The Basics

Article marketing is hands down on of the best ways to drive quality traffic online. In terms of quality, it beats every other system out there. It's better than PPC because anyone can start article marketing. You can start earning money right now, without spending any. There are a few basics, however, you need to know in order to make article marketing work for you. Let's talk about what they are.

Basic On Page SEO

The whole reason we choose article marketing over putting content on our own sites, it essentially the page rank of the article site. Sites like this one, EzineArticles, and other sites like GoArticles and Searchwarp have a very high page rank--something that even experienced marketers would have trouble getting in a short amount of time.

What does this do for you? Well, the higher the page rank, the better Google places the site in search results. So, in effect, your articles are assigned the page rank of EzineArticles when they're published here, or GoArticles when they're published there.

Bottom line, your articles get found by searchers.

Keyword Research

In addition to understanding why we use article marketing over content on our own sites, you need to understand a little about basic keyword research. Keywords are the words people use to search with. When you type something into the Google search bar, those are keywords. Now, if you knew in advance what keywords your prospects are likely to use you could arrange your page so that Google "believes" it's about those keywords. Here's how we do this...

It's all ridiculously easy once you know how to do it. All you do is place your keyword in the title of your article, preferably at the beginning. Then you put the keyword in the first 100 characters, use it every 50 or 100 words, then place it a the end of the article.

We're almost there. You also want to use your keyword two or three times in your articles description.

Do that, and Google can't help but know what your article is about.

How to Write for the Internet

Internet writing is slightly different than the writing you did in college. For one thing, there's a lot more white space in internet writing. Paragraphs are shorter, and have fewer sentences in them.

Diction is lighter on the Internet than in print. You can say things like "Dude!" and get away with it. You don't always have to write in complete sentences. As long as it's clear!