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Articles Pave the Road to Riches for Online Marketers

Articles can be the manna of online marketers.  Articles can be produced for free, posted to article directories, and offer many benefits when used properly.  They can promote your web site, generate traffic, boost your sales, and establish you as an authority in your niche.

There are 3 essential elements of an article, and each contributes to the benefits listed above.  Make sure that you incorporate all of these elements when writing and submitting each article, and you should see results from your efforts in short order.

First, let’s learn how this all works.

You write articles relating to your niche or web site, and submit them to article directory sites.  If you hate writing, pay someone else to do it, or trade them for a service you enjoy doing.

The articles you post in article directories contain links to your website (or blog). After reading your article, the person may choose to click on the link and visit your site.

If a person reading your article publishes a newsletter or web site, they may wish to use your article.  When they do, they must include your resource box with the article.  This creates new links to your site, and more people will be able to see the link and click through to your site.

As you publish more articles, more of them will be read and used by other webmasters.  This increases the total number of links to your site, which some search engines use to help determine the importance of a given site.

Writing one article and submitting it to a few directories is quick and easy.  The results are long lasting, too.  Many article directories have been around for years and will continue to exist for many more.  Every article you have in one of these directories works for you for as long as the directory exists – it’s basically free advertising for years into the future.

Search engines may index the pages of the article directories your articles appear in, which means that your article may be found in the search results when a person searches for a specific keyword.  Combine that over time with the number of webmasters who will use your article and publish your links, and the power of article marketing starts to grow at an exponential rate.

And if you write your own articles, all these benefits are virtually free!

So what are the 3 essential elements of an article?

1. A Good Title

Whether it is just a great description of the article contents, or a catchy title, take your time and make sure this is relevant to the article topic and helps the reader decide if this article is worth their time to look at.

Your article does not need to appeal to everyone.  It needs to appeal to your target audience.  Don’t irritate readers by using a catchy title that has nothing to do with your article.  Likewise, make sure the title describes the contents well enough for a webmaster to decide if this article is suitable for their needs.

2. Excellent and relevant content

People want more of what they like.  Give them great content that they like, and they will click through to your web site to see more.

Make sure that when they do click through, what they see is more of what they liked when reading your article.  You can do this by writing articles that are related to your web site and your niche.  That way, your article readers will click through to a site that has more content on the same topic as the article they were reading.  This is a great way to get free targeted traffic to your site.

Excellent content is remembered by your readers long after they have left the site.  Quite often, it is your name above all else they will remember and search for later.  This is a superb way to become an authority in your niche, and people who like your work will tell others about it.

3. An Effective Resource Box

This is an extremely important part of your article.  Take some care when composing this; it can be one of your best advertising tools!

This is usually a small area where you can leave your name, email, a short blurb about your site, and – most important of all – a link to your site.  This is the part of the article that creates links to your site, helps promote your site, and can get you a ton of traffic over the long run.

A great example of this was done by someone who created a series of astrology articles for newborns.  Each article contained a resource box with the authors name and email.

It also had a short blurb telling the reader about a unique feature on the site that was quite interesting and would entice the reader to click the link and find out more.  The feature was an ancient Chinese calendar that would predict whether the baby would be a boy or girl.  The site link was built into the short yet intriguing blurb.

To see examples of article writing in action, visit The Helping Circle.  You can see the articles with the resource box described above on the article pages in the Family -Family - Baby Astrology area.

There are hundreds of articles on this web site that were written by others.  Not only do they provide valuable content for The Helping Circle, but each one provides a link for the author that is provided in a content targeted area.  Since some authors wrote several articles on one topic, they have several back links just from this web site for the use of their articles.

This is a current and active example of the power of article marketing at work for these authors.  It might be a good time for you to consider joining their ranks!

If you would like to make the process of writing article a LOT easier, be sure to check out the Article Writers Toolkit.  It is designed to help you with everything, from getting ideas for your articles to producing them in beautiful color pages with full SEO.