Article marketing is the process of using articles for promotion.

It is one of the easiest and quickest ways of promoting your site/product. When used correctly it can be used to:

• Brand You/Your Company as an expert
• Increase your site traffic.
• Increase your search engine rankings

It is also

• Free besides the time you invest in the article production
• Viral - The articles are around on the Internet for years.

The idea  is to submit the articles to article directories and they will in turn distribute them to other websites. People who read the articles may be interested to follow your resource link to your website.
 

Why Does it Exist?

On the Internet content is King. Google, in particular, likes sites to have plenty of fresh content. Because of this websites owners are constantly producing new content and looking for new content for their website and ezines/newsletters.

If you are a website owner then there are several sources for new content:

• Produce it Yourself
• Pay to have it produced ( ghost writers)
• Use Private Label Articles
• Use Free Article Directories

It is the free article directories that are of interest to us for article marketing.

The Process

The article marketing process is very straightforward. You need to:

• Produce/Write the Article- This were many people seem to have the most difficulty. Even though they produce web pages for their site they don't seem to think that they are able to write an article that will get published.  See Article Writing and the Resource Box
• Promote/Market the Article- This is/can be very time consuming but it is relatively easy to do due to the growth and popularity of Article directories. There are hundreds of article directories and user groups that you can submit to. There are also automatic submission programs that will do it for you. The ones I use are www.goarticles.com and www.ezinearticles.com . You will need to register (free) before you can submit.

My Website Doesn't Need Articles?

It must be said that some topics are easier to write about than others. Some site owners simply don't believe that there is anything that they can write about that would relate to their site.

If you feel that your website theme doesn't lend itself to writing articles then you have to be a little more creative and use similar/related themes for your articles.

As an example if you have a site on red widgets you could write articles on:

• History of widgets
• Top 10 uses of
• Where the name comes from
• How they are manufactured

They don't even need to be on the same theme in order to serve their purpose as a promotional tool. To understand this you need to understand a little more about article writing and the article resource box.