6 months ago I was on the ropes. I had a month to raise $1,500 to pay the bills or else I'd be in a whole load of difficulty.

I was out of a job, had no source of income and no knowledge of internet marketing whatsoever. The pressure was on, big time.

And there's nothing like a bit of pressure to get you some serious results.

In the four weeks that followed, I wrote a huge number of articles, tested strategies outside the box, experimented with different resource boxes, calls to action and wrote articles until I could feel the onset of carpal tunnel.

The results were incredible - Not only did I hit my target, but I could also afford to go for a beer or two!

I can assure you that the greatest feeling of all isn't the money or the feeling of financial freedom, it's the knowledge that at any point in time you can recreate wealth as and when you please using article marketing techniques alone.

Before I reveal my five key tips to making full use of article marketing, let's quickly define what a successful article is....

A Successful Article

A truly successful article is one that is visited time and time again on a daily basis and will be for years to come.

It targets key phrases that are consistent with the action that you want the visitor to take in the resource box. For instance, if you're linking your article directly to a sales page then you'd better make sure that the article is optimised for buying keywords otherwise your articles won't generate revenue.

It has a compelling resource box that entices the reader to click on your link and has a great click through rate as a result.

It has an article body that gives the reader useful information about the niche but also follows a plot that works in unison with the resource box to get a really high click through rate.

With the success criteria defined, here's 5 ways to make sure that your articles generate hundreds of laser targeted visitors to your site using article marketing alone:

1 - Have A Killer Title

The title serves two major purposes. Firstly for Search Engine Optimisation and secondly to get visitors to click on the article when listed in the search engines.

Far too often I see titles that cater for one or the other, but rarely do I see one that covers both bases effectively.

Here's a poor title:
Back Acne Information

Here's an improved version:
How to get rid of back acne - read this first!

You see how the second title covers more bases in terms of SEO, but also provides a truly compelling call to action.

Not only will that second title rank better for more phrases in Google but it's proven that calls to action drastically increase the click through rates.

2 - Keep it Personal!

A great article builds up trust, authority and some kind of relationship in the eyes of the reader.

People connect well with articles that are written informally in a way that they can connect with the author. Write like you would talk and make sure that you have your target market in mind at all times.

The most powerful way to establish a connection with the reader is to know your target audience like the back of your hand. If you can answer the questions that the reader is thinking and remove doubts that he/she has then you'll be hugely successful.

Here's two great ways of understanding the needs, concerns and mindset of your target market:-

- Post at forums in the niche that you are marketing in. Look at what questions come up often and what kind of things are being discussed.

- Create a free survey at http://www.surveymonkey.com and offer a free gift as a thank you for completing that survey. You can drive traffic to the survey using adwords or another PPC platform.

3 - An Ever So Appealing Resource Box

The amount of times I look at articles online and I read a resource box that has something along the lines of:

Paul McCarthy is an expert golf enthusiast with 20 years of experience shanking the ball into the trees. He also owns a golf web site, click here to visit the site.

Seriously, nobody gives a stuffing about you, what you do and your web site.

The number one rule of a killer resource box is to create curiosity allied with solving a particular problem.

For instance, something like:

"Most people don't realise this but there's actually only 3 small things you need to do to permanently clear back acne and I reveal it all here: (insert full URL)"

It's a simple but very effective strategy.

Here's a checklist to make a good resource box:-

- You're allowed 2 URL's in your resource box at ezinearticles.com so use them both!

- One link should contain anchor text with the keywords that you are targeting on your landing page (assuming you're not direct linking to the vendor sales page)

- The second link should be the full URL because many webmasters will simply do a blanket copy and paste without selecting the HTML.

- Important! Make the resource box blend in with the body of the article. In great articles, an untrained eye would have no idea where the body of the article ends and the resource box starts!

- Invoke curiosity in your reader by revealing the benefit of what's on the next page, but not the strategy itself (see example above)

- Make it reader centric...Don't talk about you as the author. Frankly, no-one cares!

4 - Add Backlinks To Your Articles

This is where you can really get an edge on the competition. There are a few ways in which you can build backlinks to your articles in record time and take over the top spots in Google.

Here's a great strategy:-

1) Write your article and submit it to ezinearticles.com or an alternative directory of choice

2) Once approved go to pingler.com and submit it so that the search engines will pick it up instantly

3) Go to feedage.com, generate an RSS feed of your article and submit to RSS feed directories.

4) Socially bookmark your article at socialmarker.com with all the major social bookmarking sites

5) Go to freetrafficsystem.com and submit your article there so that it's syndicated on 30 blogs related to your niche

6) Take the same article and submit it to a number of different article directories with the resource box linking back to your main article instead of your landing page.

The above steps take you about 10 minutes per article but put you head and shoulders above your competition. What are you waiting for?

5 - Use a Link Tracker

What's really important is that you can track your articles and understand which are performing well and making you sales.

Ezinearticles.com has a decent stats engine, but what you need is an end-to-end method of tracking so that you can figure out which articles on ezinearticles.com are leading to sales on clickbank.com (for example).

What's more, should you choose to point your links to a different web site then you don't want the hassle of editing your articles that have already been published. Especially as ezinearticles.com take your article down until the changes are approved.

The answer? Use a service like budurl.com - a free third party article tracking tool that gives you, as the author, incredible management information to help you analyse and improve your article marketing methods.

In Summary

It seems that every man and his dog are now doing article marketing to try and drive traffic to their site.

Most people are doing it wrong though - they'll write poor articles and chuck them onto the article directory and not give it any further thought. That's a waste of time.

By doing what 95% of article marketers are unaware of you'll make an absolute killing with article marketing alone - especially if you can leverage the traffic generated from your articles to build a highly targeted list of subscribers.

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Most people don't make a dime online, yet 5% of people are making the money that 95% can't. Which crowd do you want to fall into?

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