The first thing I loved about article marketing was the word itself. As a marketer, it intrigued me to realize there was something like this and when it I realized its power I was even more in love. To this day, I still swear by this Internet marketing strategy. Okay, I don’t swear but I guess you do get my point.

If you are just starting out with Internet marketing, this is one of the key strategies you absolutely must know about. In fact, it’s so popular that there are software packages and Web sites available to help you syndicate your articles easily to thousands of other sites.

Article marketing is the process of writing short articles and submitting to article directories like Ezinearticle.com – with the hope of drawing those who read the article to visit your site. Let me be quick to point out that, within the body of the article, you never mention your site or recommend any of your product but you simply provide objective information to the readers. The idea is that the reader will realize how knowledgeable you are with the subject matter and will want to read more of you work. This is when they will then go to your site.

How do they know where to find your site?

The article that you submit must have a biography section at the end. This is where you talk more about yourself and your website or product. You are allowed to insert a link that points to your site in the bio section. So this is how the reader will find you i.e. after reading your wonderful piece of work.

Benefits of article marketing

Article marketing has several benefits, including establishing yourself as an expert, lead generation, increased site traffic and improved search engine rank.

Syndication

When you submit your articles to these article directories, you automatically give permission to other website owners to take the article and reprint it on their sites BUT on condition they do not change anything about it especially the link that points back to your site. This means then as your article is republished all over the web more people will read about your work and may click the link to your site

SEO

By now you should know about search engine optimization (SEO). You must know that Google’s decision to rank a site is based on the number of links that points to it. The more the links, the higher the site gets on the search engine results – thus making it more visible to the surfers. If you don’t know about this, don’t worry; I have a post on the site that will help you understand.

So as your article gets syndicated across the web, you automatically get back links pointing to your site and Search engines like Google will find those links and then give your site a high score. Now because your site is visible even on the search engines, you get more traffic.

What to note:

Those internet marketers who have been here longer will often tell you that the power of this strategy has lessened over time as search engines got smatter and tried to curb what they called “link spamming’. While this is so true, there are still ways to using Article marketing effectively. For one, instead of submitting the same article to different article directories, you can rewrite it and have the same article written in different ways submitted to different article directories.

Generally speaking, search engines are blind; they will not notice that essentially this is the same article because the words are now different. Please note that this goes much deeper than this but I am simply providing you with an overview. Article marketing is an on going discussion and now that you know the basics, you will start to understand its depth as you do your business online.

For example you can read my post about the best way to write articles that attract highly targeted traffic.