Article marketing has turned into a strategy of conquering new market niches by means of content material. Web developers write or buy informative articles related to their domain of activity, they include some backlinks in the content of the material and then submit the articles to special directories where web users can access them. This system has proved very efficient for advertising on low budgets, as well as for the considerable increase of the traffic level. Yet, it all starts with article marketing research.

The very purpose of research is to find out what customers look for. If you are to apply such information to article marketing, you will in fact identify those topics that readers will show most interest into. The outcome of article marketing research thus turns into the creation of that ‘catchy’ background that makes a web visitor click on a link and get on your web page. There are several elements that should allow a good coordination of your efforts; thus, the essence of research strategies can be resumed to the identification of the consumers’ behaviors, attitudes and preferences.

There are various ways to conduct article marketing research but the course of action depends on the kind of business model you follow. Do you need article market research for B2B (business-to-business) relationships or for B2C (business-to-customer)? The marketing research can then be conducted according to the specific priciples of each of the above models. Normally, you won’t make management decisions on intuition and feeling alone, but also on the information gathered in the form of marketing research.

The nature of the articles content will thus be determined starting from the results obtained from article marketing research. Do not write the articles until you know which keywords are the highest in demand? Determine the keywords that best define your domain, product and service and then create the informative content around them. On all situations you need to keep the information reader friendly.

A very frequent mistake web marketers make is to get a very high keyword density in the articles they use to market their business. Yet, such strategies could be detrimental on the long run by the negative impression on the readers and the official search engine policy related to keyword density. Informative content with an average keyword density between 1% and 3% works fine with search engines and readers, and proves successful no matter the nature of the business you advertise.