Article marketing is the most widely-used tool over the Internet for website promotions. By definition, article marketing means submitting keyword-rich articles to various places on the Internet like article directories, newsletters, online publications, etc. with the author's name and link to the author's website.

When a visitor reads the marketing article, there is a very huge probability that the user will visit the link and thus, traffic will be generated on the author's website.

Thus, article marketing serves the following purposes:-

(i)Providing more visibility and readability to the author's works

(ii)Generating traffic to the author's website

(iii)Creating actual sales on the author's website and increasing business.

However, marketing articles have to be written in a very specific way, which is much different than the way normal publication articles are written. This is because the marketing article is a promotion article and it needs to satisfy some requirements.

All marketing articles focus around keywords. A keyword is a specific set of terms that people use often in their searches on popular search engines like Google. Search engines rank web pages according to the keywords contained in them.

So, if the specific keyword is present in the marketing article, there are very high chances that the article link will show up in the first few pages of the search engine and the article will get a hit. This will bring the visitor to the article and hence, make the link of the author's website accessible to them.

From then on, it depends on the article how it carries the visitor forward. If the article is informative and impressive, then the visitor will want to read more; and very likely will click on the website link of the author. This results in building up the traffic to the website, and could also lead to a substantial sale.

Marketing article writers always take great pains to make their articles more and more impressive to their readers. Apart from using the keyword several times in the article, there are other tricks followed like including a very compelling leading paragraph, interspersing the article with own points of view and deductions, putting in impressive facts and figures, using bulleted and numbered lists to make the article easier to read, and attaching a small anecdote or a thought-provoking question at the end.

All this might make the reader to continue reading at the author's site. The title is also made novel and catchy in a keyword-rich manner so as to bring the reader to the site.

It must be remembered that marketing articles may not be literature, but they do achieve a very specific purpose. And that is, generating business for a website. As such, there are high stakes involved with article marketing.

Website companies could spend more than they did on building the website itself on their promotion through article marketing. But the profits of a website that markets in this manner are extremely huge, while a website without article marketing could end up in ignominy.