Article Marketing - A Powerful Way to Promote a Site

Article marketing is one of the best ways to promote your website or affiliate product. For instance, I've got a small site that sells a certain type of electronics product through Amazon. I spent maybe ten hours on setting up the site and writing 20 or so product descriptions. I also wrote a few promotional articles. I've not touched the site since I built it just before Christmas. It's made me a few hundred dollars per month ever since with regularity. The only way I promoted the site was through those few articles.

A lot of internet marketers have heard about the power of article marketing, but they haven't tried it yet. Some try, but find writing the articles takes up too much of their time. There are two solutions to this quandary:

• Learn to write faster
• Hire someone else to write.

Unfortunately, a lot of people feel unsure about their writing ability. Let me set your mind at ease. The level of ability you need to write promotional type articles is not that high. You need to be able to write grammatically, and you need to be able to spell correctly. A good word processor will take care of most (not all) of your problems here.

I've had people tell me they would like to write articles, but they freeze up when they sit down in front of the computer.

Their problem is over thinking their article. You're not writing War and Peace! All you're trying to do is to write a clear article with one thought in it. Personally, I write only a few types of articles. Most are from personal experience, like this one. I try not to over think the article. I try to just write it just like I speak. I treat the computer like a friend who I am explaining something to.

You don't actually want your article to have too much information. In a way, you don't want it to be too good. This is true for any web content where your goal is to get the person to click on a link to go to some other site, either an affiliate site or your own site.

In the "biz" we call this idea "slipperiness." When a visitor reads an article that's slippery, he thinks...Hmmm, that's interesting, I think I'll click that link and see what that's about."

If the article is not slippery enough, then the visitor tends to get stuck on the article. It answers all his questions without giving him a reason to click through to the money page. That's not what you want. What you want is for your article to deliver enough information to interest your readers, but not satisfy them. The old comedians said it best, "Always leave them wanting more!"

To learn more about how to use article marketing to boost traffic to your website and its sales, download my free ebook: Five Steps to Web Profits.

Lee Cole is an successful internet marketer who can help you get your internet business up and running, and most importantly--profitable! To learn more, visit Lee's website!