If you're looking for an excellent way to generate free traffic or sales, then article marketing is the perfect answer for you. The articles you will write will be informative pieces of content for the purpose of attracting clicks to the target webpage.

This is an odd tip to start off with but here goes: make sure your articles are written in fluent English. The fact of the matter is that if your articles are poorly worded and laced with grammatical errors, people will not understand your article or will not feel compelled to check out your website. If you are not skilled at writing or if your English is not that great, consider hiring a ghostwriter to create your content for you.

The most common questions that beginners have about article marketing, or even affiliate marketing in general, concern market research. Market research can mean niche selection, keyword research, and product selection. Doing improper market research will kill your business because you'll spend a lot of time trying to sell to a market that isn't there or trying to conquer an obstacle when it isn't reasonable to try.

Competition is good. The existence of competition within a niche means that there is market demand for a product within that niche. As you start to narrow down a subniche within a broader niche however, less competition is better. The more competition that you have within a broad niche, the better. This is because you will be targeting subniches with your article marketing efforts; therefore, having little competition in your subniches is preferable.

If you type in a generic keyword such as "golf" in Google, you will notice over four hundred million results, each of which represent a competing website. As you start to add modifiers to golf such "learn golf" or "learn golf swing", you'll notice that the number of competing pages decreases dramatically. These modified keywords are known as long tail keywords.

Use keyword tools to uncover keywords which only have a few hundred thousand or less competing pages while still getting at least a few hundred searches per month. Search for "keyword tool" in Google to find some good ones to use. Those numbers are general guidelines, but the idea is to find long tail keywords with low competition but decent search volume. To write an article around a keyword, use the keyword a few times in the body and title of your article. Acquire some links to your article using social bookmarking and other methods to raise the search engine rankings of your article. Once your article is firmly on the front page of Google, you'll enjoy long term traffic to your article.

Perhaps the most important thing of all to do in your article marketing campaign is to have well written and informative articles. Google loves high quality content and your readers will too. When writing articles, make sure you balance the desires of Google and your readers. Favouring one over the other will either cost you visitors or SEO benefits. Just research a topic and write about it naturally and you should be able to produce a great article.