Online article marketing strategies are really necessary to get the most out of your article writing.
Even if you are not selling anything directly, you still want to be attracting an audience to something right? You may have a cause, a group you represent or a specific topic you want to tell the world about.
Or you may well be selling something and interested in driving customers to a specific web site or page.
Either way, the work that goes into your articles is effectively wasted if you don't research your audience, your keyword phrases and optimize your articles so more people see them and read them.
This logic is the basis for developing an effective online article marketing strategy.
Here are the 5 best strategies for successful article marketing:

1. Write your articles to be read first.
   If you try and make your articles keyword rich first, they will usually read poorly.
   After you have written a great article, you can go back and find opportunities to place your keyword phrases in strategic places and change some wording so it reads well.
   
2. Target no more than two good keyword phrases per article.
   As a matter of fact, trying to optimize your articles for only one keyword phrase is what I recommend so you don't take focus away from your target audience.
   
3. Place your keyword phrase in your title, in the first paragraph of your article and in the last paragraph as well.
   Use about 2 keyword phrases per 100 words in your article.
   Some directories allow a bit more than this, but to be safe this is a good rule of thumb.
   
4. Most successful online article marketing strategies make use of bolding and or italics.
   I typically will bold my keyword phrase once at the beginning and once at the end of my articles.
   Doing the same thing with italics is also beneficial.
   
5. In your resource box you want to entice your readers to your offer.
   Don't brag about yourself.
   Invite your reader to your offer ideally by using your keyword phrase as anchor text, linking directly to your own website.
   

There are other things that you can do to optimize your articles but the critical thing is to actually have a strategy.
Online article marketing strategies can take great content rich articles and turn them into profit pulling traffic vehicles.
Don't keep leaving these traffic opportunities untapped.
Do the research and use these tactics to get a lot more results from your article writing.