How to Write a Good Article for Article Marketing on a Topic Which I Know Nothing About?

Writing articles about a topic which you know nothing about isn’t as daunting a task as it may seem. There are articles written everyday for article marketing by people who had no previous knowledge on a topic.

Affiliate marketers, Internet marketers, and freelance writers create articles in a variety of niches and subject matters that are foreign to them.

In order to write an article you must know something about the topic or subject matter. You don’t have to be an expert but you must have enough ‘working’ knowledge to write the article.

To accomplish this, you need to familiarize yourself with the topic you’re interested in writing about. You should be able to answer the following questions:

• What is the specific issue you are addressing?
• Who is the audience that you’re writing for?

Although you may have a topic to start with, you’ll want to focus or expand the topic. This will help you write a logical and targeted article. It’s critical that you identify and understand the problem you are solving, the question you are answering, or the issue you are resolving.

Identifying and understanding the audience you’re writing for will help you isolate and shape the style, content, and readability of your article. Successful article marketing requires focused articles that are relevant to your audience and niche.

Conducting Article Research

To determine what you’re writing about and who you’re writing for, you must research your topic. There are many methods and sources for conducting article research.

Here’s a quick 4-step guide to help you research a topic you know nothing about.

1. Type your topic into Google search and read the top results to familiarize yourself with the topic and sub-topics.
2. Identify and note the problems, solutions, questions, answers, and issues that are related to your topic.
3. Only use legitimate (true) information by including information that you find on more than 2 unrelated sites.
4. Search EzineArticles for relevant articles to get ideas about what to write and how to write your article.

It’s hard to find the passion, motivation, and enthusiasm that are necessary to write articles for topics you know nothing about. In the absence of that emotional drive to write articles, it’s important that you follow proven techniques and utilize tools to write good articles.

• Using outlines to structure your article is a technique that many professionals and marketers use to pump out articles.
• Article generator software will automatically search the Internet for your keyword, gather relevant information, and organize that information into sub-topics for your use.
• Article templates provide the framework and structure for articles. It’s very similar to article outlines but is preformatted and ready to use.
• Freelance writers (ghostwriters), article directories, and PLR (private label rights) packages are also good sources to articles.

Does anyone use article submission services to automatically submit articles to article directories?

Article submission is the core of an effective article marketing campaign. Manually submitting articles to directories can be a time intensive and consuming task.

Many article submission services have been created to ease the burden on article marketers. These article submission services will submit your articles to article directories, mailing lists, and other websites.

There are many benefits to using article submission services to submit your articles.

Save Time

How much is your time worth? We as Internet marketers and entrepreneurs are always looking to save time. Submitting one article could take hours to complete. Think about the steps that are necessary for article submission.

1. Sign up and register with article directories
2. Send e-mail confirmation of article directory registration
3. Sign-in to the article directories
4. Check the article for compliance with submission guidelines
5. Enter the title
6. Enter the summary
7. Enter the author
8. Enter the keywords
9. Enter the article body
10. Select the categories
11. Enter the author resource box
12. Track article submissions
13. Repeat this process for each site you submit to and article you submit

Using article submission services will cut the time needed to submit articles from hours to minutes.

Maximum Exposure

Article submission services will submit your articles to hundreds of article directories. The best article submission services will also submit your articles to the top article directories including EzineArticles and GoArticles.

Not only will they submit you article to article directories, article submission services will also submit them to web sites, mailing lists, and groups that accept category specific articles. Article directories also have RSS feeds that will syndicate your article on the Web.

Instead of limiting your article submission to a few select sites, you can gain maximum exposure for your article by submitting them to hundreds of article directories across the Internet.

Focus on Your Business

Most small business owners are multi-taskers who try to balance a deluge of tasks and objectives. Many small businesses lose their focus and drown in a sea of incomplete tasks and ideas.

With your time spread thin, you need to outsource and automate time consuming and non-critical tasks. Using article submission services allows you to concentrate on your business rather than submitting articles.

Stay Creative & Motivated

Most entrepreneurs and marketers are creative by nature. By contrast, article submission is a long, boring, and arduous task. Article submission can suck all of the joy, motivation, and creative juices out of you.

It’s hard for entrepreneurs to adjust to the daunting and repetitive task of submitting articles to numerous sites. Using an article submission service can help restore your joy and love for your business. It can also help motivate and rejuvenate your creative self.

Improve Writing and Articles

The best article submission services don’t accept every article that’s submitted to them. They review articles for spelling, grammar, and comprehension. Article submission services also make sure that your article complies with the submission guidelines of article directories.

You can view article submission services as your editor. Their job is to make your article more readable and consumable. They help to improve your writing and the quality of the articles you submit. This is an indispensable service that authors usually pay top dollar for.

Should I Post Articles Only to My Site Instead of Submitting Them to Article Directories?

Article marketing pre-dates the Internet as a marketing strategy. Article marketing was used by professionals, marketers, and businesses to get brand exposure, build their reputation, and drive leads to their storefronts, offices, and call centers.

Articles were submitted to various print publishers including newspapers, newswires, newsletters, magazines, and journals. Marketers would submit their articles to numerous publishers with the hope that they would get published and syndicated.

As the number of publications that published an article increased, the number of inquiries and leads grew. This is one of the fundamental strategies of article marketing: more exposure delivers more inquiries.

The objectives of article marketing haven’t changed but the methods to syndicate articles have. With the Internet and Web 2.0, marketers are now able to syndicate their articles to publishers more efficiently and effectively.

Also, the Internet has expanded the number and types of publishers significantly. Search engines are the largest publishers on the Internet. There is a massive amount of traffic generated from search engine results.

Site Authority

There are two primary benefits to posting articles on your site or blog.

1. Provide information to help establish your expertise, credibility, and authority in the minds of your target audience.
2. Increase the authority of your web site so that it will rank higher in search engine results for your targeted keywords.

As you can see, both of these benefits are anchored in the concept of ‘authority.’ Authority is the acceptance that you are the definitive source on a topic.

Providing relevant, unique, and quality articles will help build your overall authority with search engines and people. Google and other search engines also use link popularity to help determine your site’s authority.

Link popularity is the quantity and quality of back links to your site. Increasing the number of quality links to your site will increase your website’s authority. Increased authority equals higher rankings in search engine results and more traffic from search engines.

Your Site vs and Other Sites

The only reason you wouldn’t want to submit your articles to multiple sites is to build your sites authority. Writing and posting original and quality articles to your site will help increase your site’s authority.

Through other link building efforts, eventually you could build the number of inbound links to your site. But why not leverage your articles for their content AND link building capabilities?

Using your articles exclusively for content is an inefficient way to leverage your marketing resources, time, and budget. Syndicating your articles will help build your back links and website authority. Submitting your articles to article directories and other sites will also help you ‘piggy back’ other websites' authority, search engine rankings, and search engine traffic.

Article Marketing Strategy

Here’s a quick step by step article marketing strategy to completely leverage your articles.

1. Write an article with a link to your site in the author box or article body
2. Post the article to your site and ping the article (don’t use a full feed)
3. Check to see if Google indexed the article on your site
4. After Google indexes the article, submit your article to as many sites as you can

This strategy will give you credit as the originator of the article. It will also increase the number of back links to your site, your search engine rankings, and traffic to your site.

How Many Articles Should I Write Every Week to Drive More Traffic?

Article marketing is about writing, publishing, and promoting articles. Article marketing is an excellent way to drive traffic, increase back links, and established brands.

Successful article marketing correlates to the quality and quantity of articles you have on the Internet. The more articles you write, the greater your chance is for success.

Increase Back Links

The number of back links to your site will increase as you write and publish your articles. Every article represents at least one back link and if you submit your articles across the Internet then every article could potential mean thousands of back links. The number of back links to your site will increase your site’s link popularity and subsequently your traffic.

Drive Traffic

Writing, publishing, and promoting numerous articles will boost traffic to your web site or offer. Quality articles will get used by publishers and shared by readers. As your articles virally spread through the Internet, you will receive more traffic.

Establish Brand

Articles can establish and build your credibility, expertise, and authority. Writing more articles can help establish and reinforce your authority as an expert in your field.

There are two ways to increase the number of articles you have on the Internet:

1. Submit your articles to multiple sites on the Internet
2. Write more articles

You can submit your article to different sites on the Internet. These sites can include blogs, article directories, groups, forums, and any place else that accepts articles. The primary criterion for submitting your articles is to verify that the site allows you to include a link in the article.

Writing more articles is the best way to get the most out of your article marketing experience. The more articles you write the more topics you can cover and the more keywords you will rank for in search engines.

There are three primary ways to create articles:

1. Write the articles yourself
2. Contract a freelance writer or ghostwriter to write articles for you
3. Purchase and re-brand public label rights articles

After you start writing, publishing, and promoting articles, it’s important to track your results and adjust your writing schedule as needed. If you’re not getting the results you expect, increase the number of articles you write.

Don’t get mislead with unrealistic objectives about how article marketing can help your business. Start small, track the results, and scale your article marketing campaign to help you achieve your desired results.

Article Marketing is all about consistency and ‘just doing it’. Whether you’re writing 1 article per week or 4 articles per day, it is important to stick to a schedule and ‘pump’ out as many articles as possible. Start with writing 1 article per week and grow from there.

How Many Words Should Be Included In An Article?

The number of words that should be included in an article will vary according to the publisher and medium you plan on submitting the article to. There isn't any universally recognized standard for the number of words an article should contain.

Identifying a universal minimum or maximum word count for articles is a futile endeavor. All publishers have their own article submission guidelines which vary according to their purpose, market, industry, and other publishing factors.

There are several questions you should ask yourself to determine the number of words you should include in your article.

• Who is your audience?
• What type of article are you writing?
• What are the standards for your niche, market, and industry?
• What are the publishers' article submission requirements?
• How much time do you have to write the article? What are the deadlines?

There are many different types of publishers who accept articles. Each publisher has their own article submission policies and standards. It is important that you read the publishers' article submission guidelines before submitting your articles.

There are two groups of publishers that use articles as their primary content: traditional media publishers and new media publishers.

Both of these groups of publishers rely on articles to maintain and increase readership. But the article submission guidelines of each of these publishers are shaped and influenced by different factors.

Traditional Media Publishers

The number of words allowed in an article for traditional media is primarily shaped by the amount of available space in each issue. Below are some common word count guidelines for article submissions to traditional media publishers.

• Featured Magazine Articles 1,500 - 3,500
• Research Reports 4,000 - 5,000
• Letters to the Editor 150 - 800
• Featured Newspapers Articles 600 - 1,500
• Newsletter 300 - 700
• Journals 3,500 - 6,500

New Media Publishers

The number of words in the article submission guidelines of new media is shaped by the attention span of the readers. Below are some unofficial word counts for article submissions to new media publishers.

• E-Zines and E-Newsletters 200 -1,000
• Article Directories 200 - 5,000
• Article Submission Services 400 - 2,000
• Blogs 150 - 5,000
• Search Engines 150 - 600

Remember, these word counts are loose guides to help direct your writing. It is important to refer to the article submission guidelines of the publisher you want to submit your article to.

I Want To Submit Articles To Increase Backlinks, Should I Be Wary Of Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content is when one of your articles appears within your site or on multiple sites across the Internet. The hysteria surrounding ‘duplicate content’ comes from two sources:

1. Those who haven’t conducted any research or don’t understand duplicate content. They proceed to spread misinformation and fear.
2. ‘Gurus’ and ‘experts’ who use fear to sell and upsell their products and services.

Search engines want to display the latest and most relevant content in their search results. Articles make up a large percentage of search engine results. But they don’t want to show the same article multiple times within their results.

I applaud their effort. When I search for information, I don’t want to read the same article multiple times. But where does that leave article marketers?

Within Domain vs. Cross Domain

Duplicate content can occur in two different ways: within your domain or across multiple domains. If your article appears more than once on your site then it is duplicate content within your domain. When your article appears on different external web sites it is called cross domain duplicate content.

Handling duplicate content and articles on your site is fairly simple to deal with. Adjust and configure your robots.txt, htaccess, and robot meta-tags to prevent duplicate articles from being index by search engines.

For article marketing, cross domain duplicate content is where most marketers and entrepreneurs have questions. Duplicate articles can appear on multiple sites in one of three ways.

• Your article was scraped by another site from a RSS feed
• You submitted your article to multiple article directories
• Someone republished your article on their site

Filtering vs. Penalty

Many marketers don’t have a clear understanding of how duplicate content affects their bottom line. The two concepts you have to understand are filtering vs. penalty. These are two separate actions that search engines take when dealing with duplicate content.

If a search engine finds duplicate content it can either determine the original source of the article or penalize the article. Penalizing the article involves removing the article from search engines’ index or downgrading the value of the article so that it doesn’t rank high in search results.

Penalties only occur when the intent of the article is to artificially manipulate search engine results. Penalties are all about intent. If your intentions are good and comply with webmaster guidelines then there are no penalties.

For article submissions, penalties don’t apply. So don’t worry about getting penalized by Google or any other search engine for duplicate articles.

Filtering is how search engines deal with duplicate articles on multiple sites. They use their search algorithm to identify the original source of the article. They are good at identifying the source most of the time but sometimes they attribute the article to a site that has more authority than yours.

It is important to note that Google, Yahoo, Live, and other search engines don’t remove duplicate articles from their index. So you will receive multiple backlinks from submitting the same article to multiple article directories.

You will also notice that your articles will appear in search results multiple times for the same keyword. This will only occur if your articles are on multiple sites.

Prevention and Management

When another site is recognized as the original site of your article there is nothing you can do. The best thing you can do is to try and prevent other sites from being recognized as the source of your articles. Here are some tips to help you get recognized as the original source of your articles.

• Post your articles to your site first before submitting it to article directories.
• Make sure your articles are accessible by search engine crawlers and not blocked by the robots.txt, robots meta-tags, and htaccess files.
• Make sure your RSS feeds are set to short. Don’t syndicate the full feed or scrapers may take credit for your articles.
• Make sure your site is in compliance with each search engines’ respective webmaster guidelines.
• Make sure that your article contains a link back to your site in it. Better yet, a link back to your original article.
• Resolve in yourself that you could be outranked in search results for some of your articles.

How do I add links to an article?

Adding links to an article is a simple process. It doesn’t require an entirely new skill set. But adding links to your article requires some forethought and planning.

Most article directories only allow 1-4 links in the article. Knowing that you’re restricted to a certain number of links will help you to decide what links you will use and where to place links.

Self Serving Links

There are two kinds of links you can place in an article: self-serving links or non-self serving links. Self serving links are links to a web site that you have an interest in. These can be sites you own, manage, or have a stake in.

Non-self serving links point to a web site that you don’t have an interest in and adds value to the article. These links usually point to well known, high authority sites like CNN, Yahoo, Google, etc.

You should only place self-serving links in the author resource box. Self-serving links in the body of the article will usually be rejected.

Active Links

Active links are those links that are hyperlinked. Some links just contain the text and not the links i.e. http://www.your-web-site.com

Active links can contain anchor text which should include your targeted keywords i.e

<a href="http://www.your-web-site.com">Your anchor text</a>

Link Placement

Links can appear either in the body of the article or in the author resource box. Links in the body of the article shouldn’t be within the first three paragraphs of the article.

Linking Do’s and Don’ts

• Links shouldn’t use style attributes
• Links shouldn’t point to downloadable files
• Confine self-serving links to the author resource box
• Use valid HTML to create links
• Don’t link to link farms or sites banned by search engines
• Don’t use the same link or URL more than once
• Don’t link to sites that are under construction
• Don’t link to adult or hate oriented sites
• Don’t add your email address to the article
• Don’t use deceptive linking that sends visitors to sites they didn’t expect

Inserting Hyperlinks

Inserting links into articles requires the use of anchor HTML tags. This tag allows you to hyperlink text in your article so that they will automatically jump to the designated web site.

The following is the standard HTML syntax for hyperlinks:

<a href="http://www.your-web-site.com">your anchor text</a>

All you have to do is insert your websites link (URL) in place of http://www.your-web-site.com Also, replace ‘your anchor text’ with the text (keywords) that you want displayed. Now place the link you created exactly where you want it to show up in your article.