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There comes a time when you have to put away the facts and figures, forget about the costs, stop trying to figure out how many people are doing the same thing you are, quit trying to analyse the code underneath the latest WordPress or BANS template and just jump in with both feet ready to do battle.

When I used to train people in the mlm group I was in, there was this one guy that came to our training sessions who always came with the biggest ideas, the nicest graphs and charts, the best marketing materials and he would go over his ideas, charts and materials endlessly, and guess what, he never made a dime, nor did he attempt to. I knew from the second time I met the guy, he wasn’t going to do anything. He analysed his business to death and killed it.

While it is important to do your due diligence in the niche you’re going into and research keywords, competition, offers, payouts, affiliate companies, available tools and a few other things, all the research and the statistics in the world aren’t going to sell products for you. My personal philosophy is that if you have a good idea for a niche or business on the web, you should have started it yesterday. Because of the time it takes a site to get indexed and start bringing you organic traffic, your new idea can’t wait for you to spend 2 or 3 months analysing all the minute details. It’s better to put that site up as soon as you can, get a few incoming links into it by writing articles and tweak it as you go.

Obviously, you want to have the framework of a site in place before you launch it and if you have a more interactive site or membership site, you have to have enough material that your readers will find interesting and encourage visitors to come back. But for the general affiliate site such as a Build A Niche Store site there isn’t any reason to not launch your site immediately after you find your niche and decide on a domain name. All the other work of writing and adding content and making your store look pretty can come later.

When you put your web project out there for the world to see and hopefully stop by and make a purchase, you can always work on the code later, you can always add more content later, you can always buy more advertising to bring more visitors, you can always add an additional revenue stream and yes, you can even change that sucky logo later. But if your site is still in the design and analysis phase, or the someday phase after 3 to 6 months, you can’t do any of those things and more importantly you won’t be taking checks to the bank to cash them any time soon.

It’s much better to analyse and tweak an already existing project than it is thin air. Thin air doesn’t pay the bills.

Article marketing is one of the fastest ways I’ve found to get a new site indexed and traffic coming to it almost immediately. With the techniques I’ll describe in this post, I’ve seen most of my brand new sites get indexed in Google in about 3 days and have organic keyword traffic coming to those sites in about 10 days from the time the article is published.

There is a right way and a wrong way to do article marketing and one of the most important aspects of it aren’t followed by even the best writers. I’ve read articles by Doctors, Lawyers and Indian Chiefs or similar professionals and if they adhered to one simple principle, it would probably make a huge difference in their traffic and rankings. And this principle has absolutely nothing to do with your writing ability.

I’ll get to this super secret technique in a minute, but first, let’s talk about what an article that you submit to an article directory is. An article has nothing to do with the specific site you’re trying to promote. When writing an article, think about your subject, not your site. An article should never be written to tell your audience how terrific your site is and how they should visit it because you are the super guru in your specialized field. Never sell your site when writing an article.

The purpose of writing an article is threefold, one, to give the reader some general information on a subject, secondly, to position yourself as an expert in your field, without selling, and thirdly, to get links back to your site from authority sites and hopefully more sites as other webmasters pick up your article to used as content on their site.

For a good article example, let’s say you have a travel site on San Francisco and on it you talk about great places to eat, places to visit, museums to see, places to shop, etc., and you have the site filled with Adsense and TripAdvisor links to all the top hotels and B & B’s. When you write and article you don’t want to describe pages on your site and try to sell the fact that you site is the place to go to find the best rates on hotels and places to stay.

What you want to write about is maybe the history of San Francisco and the nostalgia of cable cars, or maybe about the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge or possibly the history of Alcatraz and how only one person in the history of the prison escaped from it. You then want to place links to your site in the writer’s box at the bottom of the article.

So what’s the big secret to article writing that most people miss? It is in how you place those links in your writer’s box. Most article directories will let you place up to 3 live links at the bottom of your article and some will even let you place links in the body of the article as well. The biggest mistake I see writers make is in not using all 3 links and not using anchor text to link back to their web site. They instead just use a simple url as a link and while this will get you a link back to your site, it will not give you the full SEO benefits of having a keyword link instead. It’s not really a super secret technique, it’s just being smart about your article marketing.

The three article directories I use that give me the quickest results are:

EzineArticles.com- This is the best of the best in article directories. It is a PR 6 article directory and somehow your articles are immediately ranked as a PR 6 page getting you the benefit of a quality keyword link to your site. Once your article is approved, your site is usually spidered and indexed in about 3 days to 1 week. Until you write 20 articles it may take up to 5 days to get your article approved.

GoArticles.com - I like this directory because you can place links in the body of your articles and it is one of the only top directories that will let you do this.

ArticleBlast.com - The reason I like this directory is because your article needs no approval process except that you are a member of the site. Your articles are published to the site immediately and will appear on the front page under your chosen category within 5 minutes of publishing it. You can’t get publicity any quicker than that.

My normal process for getting a site indexed quickly is to write an article and submit it to all three of these directories the same day. Some would suggest to change each article around a bit to avoid duplicate content issues between directories, but I’ve personally never done that and haven’t had any problems with this technique being a big benefit to my sites.

Now get to work on writing a few articles and see if you don’t find out the benefits.

Alan