Network Marketing and Home Business Success

Determine what specific goal you want to achieve. Then dedicate yourself to its attainment with unswerving singleness of purpose, the trenchant zeal of a crusader.
- Paul J. Meyer

Would you like to use article marketing to build your business? Here are some ideas and hints on how to do this effectively.

1.       To begin with, let’s define what article marketing is and what it can do for your business.

Article marketing simply stated is the action of writing short articles, usually from 300-1500 words and posting them online. Some of the places you can post your articles include: article directories such as ezinearticles.com, blogs, message boards, and ezines.  Article marketing can help your business in several ways. First, it can increase your search engine presence for your website because at the bottom of each one of your articles you will include a brief bio about you along with your website and all of those links can really add up and increase your online presence. In addition to increasing your online presence, article marketing can position you as an expert in your field as well as someone who has something of value to offer your readers and the internet audience at large.

2.                      Create a plan as to where you are going to put your articles once they are written. There are many places you can put them and while I do recommend including them in some article directories, you also need to make a goal of finding some places where you will be the only one with an article on that subject or where there will not be thousands of other articles similar to yours.  For example, the popular and heavy traffic series of websites on about.com features new articles by various authors each week on each one of their subject pages. The way to successfully get an article published on this popular site is to first write something with good content and with quality information and then email the guide who is in charge of the subject matter where you would like to see your article published and ask them if they would consider including it on their website. Depending upon the competitiveness of the topic and the timing of your request you may have to wait a while for it to be published or you may have to submit more than one article in order to be successful. I have had an article published on the home business section of about.com and it was a bit difficult to get through but once I did, it was well worth it. You can try the same idea with any other websites or blogs where you feel your content would be a good and appropriate match.  Another idea which can generate a large amount of publicity for you is to write articles for ezines. Again this can be a bit of a challenge as you have to find a good match for your articles and then persuade the ezine owner that your article is worth publishing. However, it is free advertising for you and from my experience it works better than if you purchased an ad in the same ezine. The best way to find these ezines is to do a google search for ezines which match your personal interests, hobbies and experiences.

3.       Start writing articles. There are several ways you can approach the writing and come up with ideas for articles.  You can start by brainstorming ideas based on your hobbies, profession, work experience, life experiences, and any other idea you can come up with.  You want to make sure to write at least a few good high quality articles which have nothing to do with a home business or mlm. One of my most successful articles is about how to successfully learn a foreign language as I have a lot of experience in this area. I have found that it is helpful to first come up with a title and then create an outline of the article and then fill in the outline with text. It is easiest to do this by opening up several blank screens in Microsoft word and then begin writing each article on a separate one.  You also want to be sure to avoid including links in the body of your article unless they are truly useful and directly related to the content of your article and they are not your own websites or affiliate links. It is generally only considered acceptable to include one or two links at the bottom of your article with your bio. You can also find many websites which offer you article topic starters using fill in the blank suggestions. One great place to find these is from Joan Stewart at Publicity Hound. She is a PR expert and she has some great ideas. Another idea is to target articles based on seasons of the year, holidays, foreign countries, places where you have traveled or other high interest and popular topics. You want to time your release of these online so that the topic is popular at the moment it is published. For example, I published an article about the similarities between network marketing and Harry Potter the same day book seven in the series was put up for sale. The timing of the article along with its uniqueness created quite a bit of publicity and buzz for me.  Another idea is to use lists in sets of either 5, 10, or 101. I actually have even taken an article I wrote on 101 internet marketing ideas and expanded into an ebook that I am selling online.

4.       Another way to find ideas for writing articles and to cut down on the time it takes to produce them is to purchase Private Label Rights articles and then modify them and publish them online. If you are going to do this though you need to make sure you pay attention to the rules with them as sometimes you are restricted as to what you can do with them.

5.       You can also post your articles in message boards and forums. Shorter articles work especially well there.  Make sure if you do this though that you post them under the appropriate categories and actively participate in the forum by posting other items and asking questions so that people learn to associate your name with your articles, rather than just posting your articles and never coming back to the forum ever again.

Follow these principles and steps with your article writing and you will become a successful article marketer and your website traffic and search engine rankings with soar.