Article marketing is an extremely effective traffic generation method for three main reasons:

a). Provides multiple backlinks to your website/landing page, which skyrocket your PageRank in Google search.
b). Pre-qualifies your traffic.
c). Depending on their quality, your articles will be listed in the first pages on Google search results under some of your most profitable keywords.

Extremely powerful, indeed, but how can you make so?

Core Formula behind any successful Article Marketing  campaign:

1. Do your Research

Find quality product: valuable in itself, good landing page & good conversion rates.

2. Create the Promotion

Usually, this step is already done by the author.

3. Find keywords and keyword phrases Associated with that specific product

4. Find out which keywords & keyword phrases Convert Best

For rapid and relevant results use pay-per-click; adwords is an option. Also here, sort your terms based on the traffic they provide for the landing page.

5. This is important. Evaluate Your Competition

Do a search for the keyword phrases retained after completing the steps above and find a niche-subject you can realistically rank for in Google. Searches must be made by “exact match”. Take note of how many results there are for each phrase you type in and take into account only those which have under 35,000 results.

Above this number, it would be difficult and extremely difficult to position your article on the top ten search results. The longer tailed keyword you use, the more chances to get your article visualized. Remember to include the phrase 5-6 times in the content body.

6. Write an atractive Title. Always

You want your content to stand out of the article crowd. I suggest never outsource your title writing.

7. Write the content

Couple of tips here: make the content informative and interesting, avoid hype or ‘salesy’ text, include a link within the article content itself (I don’t mean in the signature!), use as a anchor text for the exact keyword phrase the reader must type in the first place to find your article.

8. Finally, submit it to an article directory

Here is an updated list of article directories.