Article Marketing

An Overview

Article marketing is a highly effective way to promote products and services online. Many marketing experts consider article marketing as an essential component to any Internet marketing strategy.
In a nutshell, article marketing includes the distribution of articles intending to inform and entertain people surfing the web. The articles should include a link back to the website you want to promote (typically in the author bio portion of the article).

Why Article Market

One of the key goals for anyone who owns a website is to bring traffic to their site. Article marketing is an effective way to add multiple traffic sources. The distribution of articles is a form of viral marketing. Once you have posted the articles on the distribution sites other website owners will post the articles on their websites in order to add fresh content.

Fresh content is something every website owner needs to focus on. The ability to use articles written by others gives website owners unlimited access to relevant articles they can add to their site. Every time your article appears on someone else's website you have a potential new traffic source.

Article marketing is considered by many experts to be the most effective form of Internet marketing with respect to adding traffic sources and increasing consumer confidence.

Article Marketing - Who should do It?

Article marketing is something every website owner should consider. If you are not a good writer you can hire content writing services to handle your article marketing for you. A professional content writing service is a very cost effective way to engage in article marketing.

Websites that offer products and services are the key candidates for article marketing. Articles can be written about the problems or issues that your products or services are designed to address. People searching for information about the issue or problem may find the article that also mentions possible solutions. The link at the bottom of your article gives them the ability to find your site.

Article Marketing - How Often do I Distribute Articles?

You want to distribute fresh articles as often as possible. The more content on the web that includes links to your website the more likely your site will succeed. Article marketing has a very high return on investment. The nature of the Internet means the impact of those articles is indefinite.
If you are putting together an Internet marketing plan you definitely want to engage in article marketing.
Link Building

Link building is an important consideration for all website owners and marketers. Effective link building can have a dramatic impact on the volume and quality of your website traffic. Article marketing is generally recognized as the most cost-effective way to engage in link building for a website.

Why Link Building is Important

Link building is important for a number of reasons. First and foremost links into your website improve your website's rankings in the search engines. Every search engine must determine which websites appear in the search results and which do not.

Search engines use a complex mathematical formula to determine which websites appear in search results and they order they appear in. A large factor in the formula is the number of other websites that include a link to the website being evaluated.

In addition to helping improve your site's score in the mathematical formulas, link building also instantly creates new traffic streams for your website. Since every article you distribute will have a link to your website in it, every time it is posted on someone else's site you have a potential traffic source.

Why Article Marketing is Cost Effective

Building links can be a very laborious process. In fact, it is the biggest expense many sites incur.

The most common ways to build links include:

* Article marketing
* Directory submissions
* Link requests
* Press release distribution

Directory submissions are fairly easy to do but it does take time to research and find online directories where you can submit your site for consideration. The directories are only valuable if they are focused on the same topic as your website is focused on.

Link requests are a manual process that takes considerable effort. You need to identify potential sites to request a link from then contact the site owner to request they add a link to your website. The return rate is quite small.

Press release distribution is effective but expensive. The press release distribution services charge a considerable amount of money for every release you distribute. Most of the free distribution services do not allow a link to your site.

Article marketing is very cost effective. If you are writing the articles yourself the only cost associated with this form of link building is the time it takes you to write an article and distribute it. Even if you have to hire a writer to create the articles it is still very cost-effective since article marketing virtually assures corresponding links to your site.