Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia defines ‘article marketing’ as “a type of advertising through which a business writes short articles related to its respective industry.”
I’m here to tell you that internet article marketing works! Why do you think so many article directories are popping up all over the internet the past couple of years? Internet article marketing is a great method to get tons of traffic to your website without breaking the bank by spending your hard earned money on advertising services like Google Adwords(tm), Yahoo Search Marketing(tm), or Microsoft adCenter(tm).
If your niche is very competitive, your costs can begin to add up fast. Sometimes you’ll tally up your finances and find that you have a negative ROI. This is easily avoided by using internet article marketing.
When you use article marketing effectively, you’ll soon become recognized by others as as an expert in your particular niche.
When you employ internet article marketing, you’ll soon have lots of quality back-links to your website.
How Does Internet Article Marketing Work?
As you are aware, the WWW is made of many websites. All of these sites contain “content”. People are usually searching for content around a specific subject. This information is found usually by the use of a search engine. Search engines go out and crawl the internet, visiting each page. The search engines then digest this content and index it by using the descriptions and content found on each page.
By carefully indexing and cataloging the information that they found when crawling the web, the search engines give you the best information they have which is related to the subject that you were searching for. The content that the search engines find has to be accurate, fresh, and closely relate to whatever term was searched for. Articles, if well written, are considered an invaluable source of information from which to draw.
For websites to keep visitors returning to their websites, a webmaster has to give their visitors accurate, interesting and timely information. This aspect is crucial for someone who maintains a daily blog. If the blogger wants to climb high and remain there in the search results for his given niche, he has to make posts to his blog every day.
As you may know, posting to your site everyday can take up alot of your valuable time. The webmaster can supplement his content with high quality articles which were written by other people as long as the author’s resource box is left intact with the links. The person running the site finds these articles on article directories.
What is an Article Directory?
An article directory is a website that contains a wealth of articles in one large database. These articles are categorized by topic. Authors can post their articles there. Publishers (such as bloggers, and other webmasters) can find free articles relevant to whatever their website is about. Article directories contain a vast array of information on almost every niche that you could think of, and probably several that you never thought of.
You’ll find specialized article directories which only accept articles whose subject is about certain niches such as computer technology, or skin care. You just need to read the submission rules and each directory to see what is permissible and what is not. Most topics are allowed as long as they don’t promote hate speech or advocate violence.
What Do I get in Return For Giving My Articles To An Article Directory?
Following the last paragraph, there is a place where the author can place his resource box. This usually contains one or two sentences about the author and invites the reader to visit his or her website for more information beyond the article.
When you submit your articles to an article directory, you’ll gain many benefits. Not only will you get free marketing from it, you’ll also get lots of exposure.
Research is Important
Like any facet of marketing, internet article marketing is no different. You just have to research the subjects of your articles. You can do this research by simply looking at and visiting and reading forums which center around your subject. Pay attention to what people are “talking about”. Now that you have chosen your topic, or probably several of them to write about, it shouldn’t be too hard to be able to write an article which is between 250-750 words.
Now What? I’ve Written My Article, What Comes Next?
You should post your article on your own blog or put it on your website, first. Then wait for a couple of weeks or a month until your article is crawled by the search engines. You’ll be able ton find out if your article has been indexed by searching for your article’s title in the search engines. When you find it, then you can submit it to the article directories. The reason you would want to do it this way is that you’ll want to avoid duplicate content possible.
Wait a month? Are you Serious?
There is a new method of writing unique versions and submitting them to your articles directories and your own website. It’s possible to easily submit this article to over 700 websites as well. This serves two purposes- first, you aren’t trashing the article directories with more duplicant content, they get enough of that everyday. All you have to do is pick a few articles from one of the top directories, and search for them and then read the links you find and you’ll see how almost completely, if not ‘comepletely’ the articles are word for word the same as on other sites.
