Article Marketing is a legitimate method of Lead Generation. Unfortunately lots of people are jumping on the bandwagon and beginning to write articles.  Why unfortunately?  Well because too many people think they can blast out ten articles and somehow throw a switch to massive traffic arriving at their page.  Sorry, but this will not happen.  If you are going to use Article Marketing as a method of lead generation for your MLM business, be prepared to put in some hard work.

Because using Article Marketing is not a quick route to riches!  Article Marketing is one of the main methods of lead generation used by people who start out with little or no cash with which to advertise their home business.  Anyone who want quick methods of marketing their business online, needs plenty of cash so they can invest in pay-per-click lead generation.  You either need time or money to market your mlm home business online, and if you have no money then you had better be prepared to work your butt off! And be consistent.

You also need to do more than just write an article.  That really is just the basic part of article marketing.  After that you need to do lots with it to promote it and get it seen.  For your article to get seen by the search engines, it needs to be all over the internet.  First of all it need to be published on your blog, or other main website.  Then you could do a video to promote it even more, linking back to your blog.

From there you should bookmark it, using social bookmarking.  The best way I know of doing this is to use the Onlywire service, which is free and takes only a minute to post.  The first time you set it up, this will take an hour or two, as you have to open accounts with the 30 or more sites that you will be bookmarking your article with.  In future, every time you write an article, you simply click on the icon on your browser, or if you have added the Wordpress plug-in to your blog, simply click on that and your content will go out to 30 or more social bookmarking  sites, including Facebook and Twitter!

After that you need to post your article in as many directories as you can.  Some people use an article submitter for this, and they certainly save you alot of time.  I use Automatic Article Submitter, which means I can ‘spin’ my article.  This involves writing an alternative sentence for each sentence I write.  The submitter then spins these sentences, making new and different articles for each directory.  In this way you are really be making the most out of every article you write.

Lastly, I must warn you that if you are not prepared to CONTINUE writing articles and sending them out all over, you will not get results.  Because it will take much more than a dozen articles before you start getting traffic to your websites.  But this is just like anything else in Network Marketing;  you need to build momentum.  You need to keep on and on churning out your articles and doing everything else that I have said, and slowly the trickle of leads you were getting will build up to a wonderful solid flow!!

There are lots more pointers I could give you, but they will have to wait for another article………….

If you are ready to dive into Article Marketing then you should check out the Automatic Article Submitter that Sue uses.

Writing Articles seems quite straightforward, but if you need your articles to be seen and ranked, you will need to put some thought into several areas which may not have occurred to you.

1.  If you are writing for article directories, your articles need to be in an editorial style, and you can definitely not swear!  However if you are writing something just for your blog, or to put on a social media site such as MySpace or LinkedIn, the article can be more personable.

2.  Use only one or two keywords.  Make sure you use these keywords a few times in the article body, but do not use them where they do not make sense.  Try to use them naturally.  Dont repeat them ad nausem just to try and rank higher.  This will not work; the article will be considered spam.

3.  The title must be optimised.  It must attract attention or interest someone enough to make them want to read the article  It must also convey to the readers clearly what the article is about.

4.  The description of the article is VERY important. This is what will show up when someone does a search.  Imagine you were doing a search for something and the first four or five results sounded like what you were searching for.  Which one would you choose?  Whichever sounded the most interesting, or compelled you to open it!  So think carefully about what you say.  Try to draw the reader in to read your article!

5.  Focus the article body around the subject.  This may seem very basic, but if you are writing an article around one or two keywords, do not go off at a tangent; try to keep within those keywords and save anything else for another article on the wider points.  If the body of the article does not seem to agree with the title, google will not rank it highly.

6.  Keep your article short.  500 to 700 words is ample.  If you write more than this it is highly unlikely that people will read it.  There is so much information on the internet that people tend to scan read alot, and anything over this amount would just be ignored.  If someone does not bother reading to the end of the article, you are missing out on them coming across your author resource box.

7.  Do not promote anything in your article, just give value to the reader.  Use your author resource box only to promote.  The best way to do this is to make it read as though it is part of the article, so that if the reader has enjoyed your article, they will be encouraged to find out more about you.

8.  Try to add  a personal story into your article whenever you have one.  Always remember: Fact tell, stories sell!  People get inspired by stories about other human beings.  If you can get someone to think ‘thats how I feel’, or ‘thats what I did’, they may feel a connection with you and want to know more about you.

9.  If you can create an offer at the end of your article, always make sure it is specific to the subject of the article.  If a person is reading an article about Facebook, for instance, they will probably be happy to click on a link with more information about Facebook after they have read your article.

If you would like more article marketing tips, maybe you would like access to an exclusive 79 minute webinar that will unveil one of the simplest, most powerful marketing strategies you will ever see? Grab It Now!!!

Article Marketing is growing fast as a free way to generate leads online.  I am a great advocate of David Wood’s work in this area, and have just recently watched his article marketing webinar for what must be the 4th time, at least.  Every time I watch his webinars I discover some little principle to improve my lead generation from article writing.  He has the amazing ability to talk, seemingly without breathing, almost constantly, giving one after the other of precious little nuggets of information!

He can generate 50 leads a day through Article Marketing!

Something that I have heard him say several times which has somehow only just penetrated my skull is that Google has certain principles that it uses to decide whether an article is of value or not, and whether it should be ranked highly.  There are actually four main principles and they may seem simple at first:

1.            Relevancy – I didn’t really realise what he meant by this at first, but one day on Twitter, I  clicked on a link from a lady who was talking about finding people in your local area; good idea I thought – to find local people who wanted to start a home business would be wonderful.  Well, what I got WAS in my local area, but it was women who were looking      for…..um, well you know!!  Not quite what I had in mind!  If you click on a link about a   subject and find nothing there relating to that subject, it is not relevant, and google will not rank it highly.

2.             Popularity – Obviously this speaks for itself.  If it is something popular that lots of people are doing google searches on everyday, then google will rate it well.

3.            Unique Content – Again, pretty obvious.  Even if many of us are discussing the same idea, we  all should have our own slant on the subject and be able to make it interesting for the  reader.  We all offer something different!  Copying is just plain lazy.  Even if you like  someone else’s subject, you can definitely think of a different angle and put in your own  observations and thoughts.  So be Original.

4.            Consistency – It is no good writing an article today, and another one two weeks on Friday if  you want to generate leads.  You need to be writing consistently day after day before you will see any results.

If your articles contain all the necessary elements you will create a BUZZ!

However writing articles is just a small part of what you need if you want to generate lots of leads.  Your article is just sitting there on your blog, but no-one is going to see it if you do not get some traffic to it!  So now you need to create lots of bridges for people to get to it.  Here are some ways:

1.            Social bookmarking.  If you use a social bookmarking site such as Onlywire.com, your article        will be linked immediately to 26 of the most popular, most visited sites on the internet!

2.            Promote your article using Video Marketing.  Youtube is massive nowadays and shooting a  quick video to promote your article should only take a few minutes and get you massive exposure to your article.

3.            Do an article submission to as many directories as you can.  This step is by far the most important as their are hundreds of directories you can post in.  Using an article submission tool will help speed up the process, saving you a tremendous amount of time and effort.

All of these should link back to your original article which could be on your blog or website, therefore getting you massive traffic to your website!

Ok, so yesterday I wrote an article, which is nothing new, but this was my first since I had purchased Automatic Article Submitter.  It took me several hours of reading instructions and playing around to understand the value of AAS, but WOW; now I can completely understand the tremendous value that this has!

When I write an article and put it on my Blog, how much traffic am I generating to my Blog?   Not much!   Obviously some from all the other sources on the internet but not nearly as much as I can do with the Automatic Article Submitter.

You see, once I have written my article I can then  put in lots of alternative words and phrases; even the titles, and this awesome machine spins all the different words  round to create lots and lots of different versions of my article, then  BLASTS it out to nearly 300 article directories all around the internet!

What’s  more  in the signature box, I can enter  links pointing to my Blog or wherever I want them to go so my links are all over the web!   So when Google comes along and sees  hundreds of articles linking back to my web pages it decides that it must be important enough to rank highly  on the FIRST PAGE  of Google!!  For Free!!  Unbelievable but true!   Therefore this fantastic product is worth its weight in gold.

I do admit that it takes some time to set up, but now I know how it all works it will save me a huge amount of time and effort.  To try to open an account with each one of the directories by hand would be incredibly time-consuming and the AAS does the majority of the work for you.   Some of the directories require you to fill in details yourself, which cannot be done automatically, and you have to decide what category your article should be in but other than that it does it all.

So if you write articles and want to get massive exposure for them, I cannot recommend Automatic Article Submitter too highly.  The owner of the Submitter, Milan Kosanovic, replied quickly to an email I sent him  with all the help I required;  a very nice guy.  It will save you lots of time and frustration from dealing directly with the directories and will get you tons of traffic!

Get your copy of Automatic Article Submitter here: http://bit.ly/4UIUNu