How to Create an Article Marketing Swipe File

Most marketers know that article marketing is one of the most effective ways to create backlinks for your website, get more traffic and sell more products and services. When you regularly publish articles to article directories like Ezine Articles, Go Articles and more you can expect reliable results.

However, the major challenge that marketers face when they are trying to use article marketing is coming up with regular article topics that they can use. After a few weeks or months of creating articles, it can be difficult to come up with fresh topics. But you must keep writing articles if you want to get those reliable results.

Developing an article marketing swipe file is a solution to this problem. With a swipe file, you’ll have a fresh list of topics to pick from at any time. The term “swipe file” comes from an old copywriting technique of finding terrific sales letters and sales messages and keeping them in a file to refer to in the future. When copywriters get stuck, they can pull out their swipe file to get some inspiration.

Please note that it is not a “steal these exact words” file. When you build an article marketing swipe file, it’s not about stealing content or taking the words that someone else wrote. It’s about using other articles, resources and ideas to create your own articles.

Here are four sources that you can use to create your article marketing swipe file:

Article Directories

Obviously, this is a good point to start with your article marketing swipe file. You can see what other people are doing with content in your content area and get ideas. Look at the most popular articles in your topic and take note of what is working best.

Blogs and RSS feeds

You should build a listening station for your niche with your RSS feeds. It’s important to stay on top of what popular bloggers are writing about, and see if there are any opportunities for you to write about similar topics.

Your Blog and Traffic Stats

If you’re regularly blogging and updating your website, you have a wealth of information coming to you about what topics are popular and what topics are worth a revisit. Make it a habit to look at your analytics regularly to see which terms and topics are bringing the most interest to your website.

Google Alerts

Google alerts are a way to stay on top of articles published in other directories and on other blogs that are not part of your current radar. Visit http://alerts.google.com to sign up for a few keyword term alerts.

Once you’ve developed a swipe file of articles and blog posts (and have looked at your own stats), you can start to create new articles. For example, if you run across a lot of articles on the benefits of social media, you can write an article about how to avoid social media mistakes. If you get a lot of traffic for an article about low fat recipes for Thanksgiving, try an article about low fat recipes for Halloween or low fat recipes for Easter.

With an article marketing swipe file, you’ll never need to struggle to get an article marketing topic again.