Article Writing The Most Effective Viral Marketing There Is

Article writing is one of the hottest ways of marketing your web site and products BUT like all things in internet marketing you have to do it right to get results. Viral Marketing, an important constitute to you receiving volumes of good quality, buying traffic to your web site. So how do you combine the two?

An effective article is one that is passed around the internet and appears on many web sites and in ezines. A little caution here - there are numerous article sites quickly set up to pander to the AdSense trend at the moment. Whilst it might seem great to have your article on thousands of web sites it can work against you. The reasons are two fold:

1. Search engines are very concerned about duplicate content that's your article showing up on numerous web sites and are actively removing multiple listings. Make sure that you publish your article on your own web site first and then a few weeks later publish it on one or more major directories such as www.ezinearticles.com or www.articleshut.com This ensures that you obtain a quality listing as well as obtaining a listing for your own web site.

2. Some of the article sites are of poor quality and put up to attract AdSense income and nothing more. This means that there is not a good chance of your article actually being read. Your challenge is to make your heading and article body, full of keywords and a compelling read. In this way your article resource box should also be read.

So what do you need to do to make sure that you have a viral marketing machine silently working away in the background?

1. Write quality keyword rich articles with catchy headlines so that good quality established web sites publish it.

2. Ensure that your article is about 300 to 700 words long. The shorter length is ideal for ezines and the longer length about right for most web sites. Longer articles are acceptable, but unless they hold a lot of good information, they are less likely to be published.

3. Establish yourself in a niche by writing a large number of articles in that area.

4. Use your resource box to drive traffic to your web site. Don't be too salesy as this is counterproductive. Just make sure that your product and/or web site are mentioned and linked.

5. Your article should discuss a topic that is applicable to your web site ? and more importantly, the products you are selling. For example this article discusses Article Marketing and we have a web site totally devoted to article marketing. We are also established experts in viral marketing hence the subject of this article. I produced several articles before I discovered this!

6. Adhere to the guidelines of the article directory. This always involves how many links are allowed in the article body and resource box. The ability to use imbedded/anchored links (links attached to key words) is not possible in many directories. So check before you use them.

7. Most importantly,  write articles that someone will want to read!