Article marketing is actually something you can improve on over time. You can do this by becoming a student of this promotion strategy and implementing what you learn. This is not hard to do and anyone who is serious about their Internet business should be doing.

Here are five simple ideas to help you achieve better results from article marketing and help you make money online.

1. Study expert authors! You can go to almost any article directory and see who the top authors are. You are not interested in their name or article statistics. What you are interested in is the content itself.

The top expert authors have a definite approach to how they do article writing. Study everything from the title to the resource box on a handful of articles per author to see how you can become as good as they are.

2. A major emphasis on building a large keyword list. Implementing search engine optimization into your articles is very important. That will start by knowing what keywords you want to write about.

Once you have your list built you can begin to attack it and write articles for each individual keyword phrase. These are the phrases that your audience is using search engines for every day so you may as well increase your odds of them finding you.

3. Write about features and benefits of products or services you sell. Although you cannot write a sales letter in your articles you can stress features or benefits that a potential customer would be interested in.

This will help your click through rate when the reader reaches your resource box. The higher your click through rate is the more traffic you are driving to your site and the more potential sales it can bring to you. This is article marketing at it’s best!

4. Know the rules of the article directory you are submitting to. For example, the top article directories may be slightly different in what they allow in terms of keyword density and hyperlinked keyword phrases in the resource box.

To ensure that you get more of your articles published take the time to submit them right the first time. This is especially true for the top rated article directories that are getting the most traffic on a daily basis.

5. Go back and make corrections on any articles that are not accepted. Hopefully you will have a low turn down rate.

However, if the article is rejected it is worth correcting and having it published online. The more articles you have online the more potential traffic and backlinks you can receive from them.

Follow these 5 tips to improve the results you are getting from your article marketing efforts.

Jeff Schuman helps Internet business owners make money online. His Local Business Group website does small business Internet marketing for local business owners who do not want to write and submit their own articles.

Marketing a local business is taking on new forms today. For example, you can promote your local business everyday by writing short useful blog articles that relate to the theme of your small business.

We are not talking about writing Pulitzer Prize quality articles either. Just short, to the point articles your readers would enjoy reading.

Here are 5 tips to help you write better blog articles and then quickly promote them online for your local business.

1. Create a swipe file for ideas for your future articles. These are ideas you get from your customers questions, TV., newspaper, your competitors websites and so on.

Your articles can be anything your readers would find interesting. It has to be worth their time to come back to your blog or to subscribe to your RSS Feed.

2. Do you really understand your audience? Developing a profile of your customer base will help you create short blog articles that fit their profiles.

You always want to write about things from a needs-benefit standpoint. Be sure what you are writing addressing their needs and then keep in mind how it benefits them specifically.

3. Stay on point and keep your articles short. Blog articles only need to be 100-200 words to get your point across. If you find yourself writing more consider breaking it into 2 articles.

As much as you would like to think you are really impressing your readers you can impress them more by valuing their time. Get to the point and wrap it up.

4. Write in a friendly tone. Be conversational and informative. When you are writing to someone like you are talking to them you keep their attention better.

One strategy that does work is avoid using big words that try to impress people. Just write like you talk and you will never have a hard time writing.

5. Proofread your article for spelling and grammar. Microsoft Word is good for this. So is Open Office which is free to download. By just taking a minute to look your article over you can quickly catch mistakes and correct them.

One final point is bookmarking your blog articles to social directories where they can be found. Using a bookmarking tool such as OnlyWire.com is helpful for hitting more directories with one click.

If you are going to bookmark manually try and get your article into your Facebook, Twitter, and Stumbleupon accounts. This is where the people are hanging out online today. Facebook has over 400 million members and building a friends list is easy to do.

So is building a followers list on Twitter. Bookmarking to Stumbleupon is quick and you can choose the category for your blog article to be placed in.

These are 5 points on marketing a local business by writing better blog articles and taking that extra step to successful bookmarking. If you do this on a consistent basis more people will read your articles and the search engines will reward you as well.

Jeff Schuman helps people make money online and his local business website helps small business owners grow using the internet.