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There are two streams of thought when it comes to developing an article marketing strategy. The first one is based on the popular “Bum Marketing” method which many are following in the hopes of generating an income stream without investing actual dollars into other forms of advertising. However, what you save in terms of money you are spending in terms of time. There is always a money and time trade-off. The second is to actually use the articles you write as a vehicle to promote yourself or your business. Either one of these strategies will work but you must know why you are doing it.

Strategy #1: Affiliate Marketing

The key to success with Bum Marketing is to research the niche you are targeting and find the keywords that have low competition. The idea is that you will have a better chance of ranking well in the search engine for those keywords or phrases. When someone searches for these “long tail” keywords, your article will be found on the first page of the search results. The interested reader clicks on your article link, reads it and is then directed to your site where you promote the affiliate product.

Others use a similar strategy but instead of promoting affiliate products, they are primarily focused on Google AdSense. If that is the case, they will be researching niches where advertisers are willing to pay a few dollars per click for their ads. The problem with this approach is that unless the advertiser is seeing good conversion rates for placing their ads on the content network, they will filter out sites that are considered to be low quality. I don’t think the strategy using articles to drive traffic to sites with AdSense will be as scalable as promoting affiliate products.

Strategy #2: Build Your Brand

The second way you can use article marketing is to build your brand. Use the articles you write as a way to introduce yourself and your business to others. If you submit your articles to a popular directory like EzineArticles, often times your article will get picked up and published by ezine publishers. This extends the reach of your original article to potentially thousands of readers.

As always, remember to include your resource box which is the part below the article where you write a brief biography about yourself. Don’t forget to include a link to your website so that the readers can go there and subscribe to your list. If you are using the second strategy for article marketing, you want to make it your main goal to the reader to opt-in to your list. After that, you can keep in touch with them as long as they are subscribed.

The strategy I have seen used by internet marketers who are building their brand through article writing is to write a large number of articles in one niche and submitting them daily. I have seen some authors on EzineArticles who have thousands of articles, particularly in the internet business category. This increases the potential exposure they are getting. If your name is out there more often, people will see it and recognize it.

So which type of article marketer are you?

Technorati Tags: article marketing, Bum marketing

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