Article marketing is a well established type of advertising that involves writing short articles related to your business. Article marketing has several benefits, including establishing yourself as an expert, lead generation, increased site traffic and improved search engine rank. When you write an article then give people free use of it, you get some back-links and website traffic if your article is re-published elsewhere. Article marketing is therefore one of the fastest ways to develop back-links to your website often resulting in improved search engine results.



Thus article marketing is one of the most powerful skills you can learn for the promotion of your online business and is the most effective way to drive free, targeted traffic to your website, blog or product. However article marketing works slowly and you shouldn't expect to get a load of traffic overnight.

So how to you get increased traffic from article marketing?

You write articles relating to the benefits of your products or service and place them in article directories which can get your name before millions of people, help you to establish yourself as an expert on your subject matter, and drive traffic to your websites. The greater majority of authors never make it beyond single figure article counts, with the most prolific writers enjoying significant traffic rewards because they publish many articles.

It doesn't have to be spectacular, but you can create a steady trickle of incoming traffic from the sites that published them. Without traffic, it's hard for an internet marketer to be successful. You must be prepared to deliver what the search engines want to get lots of free targeted traffic. Articles that are interesting and informative will act to draw targeted traffic direct to your website in both the short term and the long term. Articles I submitted to one article directory over two years ago still brings regular visitors to my site proving that high quality articles can be "timeless" and provide web site links and targeted traffic to your website for years to come. This is because article marketing caters to the thousands of websites on the internet that are looking for original content.

Articles should be written to target particular keyword niches, and distributed to content publishers that cater to those markets. Greater attention to the content creation process will create greater appeal to your target audience. Simply put, if you have AdSense sites, then you NEED to be using article promotion, otherwise you're missing out on new income from the advertising which your visitors click on.

However, don't be fooled into thinking that just writing a few articles and building in some links will push your website to the number one position for your primary keywords. Most major search engines see incoming links as 'votes of confidence' and may rank a page higher due to these votes. Your article will serve as a viral marketing tool that will grow in exposure to steadily generate even more permanent direct web site links that result in even more targeted visitors to your web site. If you want to build one way links to your website, learn more about directory submissions.

Article submission sites like Direct-Articles.net get the spider bot treatment because of their regularly updated content which in turn speeds indexing of the site. As proof of the popularity of article marketing, article directories have watched their submissions mushroom by 400% over the last two years.

When articles are published to the Internet, the content, based on keywords used in them, attracts the attention of search engine spiders. These articles should be quite different from each other, and the links in the author bio should be directly to the important pages you identified and include the top keyword for those pages in the link text. If we assume that you have focused your website(s) for your most important keyword(s), then article marketing can be used in a very effective way to drive home and support that focus but most experts agree that if you try and get too promotional you may turn off potential publishers.

The great thing about article marketing is that you are rewarded with one-way incoming links from your resource box at the foot of every article, yet you don't have to reciprocate as you would with link exchanges, which in theory should reward you with better search engine rankings.

So, article marketing and submission is one of the easiest kinds of website promotion, it is a perfect way to focus your website marketing on the full range of your most important search phrases and it is a practice that no webmaster, blogger or Internet marketer should go without doing.