This is the second of the five part “Article Marketing 101 for Affiliate Marketers” series. If you missed yesterday’s first part, you can read part one here.

Yesterday, you learned what article marketing really is and how articles can get your advertisements and website address in front of your most likely paying customers for FREE while they also help raise your search engine ranking for FREE.

But you still may be sitting there shaking your head and saying to yourself, “Great! But you have to be able to WRITE to take advantage of this free advertising and free SEO tactic…and I can’t write!”

But I’m telling you that you CAN write. You know a lot about your niche or you wouldn’t be in your niche. You have information and sharing information is what article marketing is all about. You’re going to write about what you already know about.

Tips for Writing Articles That Will Sell Your Affiliate Products!

There are three components to an article marketing article:

• The Headline (or Title)
• The Body
• The Resource Box

The Headline or Title

The words in the headline or title of your article are the most important few words in your article. How interesting you make your article sound in the title determines whether the reader is going to keep reading or move on.

There are two basic rules:

• Your article title needs to contain the keywords that describe your niche.
• Your article title needs to attract the attention of the reader.

The Body

Don’t panic! You can write the body of your article. Remember that great articles are never written … they’re REWRITTEN! So don’t accept your first draft as a finished product.
You just to need to follow these simple rules:

• Organize your thoughts and present the material in a logical order
• Keep your articles to 300-500 words.
• Use short sentences.
• Paragraphs should be no more than 5 lines long.
• Use bullet points or numbered lists if possible.

The Resource Box

Now this is the most important part of your article to YOU. There are four important elements that make a great resource box:

1. Your name: You want to build your own credibility, so use your first and last name!
2. Your website address: You can use anchor text but you need your complete website address at least once in your resource box – http://whatyourwebsitenameis.com
3. Your “elevator pitch” or USP (Unique Selling Position): Pat yourself on the back. Tell readers WHY they want to visit your website.
4. A call to action: Offer something FREE. “Get my FREE newsletter” or “Claim Your FREE eBook”.

If All Else Fails….

You can hire ghost writers to write original articles for you that you can attach your resource box to and submit to article banks. The last time I checked, a 400 word article cost about $10.00.

**NOTE: if you hire a ghost writer to write for you, make SURE that English is their first language and be CERTAIN that you screen articles carefully for misspelled words, incorrect grammar and wrong punctuation.

You also need to check ghost written articles for plagiarism, which we’ll talk about in part four.

In installment three of our five part “Article Marketing 101 for Affiliate Marketers” series, you’ll discover that you already have article ideas and you may even have some articles that are practically written.

• NOTE: Even though Lurn, Inc. receives compensation for products and services promoted in our blog posts, we always give our honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experiences about those products and services.