How can you use article submissions to draw attention to your business and generate leads? Learn from big business. They write short articles about a product or service their company offers in hopes of drawing publicity to their website. The company submits these articles to directories to be published and freely distributed.

The article will generate traffic to the companies website and the directory receives free content. Article marketing is a very effective Internet marketing technique that increases traffic that draws targeted visitors. By submitting articles to directories, ezines, and announcement groups you will generate a lot of backlinks to your site. Backlinks equal visitors and visitor’s equal sales.

So how do you promote your business using article marketing? Let’s say you already have a website. Not the companies cookie cutter website but your own website. The reason I’m suggesting you have your own website is to encourage you to use it to make money outside of your network marketing business. Your own website can produce multiply streams of income.

If your main goal is to generate leads you will need to develop your site around a benefit of one of your products or services you offer from your multi-level marketing company. Most network marketing companies have rules regarding their name and image so look closely at your products and design a site that will get peoples attention and help them solve a problem at the same time. For example, you may sell beauty products or plastic containers but the company forbids you to use their name on your own personal site.

Think of something that your customers need indirectly outside of these companies that will benefit them. Why do people buy beauty products? They want to look and smell good. Maybe you can have a website centered on beauty secrets. Why do people buy plastic containers? They want storage space or containers they can use to take leftovers for lunch, etc. Why not design a website for customers that gives them good ideas about storage and organization for the home, office, and travel.

If your site is about storage then you can add vendor ads to your web pages and receive a finders fee for every product you sell from your own website. This will create another income stream for you. O. K. back to article marketing. You have your website pointing to a customer benefit now we need to write articles related to our target audience. Here are the steps to writing articles related to any subject you choose to exploit.

1. Find keywords about your subject that people are searching for. Use Googles Adwords Keyword Tool to research keywords. You can use this tool to generate keywords for your articles that are visible to search engines as well. Use the keyword tool to find popular words to use in your article. This way you are targeting particular keywords that rank well with search engines and your target audience.

2. Start writing. Don’t worry about punctuation or grammar at this point just write. Put your thoughts on paper. Your article should contain 400 – 700 words. If you exceed 700 words in your article split it up and make another article. Once you are finished with the article go back and spell check and correct punctuation.

3. If you haven’t done so yet create a headline or title using one of the popular keywords that you used in your article. Make your headline interesting. If it isn’t interesting to you then it will not be interesting to your readers. Try to place this keyword at the front of your article. This will help your articles ranking with the search engines. Matter of fact, you should also have your keyword in your resource box (about the author box).

The resource box is where you sell yourself and your company. You should also have a URL to your web address here to direct readers to you. In the resource box talk about the benefits your website offers the visitors.

When you are satisfied with your results and you have proof read your article submit it to article directories to be posted. When they run your article you should begin to have visitors frequenting your website.