Article Marketing: What is it?
Posted by Andy Crofford
Write articles, it is beneficial to you.
What is article marketing? It is a form of advertising where you can either hire a writer or write a short article yourself promote your website/affiliate offer/whatever else you wish to promote. These articles are written for distribution and publication which means you have the potential to have a lot of people reading them either in print or online.
At the bottom of each article there is typically a bio box and byline which shows the references and contact person. If the reader liked the article they can visit your site you should have linked in your bio and hopefully you can look forward to a sale.
Article marketing has been around for a while now. Some say it was first used when mass print became available. In the print form this type of advertising was used by business owners to obtain free space. The article was given to the newspaper free of charge in exchange for the contact information of the business being printed with the article. Most newspapers were more than willing to accept this kind of deal because their budget was very limited. Basically it was a win-win situation for all parties involved.
This arrangement is not all that different in the online article marketing world. You can write an article and post it to one of many article directories, usually for free. As in the print world this is beneficial to botht he website/business owner and article directory owner because you are providing content for their site and they can sell advertisements.
The benefit to online article marketing over printed articles is that it is much faster and easier to search for a particular article online because keywords are often used for search engine optimization. This allows you to search for a certain topic or niche in a short amount of time.
Another benefit to using an article directory is that the articles can be used on other sites such as blogs. However, this is only beneficial if your byline is kept intact and you are given proper credit for the article.
Many online marketers believe that the increase in the number of people who use article marketing has a negative effect because poorly written articles. This is why you always want to make sure you write a good quality article that is both relevant and informative.
Article marketing is just one way of getting the word out about the service, product, or site your are promoting. This is a great way to market if you are low on funds. Just remember that when you write the articles make sure you use relevant keywords so you can get valuable targeted traffic.
To do this you have to think about what words a person will likely search for to see your site. Finding the right keywords for whatever you are promoting should translate into traffic that generates sales.
Some good article directories:
Ezine Articles
Article Dashboard
Go Articles
