Article Marketing Explained

In a nutshell, article marketing is the practice of promoting a website or a product by writing articles and submitting them all over the internet. Read up on all the background info on article marketing, the benefits and drawbacks and why you should (or shouldn’t) start with it.

Example

Let’s start off with a practical example of one “instance” of article marketing, so to speak:

1. You write an article about a subject that is related to the product you are selling or the website you are promoting.
2. You add some relevant links to this article. Most typically these would be links to pages on your website.
3. You submit this article to a public, online article database.
4. Rinse and repeat.

That’s basically it. That’s what you do as an article marketer.

Benefits

• It’s free.
  Article marketing costs you nothing but time. Submitting articles to article databases is completely free.
• Links.
  You can place links in your articles. Depending on where you want to submit them, there may be some limitations as to what kind of links you can place or where you can place them, but you can always place some type of link somewhere in the article. If you link back to your own website, it can increase your traffic, because people who read your article and like it might click through.
• Page-Rank.
  One of the factors that will increase your website’s page-rank is how many links from other websites point to yours. Since you can place links in the articles, that number will climb with every new article you publish, which in turn can increase the page-rank of your website.
• Keyword targeting.
  Some article databases tend to rank very highly in search engine results. It might be very difficult for you to get your own website into the top results for your targeted keyword, but a well-placed article can get there more easily. If that article contains links to your website, then that’s almost as good as having your website itself rank in the top results.
• Branding.
  If you put enough work in and generate enough quality articles, you can get known among the frequent visitors of a database. This can help you towards building a personal brand.
• Indexing.
  If you have launched a new website, one of the fastest ways to get new visitors and to get the site indexed by search engines is to publish a handful of articles containing links to your site. Since the popular article databases are frequently crawled by search engine bots, your article will be picked up soon and a bot will follow the link to your website. This is much faster than submitting your site to the search engines and waiting for them to get around to indexing it.

Drawbacks

• It’s time-intensive.
  Writing a good article – one that is really worth reading and that will attract many readers and also motivate them to follow the link to your website – is a time-consuming task.
• It takes a lot of persistence.
  Your first article will not get many views and will not do anything for your page rank. The same goes for the next few articles your write. You will probably need to spend countless hours writing and publishing articles before you ever see distinct benefits from it (i.e. increased traffic and more sales).
• You’re spreading around content that could be a valuable addition to your own website.
  You need to keep a good balance between publishing on article sites and publishing on your own website. If you spend all your time writing for article databases but neglect your own site, you might generate a lot of traffic but the visitors will leave your site again immediately, seeing that it’s practically empty.

Where to Publish

The most popular and most highly ranked article databases are Squidoo and ezinearticles. Goarticles and Hubpages are also among the more frequently mentioned sites. Those are by far not the only choices, though. Click here to see a large list of the most popular article databases online.

Make sure to read the terms of agreement carefully, before you start writing for any of these databases. Because article databases are such an easy and free tool for marketing, they all take measures to prevent spam. You can’t get away with blatant advertising on any of them and most of them don’t allow you to publish any material on certain subjects. So make sure your niche isn’t on that list before you start writing. Generally, you have to provide good, readable, valuable and original content, otherwise you will not be published on the sites.

And that’s all the basics on article marketing. Give it a try, don’t give up after just a few articles and see what it can do for your traffic.

All the best,

About Shane

I'm Shane Melaugh and I'm the guy writing most of the posts on this blog. My goal is to provide you with useful, straight-forward advice about online marketing and SEO and share my enthusiasm for entrepreneurship with you.