Article Marketing Success: Are You Writing for One Person or the World?

When you start doing article marketing, you will find that you are writing on a steady basis. Depending on if you are submitting via an automatic submission service (which requires about 8 articles a month per website) or manually (which requires significantly more articles submissions), you will either spend a moderate amount time writing each month, or an extreme amount writing.

Either way, you need a steady stream of article ideas and inspiration to have article marketing success. I'd like to share 3 main approaches I take when I'm creating articles:

1 - I watch out for "frequently asked questions" from customers. That way, with one article I can help a large number of people. Whenever someone asks me that question, I can refer them to the article I've written. This is a great way to generate article topics.

2 - I also do keyword research to find out what people in my target market are searching for, then I write content to satisfy those searches. Again, this is creating one piece of content to address a common concern of many people. This is extremely beneficial for SEO, because you are catering to information that search engine customers are specifically requesting.

Both of the two ideas listed above are excellent ways to brainstorm article topics, but I wanted to mention another approach that you might not have considered. Every once in a while (say every couple of months), I like to write an article that is just for one person.

I always invite people to ask me questions about article marketing (anyone can ask--not just customers), so I get lots of interesting questions. Sometimes a question that someone asks is a little more on the philosophical side. It is not a question that very many (or any) other people have ever asked, but the question intrigues me and gets me thinking.

Recently someone asked me what it means to be an "expert" in one's field and how a person could know when they had reached that "expert" status. That question caught my attention--not because tons of other people were asking the same thing, but just because it was a thought provoking question.

I enjoyed putting together an article on that topic, and I immediately felt my creativity for that topic start to blossom. I'm not saying that it is the best article in the world or that massive numbers of people will be searching for that topic, but the article was very enjoyable to write, and kind of gave a boost to my entire writing schedule (even writing the articles that were more for "the masses").

Interestingly, I received a comment from a reader of that article (the article that I thought that no one was reading), and that person told me that he had decided to become one of my customers solely on the basis of that one article.

Mostly, we don't really look to our articles to translate into direct sales, because that is not the strength of article marketing. We strategically submit articles to get a higher website ranking, which can drastically increase sales.

But what if there is a unmeasurable, unexplainable, undeniable marketing and personal value to every once in a while writing for one person instead of the world, writing articles that address one very interesting concept that someone in our general niche has asked?

You might experiment with that some time. I think you will find that it:

=> infuses a new life into your overall marketing campaign

=> helps you stay focused on who your are really writing for--real people, rather than just search engines

=> and that you will perhaps connect more deeply with some individuals than you normally would.

I challenge you to try this: Look for an interesting question that you see posed by a customer or a person in your niche, and then write an article that explains your viewpoint. Get creative and share a little bit of your heart. The results may suprise you.


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Steve Shaw's article submitter has helped thousands of business owners worldwide build traffic, leads and sales to their websites - grab his free report giving you a blueprint for attracting sustainable, dirt-cheap, long-term, targeted traffic to any website! Go now to http://www.submityourarticle.com/report and learn how to boost your traffic by up to 600%!