OK, it might seem that I’m pushing article marketing a bit, but it’s for good reason, it works!
Many affiliate marketeers overlook this very simple strategy, they think it’s too much work for little results, they couldn’t me more wrong.
There is plenty of search engine traffic available for you, no matter what niche you are in, even if there is alot of competition for your target keywords, you can still get top search engine rankings.
Before you write any article you should do some keyword research, this is important, you’ve got to maximize your efforts,
Don’t worry, it’s easy, and you can do it all for free, if you have a little money to spend, you can do all your keyword research in minutes for your chosen niche.
You must do this research before you even think about writing any articles, there is no point writing an article aimed at a keyword or keyword phrase if no one is searching for that phrase or there is too much competition.
When people talk to you about keyword phrases, they usually talk about long tail and short tail keyword phrases, let me explain the difference…
Let’s say, for example, your niche is dog training, if you were to target just the keywords “dog training”, those are short tail keywords, or primary, umbrella, or top level keywords, basicly, these are general keywords, let’s face it, there are many different aspects to dog training.
If you do a search for dog training, you will find that there are 18,700,000 search results, this is far too competitive, even a search with “dog training” in quotes returns 1,960,000 results, you need to be far more targeted.
BTW, using quotes “” when searching shows only sites with that exact phrase either in their title or content.
Let’s try and find a more targeted keyword phrase, let’s try “a plan for training your dog”, there are 2,550,000 results that’s far better, but wait, if you do the same search using quotes there are only FOUR results returned!! WOW, you have just found a great keyword phrase that has practically no competition, I can tell you that keyword phrase gets over 1000 searches a month on google alone.
Now all you have to do is write an article based on your keyword phrase and submit it everywhere you can. (see Where to submit your articles for maximum effect ) You will easily get the top spot in Google and other search engines for this phrase you don’t even need a website, as places like ezinearticles.com carry alot of weight, your article will be right up there on the search engines, and of course you have a link at the bottom of your article pointing back to your site or affiliate site.
Please note, most article directories don’t allow affiliate links, this is why you need a domain and hosting (see Cheap affiliate web hosting companies and Buying affiliate hosting and domain names ).
I will cover keyword research if alot more detail in another post.