Article marketing, while it still works for driving free traffic to your site, is not nearly as easy as it used to be. If you want to maximize the results you’re getting, try including the following article marketing tips into your game plan.

1) Determine Your Article Marketing Strategies

What are you trying to accomplish with a particular article or set of articles?

In other words, what type of action do you want your readers to take?

Interaction – do you want the readers to give you feedback? Go to your blog and leave comments?

Subscribers – do you want your readers to click through to a squeeze page and sign up to your list for more free information on the topic in the form of a pdf report, mp3 audio or video?

Site Traffic – do you want to get your readers to click through to your affiliate site where you review or recommend products or in some other way monetize your site so that you generate revenue from these visitors?

Become An Expert – do you want to become known in a specific niche as the go to guy or girl?

Links – do you want other sites to pick up your articles, generating links, traffic, and higher search engine rankings for your site?

2) Write the Right Stuff

What do I mean by that? When deciding on article marketing topics, you need to be sure to write about topics that your readers want and not necessarily topics you want to write about or that you think people want to read.

You need to do your research. And I don’t mean just keyword research. Visit some forums, message boards, social networking sites to determine what it is your potential customer or client needs from you.

Another great way to find out what topics readers want is to go to EzineArticles.com and check out the most popular articles in your niche.

3) Pull Your Readers In Right Away!

When people search for information on the internet, they do a lot of scanning. If you don’t grab their attention right away, you’ll lose them and they’ll move on to another article or web site.

The title of your article is crucial to any successful article marketing strategy. Without a good title you’ll lose out on tons of targeted traffic to your articles.

I could make this part complicated and get into a lot of copywriting techniques, tips and ideas but I’m going to make it very simple for you to get started and take action.

Go back to EzineArticles.com and check out the top articles in your niche and other niches. You’ll see a lot of similarities to titles (and topics) within a niche.

This will give you a great place to start as far as the type of titles you should use for your articles.

4) Stay Focused

The difficult part happens after you suck the reader in with an amazing article title. You have to keep their interest by providing them with quality information they can use. You can do this both in your words and in the layout of the article.

You need to stay focused and on topic. When writing a 300 to 500 word article you can’t veer off into topics that have nothing to do with the promise of your title. Your readers will quickly hit the back button.

Keep the article short and provide quality information. That’s the “secret” to writing effective articles.

Another great article marketing strategy is using an effective layout for your article.

Two great ways to do this are numbers (like the four article marketing tips you’re seeing here) and also bullet points where you quickly list the points of your article.

• Keep your article short
• Hold the readers attention
• Provide quality information
• Know what you want to accomplish with your article

Keep these article marketing tips in mind with each article you write and you’ll increase the effectiveness of your article marketing efforts.

But I get asked a lot if it works as a long term traffic strategy.

In other words, does the traffic dry up once you stop submitting new articles to the article directories?

Well, it depends. There are a number of factors involved that help determine how effective your article marketing efforts are over the long haul.

Things like:

• Keyword Selection – selecting the right keywords goes a long way toward determining whether your article will get found by searchers.
• On Page SEO – where you place your keyword phrase in your article, as well as how often it appears, will also affect your possible rankings in the search engines.
• Article Quality – the higher quality the article, the better chance another site will pick it up and use it on their site, or possibly in their newsletter.
• Article Topic – this will also play a huge role in whether other web sites pick up your article. If your article topic is timely or controversial there is a much better chance of it getting passed around the internet
• Links – Things such as the quality and topic of the article will also play into whether or not you get a lot of links from your article.

The more web sites that pick it up, the more links you get, which means a much better chance at receiving long term traffic from your article.

If some real authority sites in your niche pick up one of your articles, your main site could get a serious boost for its search engine rankings.

One article I submitted a while back, continues to get more direct page views on Ezine Articles each month than most of my articles do ever.

Here’s a screen shot of monthly views:

Now, I have plenty of articles that don’t have 3,000 views on Ezine Articles in total, let alone for one month.

And no, I haven’t figured out what sets that article apart from the others.

What I can say is if you do do as many things right as possible with each article, and continue your article marketing efforts, you’ll create articles that have traffic generation staying power, too.

If you haven’t seen it yet, check out my previous post ==>> No Way, Not the Death of Article Marketing, Too!

As I’ve said before, the internet is made up of information.

While video and audio are becoming more and more popular as people get faster and faster internet connections, the text format still has it’s place in any marketing campaign.

For one, many people prefer reading over audio or video when it comes to absorbing information.

I know I much prefer being able to read something as opposed to listening to an audio on the same topic.

I’ve written previously on using article marketing for traffic generation, as well as link building, and sharing with you some of the results I’ve had, including my article marketing case study that you can get for free at ArticlePublishing.com.

Article marketing will drive traffic to your site. 

How much traffic it drives and how much money you make will depend on other factors, such as your niche market, your keyword research, your resource box for your article and then the structure of the offer on your web site when people do click through and visit.

Here’s a recent look at my main Ezine Articles account (yes, I have other Ezine Article accounts. In the past, they didn’t allow you to have multiple author names in one account so you had to sign up for different accounts for each pen name you used).

One thing I want to point out is the clicks.  This number is probably much higher. 

I had my EA account, and most of my article views, long before EA started tracking that information.

My first site, which is still around and about 1,000 pages or original content right now, was built around  proper keyword research, SEO, and article marketing. 

As you can see in the image below, this site gets a lot of traffic from a lot of different web sites.

That’s because the articles I’ve written get picked up by other web sites and link back to my sites. 

This means the articles you submit to a site like Ezine Articles help you in other ways. 

They get you links on other sites which helps your search engine rankings and they also get you direct traffic from other sites as well.

If you’re beginning internet marketing or you’ve been trying to make money online but have been struggling and are frustrated with your results, or you don’t have much money to try things like ppc, article marketing can do wonders for you.

Haven’t made money online?  Want to make that first bit of cash?

1.  Grab your own domain and hosting and set up a simple 5 page web site OR just set up a free site at Blogger.com

2.  Put Adsense on the site

3.  Write and submit articles to EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com

4.  See money in your Adsense account

Obviously, that’s a very simplified example but it also works. 

I finally started seeing success online when I focused on building a quality web site using Site Build It and writing and submitting articles to EA.

Everything else I’ve done has grown on top of that initial site building and article marketing process.

Now, a crucial point to understand is that you can leverage your article marketing efforts by turning your articles into audios to submit to podcasting directories, and videos to submit to sites like You Tube, Meta Cafe and Revver.

You can do all of this quickly and easily with PushButtonTrafficSystem.com

You don’t have to create completely new content.  You’re just re-purposing your articles into different mediums to generate more links and more traffic to your money sites

I included article marketing as one of the tips in yesterday’s article, 10 One Way Link Building Tips.

I wanted to share something with you that I recently received via snail mail. I received a very cool mouse pad in the mail from EzineArticles.com

It included a brief one page letter about my 2007 article marketing results, which were as follows:

For example, my most viewed article on EzineArticles.com was viewed 42,898 times!

That same article got the most clicks in 2007 – 1,188 clicks!

Those article marketing numbers are only the immediate stats direct from EzineArticles.com.

It doesn’t include things such as the number of other sites that posted the article, the number of one way links it generated, and the traffic those links on other sites generated.

It also doesn’t include the intangibles, like the joint venture opportunities that happen because other experts in my niche recognize my name.

That article took me about a half an hour to write. And it generated 1,188 visitors just from EzineArticles.com.

Don’t forget that is also extremely targeted traffic. Those visitors clicked through to my site AFTER reading that article.

They would only click through if they liked the article and wanted more of the same type of information.

Oh, and EzineArticles.com only sent this package out to 500 of their members out of over 82,000! There’s your other lesson in this bit.

Besides the results you can get from article marketing, it’s an example of great marketing by EzineArticles.com.

After all, their business is dependent on quality submissions from their top authors. It re-energized me to keep on top of my article marketing.

For example, my top article for 2007 was viewed 42,898 times on EzineArticles.com and also received 1,188 clicks (highly targeted traffic to my site)!

Those article marketing numbers are only the immediate stats direct from EzineArticles.com.

Article Marketing Update:

Some articles have legs and it really is set and forget. You never know which articles will achieve this which is why you need volume. Keep writing.

In addition to the above mentioned stats for 2007 that same article already has the following numbers for 2008.

Remember, these numbers are specifically from EzineArticles.com

Articles Views: 3,080
Click Throughs: 408

I don’t want to cherry pick and make the picture seem rosier than it is.

I have articles older than this one that don’t have any many views as this one has click throughs. That’s the nature of the beast.

The more you write, the more likely you’ll generate some articles that give you big numbers.

Article marketing doesn’t work like it used to but is still very effective.

It’s even more important than before to do good keyword research, use effective headlines that grab attention, write high quality content and provide the information on a niche that is in demand.

This will help you stand out amongst all the low quality recycled plr content from people that are throwing up 40 – 50 software generated “articles” each day.

I know plenty of people complain that EzineArticles.com has become very strict about the articles it accepts. The truth is this is a good thing.

If you do things right, from article marketing to blogging, to social marketing or anything else, you’ll have very little competition.

Very few people follow through and take action. Most do nothing at all and some try and take a shortcut and use things like article “writing” software to recycle crappy PLR content to create crappy articles.

Don’t let this be you.

Massive Action Equals Massive Results!