What is Article Marketing and Why Should You Be Doing It?

One of the key ingredients to making money online is to generate quality traffic to your website or blog… and there are many ways to achieve this. You have to work on getting traffic to your site both directly and indirectly, and you should work on building your reputation within your niche at the same time. One method that can help you accomplish these goals is article marketing. When used correctly, article marketing can be an extremely powerful method of traffic generation, and the best part is it is FREE. Well it’s free if you write the articles yourself.

Article marketing is the actual process of first writing an original article(s) and then submitting it to a variety of online directories, databases, and magazines, but most everyone I know usually just submit their articles to article directory sites like; EzineArticles, GoArticles, ArticleBase, etc….

Once your article has been accepted by a directory (or directories) it is then added to their large database of articles and it will then become accessible for anyone to copy and paste into their newsletters, blogs, magazines, etc…. The more directories you add your article to the better, as you are exposing your articles to potentially thousands and thousands of people with each directory you submit them to. At the bare minimum you want to submit each article to the top 3 to 5 directories for sure!

The person using your article must display the article EXACTLY how you wrote it, and they must also include your resource box at the end of the article which contains all the information about you and your site, but we will get more into that in a minute. The key to understand here is once you submit your article (and if it is well written on a fairly hot topic)… there is a good chance many people will take your article and share it with all their readers. If lots of people do the same thing… your article could easily be viewed by thousands and thousands of people in a very short period. Plus your article will stay in the database for many years, so there is a good chance it could be viewed for many years to come and hopefully continue making you money online.

Now getting back to the actually writing of the article… generally you write articles that are relevant to the nature of your website. You can’t directly promote your site, and you wouldn’t want to anyway because it would just turn people off and that is the last thing you want to do.

Instead, you want to provide valuable, worthwhile information that can help solve a problem, answer a question or teach them something new. In doing so you will be proving yourself as somewhat an expert in your field, and hopefully people will begin to trust and respect your opinion. In this way you can make a name for yourself within your niche, and your reputation will grow.

While that’s great (and important), what’s even better is that every time you write and submit an article you get to include some information about yourself with a link or two in the resource box at the bottom of the article. These links can lead back directly to your site, targeting whichever pages you choose. Additionally, since you are the one creating the link, you get to decide the exact anchor text you want to use. This provides an opportunity to build up a bunch of highly targeted, highly valuable one-way links leading back to your website or blog.

By doing this, you will be increasing your site’s value in the search engines like Google, and hopefully you will start getting ranked higher for your desired keywords. This is because incoming links leading to your site are one of the largest factors for determining your site’s Google PageRank. Not all links are created equally however, and you want to go after links that really provide a good amount of value. Links from the best article directories are extremely valuable because they are from high ranking sites, and they are one-way links that you didn’t have to pay or exchange for. Additionally, you can control the anchor text and destination page, so the links have the potential to be very powerful.

Therefore, with article marketing you are indirectly boosting your traffic and your online presence by raising your search engine ranking. Additionally, you will also directly see an increase to your website’s traffic when people read your articles and then click on your links to follow through to your page. The more valuable and original your articles are, the more people will click through to your site, and the more interested these prospects will already be about your ideas, products and services.

Article marketing brings along many different benefits. By providing high quality articles you can help build up your reputation, both within your community and within the search engines. You will see an increase to your site traffic and you will end up finding more prospects for your website and online business. If you aren’t article marketing yet, you are leaving a valuable opportunity sitting on the table.

So if you are serious about making money online… go and write an article right now and get the ball rolling.