This site is dedicated to teaching you how to make a 6 figure a year income with a small list, but that does not mean that you should ever stop thinking about ways to continue to build your list. I use article marketing as one of my listbuilding strategies, and it does help me when I use SEO (search engine optimization) in my article title and body.

Your articles serve many other purposes as well, such as establishing you as an expert, pre-selling products and even helping to build relationships with your prospects. But you can also use them to drive traffic to your site when you optimize them for the search engines.

Here’s the 3S Strategy for creating and distributing optimized articles:

S – Search
S – Sprinkle
S – Share

Today I’ll discuss the ’search’ part of this strategy.

Step #1: Search

Your first step is to search for the keywords your market is already using to find information in your niche. You do this by using a keyword tool (such as Google’s free keyword tool).

All you have to do is enter in a broad niche-relevant search term like “homeschooling”, “organic gardening”, or “golf”. The tool will then offer you suggestions for related search terms which you can use to expand your list of keywords. In most cases, you’ll generate a list of hundreds if not thousands of possible keywords.

What you’re searching for are longtail keywords – these are phrases that are typically four or more words long. The key is that they have very little competition in the search engines, which means you can rank well for them.

Tip: Many keyword tools check the competition for you. For example, WordTracker offers a KEI (keyword effectiveness index) value, which looks at the number of searches against how many other websites are indexed for that keyword. The higher the KEI value, the better chance you have of ranking well. Look for words that have a KEI value of at least 100 – but the higher the better.

 Next week I’ll discuss the ’sprinkle’ and ’share’ strategies.

We always think that our prospects are reading every article, tweet, and blog post we make, but this is not necessarily the case. Many times people only read a small portion of what you are publishing online.

You can change this by including a link to one of your posts in an email to your list. Ask them to read the post and to leave a comment. This will help you to build readership to your blog and to educate your list about what else you are doing. I like to make a post about one of my upcoming teleseminars or webinars so that more people will attend.

Even though you can be extremely profitable with a tiny list, growing your list should be a goal that you think about regularly. In fact, everything you do must work towards list building. This is all new to most of us, so it takes some time to get used to.

When I started out I did not fully understand this concept. I invited people to my teleseminars without asking them to opt in to my list, and gave out my affiliate links in the same way. Now I do not do this. I ask people to join my list, in return for a free report or audio recording, and then I invite them to my free teleseminars and bonus calls. This has helped me to build my list steadily for the past two years. You can do the exact same thing, but your list will grow much faster than mine because you will not make the same mistakes as I did.

Several of my students are growing their lists very rapidly by following my training. When people see the value in the information you are sharing with them, they will want to join your list.