Your objectives in online marketing are promoting your website and selling your products. By ‘website' I mean any web presence: a regular website, your Facebook page profile, your Squidoo lens, your YouTube video, your Blog, and any other way in which you use the internet to make money.

You Must Connect!

Without promotion you will be failing to connect with most of your potential customers. Even with promotion, you will fail to connect with most of them, but you will do better than if you do not.

Writing articles on a topic that interests people who might be interested in your product is sure-fire way of getting your products in front of your prospects. Who are your prospects? People who are interested in your niche or the topic of your article enough to buy your product.

Marketing is easy in theory, and involves these steps:

1. Find a product to market - yours or somebody else's on commission.

2. Bring the product to the attention of interested people

3. Persuade them to buy.

So where does writing articles fit in to this simplified process? At stages 2 and 3!

Catch their Eye!

The title of your article must catch your prospective customer's eye. It must interest them - perhaps offer the promise to solve a problem they have, offer to make them money or save them time, or offer some new information on the subject. Anything to start them reading!

Keep them Interested

Then you have to interest them. Don't lose them after the first couple of sentences. Expand on the title: if your title is ‘How to Breed Championship-Winning Dogs', don't begin with a sentence or two on dog food. It might be relevant to the breeding process, but it will seem like an advert, and the reader will stop reading.

Expand on the title: "By using a new technique it easier now to breed championship-winning dogs than it ever has been". I know nothing about breeding dogs, but that would work better than "The food you feed your dog is important.. ."

Once you have them reading, then you can propose the main problem and present your solution, full details of which can be found by clicking on the link in your resource. You can't say that of course, but you can infer it in the final summing up paragraph of your article, and leave the reader with nothing more to do than either leave the page or click on the link.

Persuasion is Key

The third action - persuading them to buy - is done on your website, once they have made that all-important click. So the simplified marketing process above can work if you know how to write articles properly, by baiting the hook with a good title, retaining interest with your first couple of sentences and then offering no option at the end but to click to your website to find out more information.

As I wrote in the first sentence, ‘writing articles is a skill', but one that can be taught, so if you want to learn how to market a product the easy way, you should learn how to write articles and how to use article marketing the way the professionals do.

You will find marketing your product a lot easier by doing so.