Article Marketing - The Process Explained

Article marketing is often considered a cost effective strategy for promoting a business online. Online marketers can write informative articles and submit them to article directories or content syndication services for free. While articles are primarily informative but can also contain promotions and mention the writer’s own products or website, if appropriate to the context of the article. These articles usually also include a brief biographical mention of the author at the end that includes a link to the author’s blog or website.

The use of articles as a marketing tool has expanded greatly over the past decade. It has turned into a multi million dollar industry. Many Web Owners have come to rely on Article Marketing as a cost effective way to market their products and services.

Article marketing is an inexpensive way to promote your products and although it requires some effort to create and promote your article, it is worth every penny.

Articles are viral in nature. This is because in every article your personal details (bio) as well as a link to website products and services are embedded. This means that whenever the search engines 'crawls' a site that uses your article, they will record a back-link to your site, which will enhance the ranking of your site. It also means that anyone reading your article on remote sites may click on the embedded links to visit your site.

So how does the process work? Once an article is written, you submit it to 'Article Directories', which undertakes to publish it on their article directory and to distribute it via RSS to thousands of subscribers to their feeds. These subscribers trust the article directories to scan articles before hosting them to ensure that they meet the minimum standards. This means that your humble article almost immediately finds its way to thousands of websites and blogs... Not bad for an hours effort I would argue...

The subscribers to the article directories may publish your article in their newsletters or on their websites. Your article may even find its way into an eBook. Take pride in you articles and you will find them to be more productive for you and your business.

The important thing is that the article act like a virus, attaching your backlink to every site it can. This can help with search engine optimization.

Article marketing can benefit authors in two ways:
1. Readers may see the author as a credible expert in the field, which can help enhance the author’s reputation and attract more business.
2. Articles contain one or more links back to the author’s website for the products that are being promoted in the article. These links attract human visitors, and also search engine crawlers. Such links are therefore a search engine optimization (SEO) technique.

Finally, there are some risks with article marketing. If there isn't enough information in the articles, readers may perceive them as spam. Also, some article directories are harvested heavily by other marketers who reuse the articles after replacing the links with their own.