When I first started marketing my website in 2006 I had one simple goal: I wanted to generate income from my website with a marketing budget of zero dollars.  Not only was I successful in doing that, but I was able to generate a nice passive income with my zero dollar marketing budget.

I was able to do this by selecting just one marketing strategy; I decided to focus on writing Articles.  As this proved to be the best way to keep my marketing budget to zero and at the same time target my audience.

I am not a good writer at all, as a matter of fact I have terrible spelling skills, but I was an expert in the field I was writing about and this made it easy for me to pick and write about the subject I was focusing on.

I remember going online and choosing keywords to use, I wanted to make sure those keywords are relevant to my specific topic I was going to write about.

Some of the Articles I wrote were short around 500 words and some were a lot longer. 

I picked the top ten article submission sites:  I signed up and created accounts for all ten and began to submit my articles.  My favorite was and continues to be Ezine Articles, mainly because they do have a great platform that forces you to do spell check, grammar correction and it’s a popular article submission site.  I always first submit to Ezine Articles and then use those corrections to submit to the other sites.

I used Article writing to promote both my own created products as well as promote Affiliate products, both proved very useful in my passive income creation.  

I would also create topics to write about ahead of time and I would write the title of the articles, this would help me stay focused and have a goal.

My first article took a little longer as I wanted to be perfect, after a while it got easier and easier to the point that I was able to write and submit an article in less than 30 minutes.

I never used the Auto Submission Robot Software, but I did use the manual submission bots, this allowed me more control.  The difference is you control the submission process without having to retype each section over and over again, it makes the submission to the article sites go faster without being flagged as a non-human submission bot.

You can check out my Ezine Article Site, here my niche is within medical staffing:  I have published over 100 Articles on this site alone.

https://ezinearticles.com/expert/Roy_Vera/33413

To be honest, I did get to a point that the income I was generating exceeding my meager expectations, so then I began using fiverr.com to have others write the body of the articles: The cost was sometimes less than $5 dollars, fiverr did help me to expand my article campaign, but at the start my budget was $0 dollars and I generating thousands of dollars a month with this marketing budget goal.

I created MyIncomeTrek as a way to show others how I was able to create a passive income source while having a full time job with little to no budget at all.

Introduction To Article Creation

There are a few important ingredients to creating high performance Article Marketing campaigns that maximize the overall effectiveness of your marketing efforts, while ensuring that you receive the most exposure possible from each article that you submit into the online directories.

First, writing an article on just any topic isn’t going to yield the results you’re looking for, if you haven’t first conducted keyword research to identify what your target audience is actively looking for, and the exact keywords and phrases they are using to be able to locate content on your topic.

This is fundamentally one of most critical elements of a successful article marketing campaign.  

The closer you are able to target your prospective customer base with well written articles that incorporate primary keywords, the more traffic and exposure you will be able to generate.

Think about the possibilities if you carefully evaluated a niche market, creating keyword swipe files of highly relevant terms and phrases and incorporated them into your content.  Not only will this help you position yourself within the search engines, but your visitors and readers will be exceptionally targeted!

It all begins in researching and evaluating potential markets prior to creating your content. 

Identifying Your Target Audience

Before we can begin to create our first article marketing campaign, we need to choose a topic for our articles.

When evaluating potential topics, consider:  

• What market do you plan to cater to? 
• What products are you planning to promote?
• Are these niche markets evergreen?
• Are people currently purchasing products within this market?
• Are there affiliate products to promote?

Conducting market research is a critical part of becoming a successful article marketer if you intend on promoting affiliate based products.

You Need To Dominate Each Product You Promote Within The Article Directories

You do this by having MORE articles than your competitors.

Let’s review what we learned.

1. Find a product to promote that shows interest. It is fine if you do some keyword searches before time to practice, but your first priority is finding a product.

2. Conduct multiple keyword searches to find out what search terms people look for when searching for the product you plan to promote.

3. Make sure the product is HOT NOW. You can do this easily by visiting the Clickbank marketplace, which ranks products according to how well they sell. If you find a product you like, but it is at the bottom of the list, or has a bad sales page, do not bother moving forward. 

All you have to do is dominate the market by creating great articles and saturating the entire market with fresh, high quality content. 

For every product you find that you want to promote, you should write 20 articles focusing on relevant keywords!

So in 5 days, a working week, you would have 100 articles written and have 5 Clickbank.com products promoted and saturated. 

When you have decided what niche markets and/or products you are going to promote, it’s time to complete your keyword research so that you can create articles that offer a blend of high quality content, with relevant keyword phrases.

If you are planning on promoting a specific product, you should also consider integrating both the product’s title and the author’s name into some of the articles in your campaign, so that you can pull in targeted leads from those searching for information on these products.

If your articles end up being based on a review platform, where you offer detailed information regarding specific products, you will be able to tap into an exceptional customer base of hungry buyers already on the verge of making the purchase but just needing a bit of reassurance.

Quick & Easy Keyword Research

To begin evaluating potential keywords, visit:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

What you need to do is enter in a basic (core) keyword phrase that describes your market, topic or a product you are planning to promote. (example: product title, author’s name, etc)

The Adwords Google Keyword suggestion tool allows you to enter in a keyword or phrase from a possible niche that you are considering so that you can evaluate existing competition, active keywords based on popularity and overall use.  

When you enter keywords into the Google Keyword tool, you will be able to generate extended listings that feature various keywords associated to the main keyword that you entered into the search box.

Keyword research can take a bit of time when you are first starting out, but as you become more experienced with choosing relevant keyword phrases and weeding out the ones that are likely to be ineffective, you will be able to create entire keyword swipe files quickly and easily, each time you develop your article marketing campaign.

Here are a handful of other free keyword tools and resources:

http://www.KeyCompete.com

http://www.Wordtracker.com

http://www.Compete.com 

http://www.SEODigger.com 

With the KeyCompete tool, you are able to extract keyword lists from those used by your competition within PPC marketplaces and campaigns.  

You are also able to instantly evaluate the popularity of a specific keyword phrase based on the number of websites that feature these keywords within their website’s overall content.

Creating Effective Article Campaigns

In truth, choosing your initial markets and products to promote is a large chunk of the work involved, and now all you need to do is write (or outsource) a handful of articles focusing on these specific topics.  

First of all, you need to ensure that your article directly connects to the product or topic that you are promoting.  

Do not write a great article about parenting and then provide a link to a product selling weight loss tips. You NEED to closely tie your article with a specific topic, product or focus.

When writing your articles, keep them slimmed down to only 300-400 words in length. 

We want to keep them short and on track, remembering our objective is to entice them to read the entire article and then click on the links featured within our author’s resource box leading either to a landing page, squeeze page or direct to the merchant’s website after being tagged with our affiliate link.

If you struggle to come up with topic ideas for your articles, one easy strategy is to use the ‘number technique’, which incorporates a bullet list into your document.

Example:  ‘ Ten Tips To Saving Money At The Pump’, or ‘Top Five Methods Of Minimizing Acne’.

If you aren’t sure how to structure your articles, or what kind of articles are performing the best, spend some time evaluating existing articles throughout the different categories on EzineArticles.

Look at other people’s articles and see what they’ve written about. Find out what people are searching for on the Web using tools like the selector tools at overture. 

What you are doing is basically rewriting other successful articles. Now, you are not PLAGIARIZING. Instead, you are creating original material, but referencing the work of others for ideas so you can create a better article. 

Your job is essentially that of an article re-writer. Every article topic imaginable has been written for you at Ezinearticles.com. There are millions of articles listed here, and all contain links or resource boxes to other people’s affiliate sites or information.

Take advantage of this system, exploit it and rise above your competition. It is the simplest way to get ahead in the industry.  

Read an article, and then write your own article. Fill in the gaps. Find out what benefits you need to include the original author didn’t mention. Don’t copy, create an original work. Just make it unique, different and better than the competition’s existing material.

It’s that simple.

Remember, you do not have to create a best-selling article. You are not an expert writer at this point, and you may never aspire to be. 

You want to do it quickly and easily.  

Quick Start Action Plan

Create your article marketing system and work on it every week, so that you are able to reach out to new readers ensuring that your content is in constant circulation.

When it comes to article marketing, quantity is just as important as quality. The more articles that you have in circulation, the more traffic (and potential sales) you will be able to generate from all of your submissions, however you also want to focus on submitting only high quality, well written articles.

Remember, you are not only using articles as a way of generating targeted traffic but in developing a brand, or in building brand awareness if you are a new marketer or developer.

Remain Consistent! In order to maximize the performance of all of your article campaigns you need to stay consistent, adding fresh new content into your article directory accounts, ensuring that your campaigns retain their exposure while you keep the momentum going!

Create squeeze and landing pages that will help you utilize article marketing as a way of building targeted lists of subscribers. That way, you can send out broadcasts and future follow up emails with additional affiliate products as well as an equal balance of fresh, high quality content.

Step 1 – Choose Your Products

You need to locate a handful of high quality products to promote within your articles. 

Clickbank.com is a good start to find products to promote. There are new products being added daily, and you can spend time evaluating popularity, gravity and overall performance by using the free resources available at http://www.CBEngine.com and http://www.CBTrends.com 

Step 2 – Compile Your Keyword Lists

Start with at least 25 keywords per topic so that you have a swipe file available whenever you create your articles.

Focus on incorporating the product titles, author’s name and extremely relevant keyword phrases that will attract readers and ultimately, customers.

Step 3 – Write or Create The Articles

Once you have chosen your products, defined your keyword lists, it’s time to create the articles for submission. The more articles in circulation, the more exposure you will receive.

Make sure that your articles are of high quality, relevant to the market or overall focus, and speak directly to the reader. 

Try to create at least 10-20 articles on each topic or product that you intend to promote.  

Step 4 – Create Landing Pages And Submit Articles Consistently

Create high converting landing and squeeze pages by enticing your reader to subscribe to your mailing list in exchange for a free giveaway (ebook, report, etc).

Add these links to your author’s resource box and incorporate a strong call to action to motivate your reader to leave the article directory and explore your website.  Remember, articles are meant to drive in traffic, NOT to sell.  

If you capture their information and focus on building a massive targeted mailing list, you can always contact them with future follow ups

Step 5 – Double up on your keywords

By now you should have written a large number of articles and submitted them to the relevant article directories. If after a few weeks, you find a certain product is doing really well, double up.

Always keep on top of your article marketing campaigns to determine what articles are performing and which ones need to be tweaked, modified or removed entirely. 

Use the resources available within your article marketing accounts on sites like www.EzineArticles.com that will help you evaluate your overall efforts.