Article Marketing Plan

Before you create your online marketing plan, you should get organized.

Create a keyword map

This is a simple one page list of the keywords you used to build your site.

If you didn’t use keywords to build your site, then you should do some keyword research before you begin your marketing efforts.

A simple page with your site level keywords and category level keywords will do nicely.

Get a notebook

Use your notebook to keep track of the articles you are going to write.

A second notebook would be handy for jotting down ideas and/or making notes about other related things to get done.

A text document on your computer will work just fine in place of a notebook, but I personally find a notebook to be better.

Make sure you know the answers to the following questions:

1. What is quality content from a buyers perspective?

2. Where can you find actual questions from prospective buyers?

3. How do you use html to include images, pictures, and boxes in your content?

Resouces:

• Quality content from a buyers perspective
• Finding actual questions from prospective buyers
• Using HTML in content marketing

A plan of action is an excellent way of going about your online marketing efforts. If you create one and stick to it your results will be noticable quite quickly…even if you only have time to get one task done each day or two.

Below is a simple, rather generic plan of action that will work for almost any web site looking to get more traffic.

It uses text as the medium ( some pictures help! ), so pretty much anyone can get started with it at no cost to themselves.

If you have the inclination, feel free to include audio and video materials as well!

We will be using social bookmarking ( in addition to twitter and plumdrop ) to help give the content you create in your marketing efforts a bit of a boost.

Some popular social bookmarking sites:

• Digg
• Reddit
• Delicious

To start with, I recommend creating accounts on three of the above sites.

To start with, I recommend using the primary keyword or phrase for your site.

You want to find at least 10 questions or concerns which you could answer and/or address by writing short, concise articles.

Note down the questions you find for your keyword in your notebook or text document.

The more questions you find, the better!

The point of this is to get yourself well stocked with material for doing your content marketing, whether you choose to use text, audio, video, or come combination of the three.

Take the questions you created in step two above and place them into groups of related questions and concerns if possible.

Ideally, you want to have at least two groups with at least three questions in them and identify how they are similar.

If you cannot create any groups, I would recommend locating more questions until you can. However, you can certainly get by without having similar questions.

Groups come in handy for creating Squidoo Lenses and Hub Pages with solid content to help rank the articles on your site more quickly.

Using one of your groups of questions and/or concerns, write articles addressing each of them and place them on your web site.

When doing so, be sure to take advantage of the fact that you have full control over the content of the articles and consider placing two or more items like those in the following list into each article:

• Images linking to products on your store
  These should use keywords in both the image file name, the title=”", and the alt=”" tags for each image!
• Boxes with links to related articles
• Quotes from actual customers

Be sure to take the time to make a strong article!
It might take extra time when you first start doing so, but it will soon become second nature and your invested time will be much better spent!

By creating articles on your site, you provide visitors with quality information and have excellent links to reference when you start doing answer or forum marketing.

Resources

• Components of Good Information Marketing

Once your articles are written and placed online, be sure to give them a bit of reinforcement with the tools you setup previously:

Social Bookmark an article

Pick the article you think would be the most interesting and share it on one of your social bookmarking accounts.

You might consider using a second one to bookmark a second article, especially if you are doing 4 to 5 rather than 3.

Use twitter to tweet one of your articles.

Pick a second article and link it via twitter.

Via social bookmarking and twitter, you are giving your articles both more traffic and more page rank.

Be sure not to spam either your social bookmarks or twitter or you could find your accounts deleted. This is the reason I recommend only doing it sporadically.

Now that you have a few articles which (hopefully) share a similar topic, combine those articles into a new (longer) article and place it on Squidoo.

Create a Squidoo account

If you don’t have one, create a Squidoo account.

Be sure to setup your squidoo lensmaster profile too!

Create your first Squidoo Lens

Treat it as you would an article on your site.

Cover the general topic that your initial article group addresses.

Give some of the good information from your articles, but hold some of it back as well.

Consider including your store rss feed in your lens.

Create good links to your site ( using your keyword! ) and your store.

Use text sections liberally. They really help to break the article up for people.

See the resources below for an example and more ideas.

Reinforce your lens

Social bookmark it with a different social bookmark site than used previously.

Twitter your lens.

Create a short post about it on Plumdrop.

Squidoo lenses give solid backlinks in addition to having good traffic potential. They are picked up well by the major search engines and have a built in userbase that is always looking for more good content.

Resources:

• Article marketing with Squidoo

Hub pages is very similar to squidoo, though a little more strict on the marketing side.

Create a Hub Pages account

If you don’t have a Hub Pages account, create one.

Setup your profile in Hub Pages

Create your first Hub

Create a new, longer article by meshing the contents of your second article group together.

For links, include one link to your site and one to your store. Using more links will quickly get your hub flagged.

Remember: Provide information! No call for hard selling.

Reinforce your Hub

Use a different social bookmark site than you did for your lens

Twitter your hub

Create a new plumdrop post about it

Like Squidoo, Hub Pages has a built in userbase and provides good backlinks to your articles.

Resources:

• Article marketing with Hub Pages

Take one of your remaining questions/concerns and address it in a new article for posting on Associated Content.

• Coming shortly: Article marketing with Associated Content

It takes a couple of days to get your first two articles approved on associated content. After that you can publish them without asking for up front payment and have them go up very quickly provided you follow their posting guidelines.

Writing articles on Associated content will give you more traffic and eventually start generating a bit of extra cash each month…provided you write quality content.

Don’t forget to twitter your article and social bookmark it once it is published!

Use one of the remaining questions/concerns from your list to create an article on goarticles.com

• Coming shortly: Article marketing with Go Articles

Placing your articles here is designed to give you backlinks and traffic, both of which are very nice for selling.

Additionally, you can get a bit of extra cash flow when people read your articles.

Take another question or concern and create a new article then submit it to eZineArticles.

They are a bit more strict on content than the others, but provide excellent information on writing good articles, so if you go over their writers guidelines and article writing tutorial, you should get your article approved easily.

As with the other article sites, your writing here is designed to get you a backlink and provide more traffic.

Don’t be selling. Simply provide good solutions to perceived problems, wants, or needs.

Resources:

• eZineArticles’ writers guidelines and help

Now that you have your initial articles created and posted, go to answer type sites and spend a bit of time answering questions related to your targeted keyword.

Before doing so, read their rules and guidelines. You want an answer site that allows posting of links ( even if they are nofollow links ) so that every few questions you can link an article that directly answers the asked question.

When answering questions:

• Provide quality answers where possible
• Write your answers like mini articles ( get your keyword in there as long as you can do so naturally )
• Jot down questions you find which relate to any of the keywords on your keyword list so that you can write articles for them later.
• Make note of any excellent answers for future reference

By doing this, you are gaining more traffic for your articles and/or site while doing research for future articles.

As long as you provide quality answers to questions and are not promotional, you shouldn’t have any problems doing this.

I tend to use Yahoo Answers myself, but any of the big answer sites should work well for this.

Using the same keyword ( or a different keyword ), repeat steps 2 to 11.

With your first round of articles up, you now have content on your site that answers questions which people are actually asking. Additionally, you have articles on high page rank sites which do the same and link back to your site (whether through a resource box, a profile, or some other mechanism).

For less competitive keywords, this should get you to the front page of search results relatively fast, sometimes in as little as a few weeks.

For more competitive keywords, you may need to hunt down more high pagerank sites to get backlinks from. If you have trouble finding good high page rank sites, I provide lists of those I come across in my free monthly newsletter.

Tweak the above plan however you like and blend it in with your normal marketing efforts.

Once done, follow it!

If you only get a couple of steps per week done, you will still be making good progress without getting burned out.

It takes time to get a website ranked up, but it is well worth the effort to do so. Stick with it and your results will speak for themselves.

Above all, take action. The best plan in the world does no good if not implemented.

If you stick with this plan and check your analytics stats weekly, you should see steadily increasing traffic over time. You should also notice increased sales along with your increased traffic.