If you’re a blogger wishing to increase your readership, article marketing can send  highly targeted traffic your way, at low or no cost to you. Everyone wants free traffic, but newcomers to article marketing can get hung up on one question in particular: “What do I write about?”

Writing articles for article marketing is very similar to writing posts for your blog. Most experts recommend articles between 300-500 words, about the length of an average blog post. There are other similarities, too. When picking topics for articles, you want to choose subjects that:

…are of interest to your target market. If your audience for your blog is first-year kindergarten teachers, your articles should be aimed at that same audience. Remember, your goal is to drive TARGETED traffic to your blog – in other words, people who will read your article, find something of interest, and click through to your blog for more of the same. Don’t disappoint them by writing articles about “Red-Carpet Fashion” only to greet them at your blog with “20 Uses for Broken Crayons.” They’ll just be annoyed and will click away as fast as possible.

…are keyword-rich. Articles are a fantastic means for grabbing search engine traffic, as the content on the larger article directories is indexed very quickly by search engines. As a result, if you choose topics and titles that are full of relevant keywords, you can piggy-back on the ranking ability of the directories and channel readers back to your site.

…you know something about. Because you’re positioning yourself as an expert in the article, you should write about a topic you feel comfortable with, or do the research necessary to write an informative article. Hopefully, your blog is on a topic you’re intimately familiar with, so writing articles on similar subjects shouldn’t be difficult.

It’s important to remember that you are not writing a college dissertation. You’re writing articles for real people searching for real solutions to real problems – that’s it. Writing articles just to sound ‘smart’ and ‘accomplished’ will get you nowhere online. People are looking for good quality content that’s easy to skim, easy to read and that gets them the answer they’re looking for in the least amount of time. Always keep that top of mind when you set out to write your articles.

If you’re passionate and knowledgeable about your subject area, you probably already have some ideas for future articles. Wonderful! Start a list in a notebook or on your computer. That way you’ll have an endless supply of topics for the future.