The Newbie Guide to Publishing Your First Website Article/Blog Post

Articles are the means by which people build their online presence and create information products to sell.

If you've never written web content before in any capacity, it's time to get your feet wet. Don't be intimidated by your lack of experience. All you have to do is write one article. Here in just five easy steps in the article creation process. When you publish articles within a specific niche, you build your credibility within that niche.

So, here are the 5 steps to publishing an article to help get you found for your area of expertise.

Identify your market niche. Your niche will determine the type of articles you write. The articles you publish will then become part of your marketing strategy, showcase your expertise, and entice your target audience to visit your website.

1. Think of a commonly asked question that relates to your niche. Then, write an article that answers the question in a few simple but pertinent paragraphs. The article should be about 400 to 600 words, but it can be shorter or longer depending on how much there is to say.

2. Break up your article into key points. To do this effectively, it helps to think of your article content as a list. You can do "5 steps," 7 tips," "5 reasons," or some other list type of article format.

3. Add an author bio or brief summary of your company - a quick read that describes what you do and how you may be able to help your reader. The author bio should be about 2 to 3 lines. Include a link at the end of the bio.

4. Finesse your article's title. In the title of the article, include common keywords that will help your article get found by people searching the web via search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

5. Publish the article on its own page (your blog) of your website. Again, utilize keywords when saving the file using a unique name. An easy way to do this is to just use a shortened form of the article's actual title, separated by dashes. Don't forget to choose copy the article's title into both the page title and the H1 headline of your article text. If you have a subhead for the article, it, too should contain keywords, and you should code it as an H2 headline.

Your article marketing will only be as effective as the articles you write. The quality is more important than the quantity. Remember that the main purpose of article marketing is to increase your online audience, increase brand awareness, web traffic and ultimately sell more of your products and services.

6. Link to the article using keyword links, from various other pages of your site. For example, you might have a page that's entitled Articles, where you share the title and intro paragraph of each article you've published. You can also keep a library of links that you update on the home page or another area of your site. 

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