website. That is the strength of article marketing.

Robert Reddin is a published author. He teaches article marketing and content creation from novice to top ranking expert author from his membership website. http://article-marketing-tips.biz/

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