Marketing is a funny old business, especially Internet Marketing. The size of the market is so huge that it is difficult to know where to start getting your word out, no matter what business you are in. Email marketing, Safelist Advertising, FFA Advertising, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Pay Per Click .... I could go on. All of these are valid forms of advertising, and all work if carried out correctly.

However, this is about marketing articles, or writing articles about your niche, and submitting them to appropriate sites.

What Constitutes a Good Marketing Article?
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There is an element of SEO about your articles.
At least to get the full benefit of your work there should be. In simple terms, I mean that your article should be themed. There should be a focus to the article, and you should try to stick on theme. If you are creating web pages for submission to directories, (which is something that you should be considering), then you should consider optimising your pages on the theme (or keywords) of your page. The specifics of doing this are outside the scope of this article, but you should try and get a very basic grounding in SEO.

* You should also try to keep your article
informative and useful to the reader. They
are, after all, potential customers, and
you want to get them coming back to you for
more.

* You should try and break your article up
into easily digestible paragraphs. This
makes the whole thing much easier to read.

* Your article doesn't need to be more than
a few paragraphs in length, but it should
be on theme.


So far so good, this does not seem too hard,
does it?

How Can An Article Bring Me Business?
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OK, now we come to the nitty gritty.

Considering how big the Internet is, and how many people search for information each day, it would be pretty foolish for any businessman to discount the value of the Search Engines to their business. But getting your information in front of the right eyes (targeted visitors) is not that easy.

Or is it?

One of the key elements of SEO, is the links that appear on 'important' sites (important in the eyes of engines like Google for example).

Once you have written your article, you need to submit it to some important sites, and if accepted, your article will be a very valuable source of traffic. The reason is that these important sites receive millions of visitors, and if your site is listed there, it will get crawled by the search engines. This means that you will have a bigger chance of featuring in the listings of the search engines for the keywords that you choose.

And you will get traffic directly from the site itself of course. Here are two sites that you might consider submitting your article to The DMOZ Project - http://www.dmoz.org

Yahoo Groups Article Announce -
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/article_announce/

In addition to all of this, these article provide a valuable link back to your site. This is something that most search engines look for in assessing how your site should be ranked.

How Easy Is It To Get Your Article Displayed
In Search Engine Listings?
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We come to the subject of Niches, which is a big buzzword on the Internet today.

So what is a niche?

A simple example would be Marketing. Marketing itself is a huge subject, and if you did a search on the Internet for the subject of marketing, you would find millions of pages of information. This is great if you are looking for information, but not so great if you are in the business of competing for 'Marketing Business'.

There are just too many pages of competition for
you to win against.

So what do you do?

Hunt Down The Niches.
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The answer is to look for Niches within your broad target. So, instead of Marketing, you could perhaps focus on 'Internet Marketing', which is a niche, or subset of 'Marketing'. So, we have narrowed down our focus and reduced the number of competing site such as say 'Newspaper Marketing' or similar. Narrowing down the focus in this way has improved our chances of success significantly.

But, the Niche that we have found is possibly still too broad. Take a look in Google, and you will see that there are still hundreds of thousands of sites competing in this Niche. So what do you do?

The answer to that is to research.

Use a product such as Adwordiser, will look at the searches being carried out for a given keyword, and give you a list of similar (or niche) keywords that you could look into. Very useful. So you end up finding Niches that are not so heavily targeted and which give you a much better chance of success.

Write your articles around the themes of the niches that you find and you will soon start getting results.

Can I Use My Articles Anywhere Else?
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Yes of course. Once you have created your article, start circulating them. Write to owners of ezines and offer your article for the next issue of their ezine. All that you have to do is to add a resource box to it, with your copyright and a link to your web site, and you will get lots of publicity. Some people make a living by doing this alone, and not advertising anywhere else.

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