It’s no secret that the most competitive verticals online like Golf, Finance, Forex, Real Estate, Health and Internet Marketing are extremely competitive. That’s because these are known as Global Markets, which means people participate in these from all over the world. But what about Mary’s Hair Salon in Birmingham, AL or Grubby’s cafe in Oceanside, CA.? These are what they call local businesses, and to date very few of these types of businesses even have an SEO friendly website much less know what article marketing is or how to implement it.

Right now there are 8 major article repositories you can submit your articles to. They are Ezine Articles, GoArticles, Articles Base, Free Articles Zone, Article Alley, Articles Factory, Article Snatch and Article Dashboard. If you’re not familiar with these places just Google them and they’ll come right up. Each one requires you to sign up. They are all free to sign up for. Then you will have to spend a few minutes on each site uploading a photo of you or your business and filling out some author bio information.

Then you are ready to start writing and submitting articles. You can write articles for free on just about any subject there is. The key is to be an expert in what you are writing about. No one knows more about how to run your business than you do, so you should be the most qualified writer on your subject matter. The key is to write your articles and make them about 400-600 words each. Word Count Tool is a free tool you can use to check the word count of your articles before you submit them (Google it). I also use a free program called Note Tab Light which allows me to open up and edit multiple text files at once and is great for simple cut and paste operations.

Your goal should be to write at least 2 articles per day related to your niche subject. You would create an author biography that looks similar to the one you will see below. Take advantage of the 2 anchor text links for every author bio and use them in each article. You can even use the Google keyword tool which is free to collect a list of relevant keywords to your niche. Then start writing articles around these.

If you can type, or know someone who can there is nothing stopping you from becoming the dominator in your local market. The key is to just get out there and start writing and submitting articles every day. Even if you can only afford enough time to do one article per day that’s way better than doing nothing at all. Before you know it your website will start getting better Google rankings for all kinds of keywords related to your business. Of course you have to also pay attention to on-site optimization but that’s a topic for an entirely different article.

But right now article directories are hungry for your wisdom and knowledge about what you know about how your type of business is supposed to be run in your locale. Publish or perish couldn’t be more true. The first one out there with the content will be the supreme ruler in their local niche. I suggest you develop a sense of urgency soon and get out there with as much content as possible before your competition does.