Writing articles is an excellent way to market and promote your products, your services, and you, both online and offline. If you are new to marketing yourself you must find a way for people to get to know who you are and what you do. This is also referred to as the “know, like, and trust” factor.

Writing articles, especially informative articles in a conversational tone, is a great way to accelerate the know, like, and trust factor for yourself. You will also become known as an expert in your field.

First, you must let others know what business you are in. Think about your target market and write articles that will appeal to and educate this group of people. Try to narrow this group down with specifics. What information does this group want to know more about that you could provide for them?

Give them tips or mistakes to avoid when writing to them. Share stories with them that are directly related to your products and services and their needs and wants. Draw them to the conclusion that you have the information that will help them.

You will want your potential clients to know that you are very knowledgeable in your field. Article writing helps to position you as an expert in whatever you are writing about. Give as much information as you can so that others see you first as a resource and then as a vendor. You will sell more products and services if people are able to see how much you know and care about the area you are specializing in.

Building your database of people interested in your products and services will also be helped immensely through the articles you write. When people who are interested in your area of expertise read your articles they will be more willing to give you their contact information.

Be sure to ask for their physical address as well as their email address. Marketing to them both ways, online and offline, will give you the maximum exposure you are looking for.

If you are directing people to your website be sure to give them the opportunity to sign up for your ezine or newsletter and also for a short, free report or other information. This will serve as an incentive for them to leave their contact information so that you can stay in touch with them regularly. Your newsletter can consist of two or three additional articles that will further convince people that you are an expert. You can also use your ezine or newsletter to directly sell your products or services.

Many people have difficulty getting started with writing their articles. It is recommended that you write down any ideas you have on a notepad that you keep with you at all times. Make notes about things that you may write about at a later time. When you have an idea that you feel will make an interesting and informative article make a simple outline with the points you will be addressing in more detail in your article.

You will most likely need to do some research to flesh out and expand your ideas before you actually write your article. Do this research and then expand upon what you already know. Be sure to give people excellent information in your articles. Take the time you need to produce quality articles that will inform and educate your audience in the areas of your expertise.

Think about how you want to present the information in the article you have now written. You may want to post all or part of it on your blog or website. The posting on your blog may be a shorter or abbreviated version of what you will post on your website. You may then choose to submit the article to an article directory.

It will have greater exposure through a directory and will have a greater chance of being used by others in their newsletter or ezine. If others use your articles they are required to keep your article intact as you wrote it, including the information about you and your website that you have include in the resource box at the end of the article. You may also want to include your articles in your own newsletter or ezine.

It is a good idea to make some changes to your work as you present it in the various formats but it is not required if it is your own writing for your own publications.

Remember that your article will be around for a long time, months or even years. Make sure that what you have written is clear and helpful to the many people who will read it over an extended period of time.

You wear many hats as an affiliate marketer. One day you’re engaging in an e-mail campaign, the next day you’re commenting on social forums. In addition, you find you have to spend time maintaining your website, while still needing time to post to your blog. Of course, there’s article marketing which you regularly employ as a marketing tool.

You realize that article writing and article distribution is vital to link building. If you perform your own article writing you know it’s time-consuming to research and craft quality articles.

Sometimes you may feel overwhelmed with the pressure to build an inventory of articles. However, unless you pay an article writing service to write for you, you have to make time for writing.

You can perform article writing faster while still maintaining quality. You do not have to trade one for the other. The following are ways to get up to speed producing consistent content that your target market needs.

Know Your Specific Topic

By knowing your topic this means specifically, not generally. You no doubt will be writing on a topic related to your affiliate product. Is your affiliate product a health and wellness product? Then focus your article on one aspect of the products you market.

An article on why vitamins are beneficial for you is good. An article on the benefits of omega-3 fatty acids for cholesterol control is better. It’s specific and highly focused.

This focus will help you concentrate on one message when it comes to article writing. You will not try to tackle too much in one article. You will not stray off topic either. You know your article must deal with omega-3 fatty acids.

Therefore, you will not start wandering into discussions on why vitamin C is beneficial for building the immune system. Your topic is omega-3 and cholesterol. You will focus your research efforts and writing on this topic and therefore make efficient use of your time.

Choose a Title

While some people like to come up with a title afterwards, choosing one beforehand further focuses your thinking. You know every word you write must relate to the title. If your title is “Keep Cholesterol under Control with Omega-3’s” you will make sure every sentence is a natural extension of the title.

Again, you will not waste valuable time on sub-topics. You will also not wander into other health and wellness topics only vaguely associated with cholesterol control.

Outline

Once you have your specific topic, and title, and have performed the necessary research, you can outline. Your goal with an outline is to choose three to five major points concerning your topic. Article marketing as part of an article promotions campaign means writing content of 500 to 800 words.

You can only convey so much information in a short article. When you select your three to five points you have a road map for your article. You simply add an introduction and conclusion to your main points and there’s your article.

With an outline you know each point can only have so many words or your article runs too long. Therefore, you focus on presenting the essence of each major point. You finish elaborating on one point and move to the next according to your road map.

It’s like a road trip to a vacation destination. You have pre-determined stops along the way.

Each point you write about is one-step closer to your conclusion and a complete article. Without an outline you will take too many side trips, often off topic. You either never reach your destination (your conclusion) or take too long to get there.

You also dilute your main message and have to revise extensively to get it back on track. This is where article writing becomes time consuming.

Article writing for submission to article distribution services is something that doesn’t have to take forever to accomplish. You can write faster and maintain quality by adhering to the above tips.

Choose a specific topic. Focus it further with a specific title before you begin writing. Outline so you have a map for your journey with a clear destination in mind. Then put your pedal to the metal and head out on that journey to build your affiliate business through article marketing.

If you want to increase you website traffic quickly there is only a few ways to it. One of the ways is by Writing good quality articles that people would want to read.

It is not easy to increase your website traffic without cutting corners and this is something you should never do. There are a few things that can increase you traffic that are legal as long as you have the time and skill to be able to write interesting articles.

So you’ve built your wonderful new website and submitted it to the search engines and directories. In your eyes you are so proud of all your hard work that Google and all the search engines will just fall over themselves to add you to the top page.

So you wait…and you wait…and nothing happens. It takes a very long time for a newly developed website to get any form of listing in search engines and directories and even longer to get any meaningful listing. So, what’s the solution to speeding up the process?

The best way you can increase traffic to your website for a short period of time is to write and submit newsletter articles. The beauty of this method is that anyone can do it all you need is a good idea, the ability to write accurately and some spare time. I’m not talking here about working for a magazine or website but the wonderful world of free articles. If you are short on cash and can’t afford to promote your business then this technique is especially suited to you.

There are many websites that require constant content on a daily basis and most Newsletter editors are always looking for well written content. This is more so if their newsletter or blog is updated daily or weekly. As you can imagine it would be very difficult to maintain that level of content and prohibitively expensive and so they turn to free articles to ensure their website is relevant and interesting to their visitors.

As with most things on the internet if a gap appears it’s very quickly filled and so we have the wonderful world of free articles. The deal is that in exchange for allowing the authors content to be published for free, the author of the article is allowed to place a link or advert at the bottom of the article without any charge.

Just imagine that for a minute, if your article is interesting enough and good enough it could be included in hundreds of websites in a matter of days and what does that mean, one way in-links. This of course is great for your pr ranking and will no doubt increase your traffic for as long as the article is placed high on the publishers website pages. The thing to remember is that you are not giving the article away just given away the rights to use the article on other peoples websites…you still own the article.

These links or adverts are usually placed just below the article and are called “resource boxes”. The resource box is your chance to sell yourself or your website or both. It usually contains information about the author and a link to his website.

It’s important that you take some time over the content of the resource box because if it is well written then more people will be tempted to click through to your main website and let’s face that’s the main reason you’re given this information away in the first place. Don’t add a affiliate link or straight link to another persons site as most publishers are wise to this and would not add your article.

Once you have written your article you now need to find the write publishers and newsletters that will take your work of art. This can be a long and boring job but it is a very important one. I would suggest you find at least 20-30 newsletters of a decent size and don’t give up until you have done so.

The main reason why taking a little time over this part of the process is simple It does not take much longer to submit your article to 500 sites that only main difference is the amount of traffic you will receive.

It’s hard to say how much this type of approach will increase your traffic because it’s very dependent on how well your article is written and how well you market it. In the best case scenario your article could be accepted at several larger ezines that have 150,000+ subscribers each and could result in 1000+ visitors to your website.

On the other hand you could end up with nobody publishing your article and not single hit. My personal opinion and experience is that a reasonably well thought out and written article usually produces around 500+ unique visitors per article.

There is another way you can get help with the tiresome job of finding publishers and newsletters and that is to pay one of the many companies out there to submit your article for you. I have used several of these companies and the quality and cost of their work can vary enormously. Some of these companies charge per submission ad some charge a flat monthly fee. The most important thing is that you are getting your article to enough quality publishers.

There are many ways to get traffic to your website; one of the easiest ways is to use article marketing method. It is not the fastest way, but it is indeed an easy and cheap one, it is perhaps the most effective and efficient.

Just think about this - when you are first starting in the internet marketing business, you need things that are easy, cheap, effective and efficient.

If you’re anything like I was when I started out, you have already blown your budget, you will do things like what I did - trying to get your website built, buying all the books under the sun, and you probably still haven’t had your first sale. When the reality finally sets in, you realize that the internet work week is actually a pipe dream, and then you find out that you don’t have any money left to drive traffic to your website.

It is a given, that PPC will drive traffic to your site faster than any other method, but if you have already blown your budget, you need to find ways to get traffic to your site for free, and this is where article marketing comes in.

From my own experience and understanding, I can say for just about anyone that with have moderate English skills and minimal writing ability can write articles, they can publish their articles to the various article directories. You know - if your articles are remotely interesting, you can have them picked up by various webmasters and bloggers to use as information on their sites within hours of being published.

However, things to understand is that you have to know exactly what needs to be done first in order to have these articles point back to your website to achieve traffic gain. What I mean is that most experts will tell you that you need to have all the important keywords in your article in order to get point back to you website. Well, if you are a newbie, the first thing you need to learn and know is what a keyword is and how it is used to point traffic to your website.

And then the expert will tell you that you need to use the long tail keyword and throw in latent semantic indexing. You also need to pay attention to back links, reciprocal links and so forth, the next thing you know is that you will probably need a witch doctor and a human sacrifice are two. At least, that is what I felt like when I first tried to break into internet marketing.

This didn’t include building a website, learning html, php, css, or the whole alphabet of website jargon yet, it is no wonder that why most people throw up their hands and quit. If you try to take in everything that you need in order to start an online business, you can quickly get overwhelmed, it is not the joke.

Here are a few basic things that you need to understand in order to implement article marketing.

* Keyword
* Back link
* Long tail keyword
* Headline
* Article body
* LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing)
* Keyword density
* Signature file, About the Author Box

As you know, one of the primary uses for the internet is searching for information. There is a wealth of information online about virtually every topic known to mankind.

When a person tries to find the information on the internet, they type in a word or phase that describes the information they are searching for to the search engines, like use Google, Yahoo or MSN. This is known as a keyword. The search engines try to match the search word or phrase with the millions of websites that contain the information being searched for.

Now back to your article, once you finished article writing and have them sent to publishers via a good article distribution service. Such as using Article Marketer to distribute your writing pieces to thousands of article directories.

And if you write quality articles with have keyword in it on topics related to your services or products, when people do their search, your one will pop up. Writing articles also a great way to help you build your credibility. Useful information presented to your niche market intelligently can earn you consistent click backs to your website.

In addition, at the end of your article, there will have a line or two about who you are, and a link to where your website or blog resides, which posted as an “Authors Resource” box. If your article is helpful to the reader there’s a good chance they will link back to learn more about what you have to offer, that’s why your signature file box is important.

Remember, your “authors resources” box is the most important part of your entire article. Here you provide the link back to your website. Without this link, even you write high quality article, and your articles may have the best information available on your topic, it won’t help your site gain any additional traffic, more worse than that, all of your effort will be wasted.

So what you want is that you want readers who enjoy your content will learn a little more about you and what you do. If you’ve earned their respect, they’ll want to do business with you, and they’ll follow your link.

An article distribution service is a specific service that does the free content distribution for you on hundreds of article directories. It means you don’t have to visit each of the directories individually and submit your articles manually. It usually takes five minutes to submit one article to a directory. Therefore, if you have to submit your article to 100 article directories, you’ll have to spend 500 minutes to do this, which isn’t possible for you.

After all, there are better things to do in life than doing article submissions. This is where you’ll find that an article distribution service can be a great help. They’ll charge you a small fee for their services. However, keeping in mind the ultimate advantages of using these services, it’s well worth spending that amount.

Double Your Web Traffic

When you submit an article to a single article directory, you can’t expect to gain thousands of views in a single day, unless you’ve written an exceptionably interesting article with the best search engine optimization techniques. In general, a quality article usually gets 100 to 200 views a day. On the other hand, if you employ an article distribution service, your article is submitted to hundreds of article directories.

Now imagine if the average number of views of your article on each of these directories is only 50 per day, you’d get a total of 5,000 views. Even if only 20% of the total readers follow the link to your website mentioned in the resource box, you’ll still gain 1,000 quality visitors to your website in comparison to just 10 or 20 visitors that you can earn by doing a free content distribution to a single directory.

It’s A Cost Effective Method Of Promotion

It’s true that you have to pay for using an article distribution service. You may be thinking that there are lots of free ways to get the website traffic to your site, why should you pay then? Well, if you closely analyze the process and consider the different factors, you’ll find that despite being a paid service, free content distribution service is still the most cost effective method to promote your website. For example, suppose you spend one hour to write a good informative article.

It takes you two minutes to submit the article to the website of the article distribution service provider. Now, you just have to sit and watch. You’ll be getting 1,000 new visitors to your website daily, which means 30,000 visitors a month. The average monthly fee charged by an article distribution service is about $30. Now, tell me what other method can get 30,000 new visitors to your site within a month, at a cost of only $30? Also, keep in mind that you have to spend only one hour for this entire process.