Online Marketing offers a lot of opportunities for income generation by tapping the huge global reach of the World Wide Web.  With access to the online billions, you have the potential to reach large audiences with your products, marketing and promotions.  But how do you begin to tap into the power of the internet?  PPC, or pay-per-click ads, although popular, are expensive. They can be complex and competitive. So used incorrectly, these can result in a drain of money and the traffic depends on money and advanced tactics, not ideal for newbies.  Enter article marketing – a free way to reach thousands of people quickly, bringing long-term traffic to your website regularly.

So what is article marketing?  Put simply, article marketing is the writing of free relevant articles that point back to your website.  These articles are submitted to article directories across the internet, and from there they can be used by other people for content on their websites, with the condition that your author bio box remains intact.  This is the beauty of article marketing – a few minutes of your time consistently e.g. daily can yield you months of results and it compounds once you continue to invest!

Let’s look at the basics.  An article is approximately one page of text, using Microsoft Word.  Articles generally contain between 400 and 700 words, they should be informative, helpful to the target audience and easy to read.  You can find word count programs on the internet.  My favorite is: http://www.javascriptkit.com/script/script2/countwords.shtml – you paste your article into the box, click “Calculate Words”, and it immediately tells you how many words are in your article.  You can even take the code from this site and put it onto your own website.  It’s completely free.

When writing articles, stay with relevant topics you know well.  Or find an article similar to the one you want to write, read it a couple of times, and then rewrite it entirely using your own words.  You can also get some ideas from several articles, and then combine them into a totally new article.  You can purchase PLR (private label rights) articles and use them on your site, ideally alter them and submit them to article sites (be careful with this one – you must change them enough to be unrecognizable from the original, or you will be flagged for duplicate content). 

To get your articles circulating online, I suggest these sites are the most important ones available: http://ezinearticles.com, http://goarticles.com, and http://articledashboard.com.  These ones, in my lived experience, have the most users and the most clout with Google.  They are all free to submit articles to.  Be careful to follow their rules (especially EzineArticles), to keep from having your account suspended or your articles rejected.

Finally, do make sure you create a biography box that will draw readers to your site.  Your author bio should give an overview about you and give readers motive to visit your site.  This is where the traffic comes from, and the amount of traffic good articles can generate will blow you away!  Write useful articles consistently, and you will see ezines publishing your articles, this will bring you more traffic from their visitors. 

For online tips see Stephen’s Power Marketing: https://stephenomearaonline.com/powermarketer