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Writing articles is my favorite way to promote my business. It actually involves several different marketing techniques, and this is the reason I like it so much.

First, if you write keyword rich articles, and submit them to a lot of directories, this can take care of both your search engine optimization, as well as your linking strategy.

Second, you brand yourself on your topic. Branding is important because only those who are looking for what you are writing about, selling, will visit your sites. This creates a very targeted form of traffic for you. Targeted traffic is more likely to subscribe to your lists, as well as buy from you. Not only are you offering value, but you are demonstrating how you can solve your visitors, and customers’ problems.

Writing articles isn’t as difficult as you think. In fact, if you really know your topic well, you’ll find it very easy to write about.

Your first step should be to forget about what you learned in high school English class. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t use good English. (Ms. Wallace if you’re out there I really want to thank you for teaching me grammar. It really helped.)

What I’m saying is you don’t have to focus on writing perfect paragraphs or writing in a formal tone. This is an article, and you only need about 500 words to really communicate your message, so write in a conversational tone.

The easiest types of articles to write are lists, tips, and recipes (How To). You can simply write down your tips and then add a short paragraph or two to explain each one. With a how to, you give the steps to doing something, like a recipe. I like this kind of article because I like to learn how to do things, and this type of article can really drive traffic to your site because others want to learn how to do things.

When you’re ready to start writing your article, start with the title. You want to include your keywords in the title.

Here are some examples of titles for the type of articles we talked about. Use them to create your own.

How to Build a Birdhouse in One Hour

5 Tips for Growing Bigger Roses in Your Garden

10 Things You Can Do to Get More Traffic Online (List)

Once you’ve created your title, then write down your tips, or your list. If you’re doing tips, write one or two short paragraphs to explain each one. If you’re writing the how to, break it down into steps and then explain the steps.

Give the basics. If you want to create a more thorough treatment of the topic, you can create a report, or a complete tutorial on your website.

Your next step is to write your resource box. Your resource box tells the reader a litle bit more about you, gives a link to your website and maybe even offers a bonus for visting. This is a great way to build your list.

Keep your resource box short. Most sites won’t accept one over 250 characters and some will allow you to use up to 500 characters. If your resource box is longer than your article, there’s definitely a problem though.

Don’t use more than two to three links in your resource box, and don’t use links in the body of your article. Many sites won’t allow you to have links in the body anymore, so don’t use them.

Use a text editor to write your articles, and make sure the sentences wrap naturally. You only want to use hard returns at the end of the paragraphs.

Don’t format for 65 characters anymore. This one happens a lot still, but many sites won’t accept articles that are formatted this way.

The best place to get information on article writing and submission is Article Marketer. For those that want to learn more about writing an article, and doing it fast, listen to Maria Marsala’s “8 Minute Article”. In this audio, she actually teaches you how to write an article, and she makes it easy. Her tips have helped me a lot in writing my own.

Try to write at least 2 articles a week. If you have more than one website, write one article per site. Submit regularly to the article directories.

The easiest way to submit is Article Marketer, and they will give you a free account that allows you to submit to 29 directories and 11,000 publishers. You can submit 3 articles a week.