Article Marketing 101, Part 4

When using article marketing, we can turn the old saying on its head.

Quantity is definitely better than quality here.

We have to carefully choose the topics of our articles to be most effective. We saw in the last post how to write the article, and now we’ll look at how to choose the topic of each article.

The overall topic of all our articles is determined by the product we want to promote. Let’s say that we wanted to promote a product for watching satellite TV on a PC. That’s the overall topic. In that broad topic, though, are lots of more detailed sub-topics.

We’re primarily interested in sub-topics that other people care about, so we’re going to do basic keyword research. We can go to Overture’s keyword tool to do some brainstorming. We could start by seeing what suggestions it made for the overall topic, “how to watch satellite tv on a pc”.

Unfortunately, Overture is fairly brain dead when what you put in is a long-tail keyword, so you’ll get back only a few fairly nonsensical results. Instead, type in “satellite tv” to see what suggestions it makes. You end up with dozens of keywords suggestions, ranging from those that get half a million searches a month, to those getting only a couple hundred a month.

We want to look through these keywords and try to pick out ones that could be the basis of an article topic. The following list would serve as a first pass:

• pc satellite tv
• free satellite tv
• satellite service tv
• free pc satellite tv
• guide satellite tv

I only went through the first dozen to pick these out, you’d actually go through the entire list. Note that Overture also mixes word order up, so you would want to reorder words in the above to a phrase that makes sense. The last one would be “satellite tv guide”, for example.

Do another pass, putting each of the possible keywords you picked back into Overture to pick out more possibles. Eventually you want a list of twenty to thirty keywords that can serve as the basis for an article.

Now go out to Google and type in one of the keywords, surrounded by quotes. Pay attention to the total number of results shown. For “satellite tv guide”, it’s 53,200 as I write this.

Our ideal keyword would have 10,000 or fewer results when we search it with quotes around it.

We probably won’t find many that low in the satellite TV niche, so we’d choose the 15 keywords with the lowest number of page results.

Then we write a separate article for each keyword. Each article can have much the same information, but slanted so that it makes sense in the context of the keyword. For example, for “satellite tv guide”, I’d write about how the satellite TV on PC technology provides an easy to use guide to channels.

Each article will, in its about the author box, link to our landing page or mini-site with appropriate anchor text. This gives the landing page SEO benefits, and provides extra spots in search engine results that, effectively, lead to the landing page.

Writing those 15 articles should be done in a couple of days, not weeks. You can submit all of them to the same article directory, or spread them around to different directories. Multiple directories makes the most sense, as you’ll get more chances of taking up multiple spots in search engine results for the same keyword.

In part 5 of the series, we’ll see about the use of pen names to make all of this more effective.