Most people believe writing articles to be easy - and reading many of those currently accepted by article directories, I am beginning to agree with them. The standard accepted these days is very poor, and perhaps some directories should review their acceptance criteria. However, that is another subject.



You can make money by writing articles if you know how to write them properly, and know how to use them to generate traffic. Article marketing is one of the big three internet marketing promotional techniques, the others being search engine marketing and list building. It can also be argued that article marketing forms an element of both these other two, and can also be used to build lists and get your website promoted online. Here is why.

1. Your article can be listed on Google and other search engines. Once accepted by an article directory, your article will be published on its own web page, with that page optimized for your keywords, particularly your main keyword that will be included in your title and in the first few words of your article. It is then liable to be spidered just like any other web page, and listed in the search engine index for your keyword.

2. When writing articles, you should include a link to your website in the ?author's resource? section. Why not make that a link to a squeeze page, designed to collect the name and address of readers? You could offer something free in exchange for the details, such as a free course or even a free report or eBook. That's a great way of building a list, and every article you write could lead first to your squeeze page, and after that, another page offering content useful to the reader.

In doing that, you are using article marketing in its own right, and also as a means of search engine marketing and list building. It helps f you know how to write articles in such a way as keep your readers interested, mainly by offering them useful, free information. If you can tell them something about their niche that they didn't know, then will respect you and perhaps want to read more of your work.

If you persuade your readers that you can help them make money, then they will continue to read. I sure would. It is beyond the scope of this article to teach you how to write articles, but I can give you some tips on how to make best of use of the articles that you do write.

Many people are under the impression that one article should be submitted to only one directory, and I am frequently asked what directory that should be. By many, I mean around 10 such questions each month. That is 10 too many that do not understand article marketing, or understand what Google mean by their ?duplicate content penalty?.

You can submit each article to 100 directories: personally, I do so to over 400 directories and ezines, and I do so over a period of 2 - 4 weeks. Not all at once. I will get a gradual increase in traffic over that period, and my websites improve in their listing positions. If I then left that for about two or three months, everything would slow down again, because the duplicate content penalty would be kicking in, and the publications on the lesser ezines and directories would begin to be dropped off by Google.

However, by doing that every week: by writing an article every week, and submitting to over 400 publications over a period of around 4 weeks, not only is there no net slow-down, but everything accelerates: the traffic, the listing positions and the income.

So, you can make money by writing articles, and generating traffic using article marketing is not pie-in-the-sky. Not if you do it right and understand exactly how Google looks on your article submissions, the time periods over which they are made, and after how long they invoke the so-called ?duplicate content penalty?, which is not really a penalty at all.