Article Marketing for Your Product: Information Will Pre-sell It!

If you’re new to the idea of article marketing, you might think that you’re supposed to bang out a “mini” sales letter that grabs up as much as you can get in 300 to 800 words. That’s wrong. An article is information on an idea, not a pitch for a product. People are coming to the Internet for free information, not a sales pitch.

Confused about how to think about this? Put simply, you have to deliver a valuable bit of information in a way that actually answers the question your prospect was asking. Your job is to identify, in advance, what that prospect wants to know. This is where research pays off.

Remember the last time you had a question about something and went to the ‘Net for an answer? How did you do it? If you used a search engine, how did you enter the words you wanted searched? Once you got results, which results attracted you the most to “read more about it?”

Keep in mind, what you actually did is probably not like what others did. More and more people are coming to the Internet for information every day and they’re NOT doing what more experienced surfers do: they enter natural language questions, not “keywords”. If you’re used to the “Old School” method of entering search words as alphabetical keywords (or are stuck using it because your search resource is Old School), start thinking in terms of natural language as a search tactic.

Learn to mine all the resources you can find. Yes, Google is #1 for many people, but if your niche has forums, discussion boards, Yahoo! Groups or social networking sites, GO THERE! Find out how people are narrowing down the “1-10 of 637,000,000” results they got from Googling. Pay careful attention to what they are looking for. If you see a pattern, that may just be a niche where you can write an authoritative article.

Learn to think in terms of answering specific questions, then supply a resource where the reader can go to get more (or more general) information. That resource will be where you make the pitch, put up the affiliate link or offer your product directly. Articles present. Landing pages presell. Calls to action sell.

Go, thou, and do likewise.

Are you targeting Desperate Buyers Only? Why not? What, you don't like money?!