The Basics of Article Marketing

Article marketing is a promotional method that involves writing articles and submitting them to article directories for publication in e-zines and websites. Article marketing is used by many online business owners and Internet marketers today for two reasons: to build links and to build their reputation or expertise within their niche market.

Article marketing has three basic steps:

1. Writing an article in a particular niche or hiring a ghostwriter to write the article.

2. Creating a "resource box" and placing it at the end of the article. The resource box carries the author's name, short bio and link to his website. The resource box does not necessarily need to carry an author name; sometimes, a resource box can be as short as one sentence or two and includes a link.

3. Submitting the article to article directories so that it becomes available to e-zine publishers and website owners looking for free content.


Link-Building Through Article Marketing

Online business owners or webmasters can build thousands of one-way incoming links to their sites through article marketing. When they submit their articles to article directories, they make their articles available to other online business owners or webmasters looking for content that they can use for free.

Typically, article directories require authors to grant others permission to use their articles in their websites, e-zines or blogs. In exchange for free use of the articles, article directories require publishers to include the author's resource box as well as make the links clickable. They are also required to not make any changes to the articles when they use them.

Each time an article in an article directory is published on a website, it means one backlink to the author's site. Articles in article directories can be published or used many times by different publishers looking for content.


Reputation-Building Through Article Marketing

Using article marketing to build reputation or expertise is almost the same as using it to build links. However, there is a slight difference. Authors who want to establish their expertise or build a reputation in their niches would include a link to their business website. For instance, a person who works for a web design company would write articles on web design and then have a link to his web design company in the resource box. In this instance, the author writes articles that show his expertise with the goal of building trust with readers and establishing a reputation in the area of web design. Article marketing in this regard is used to attract potential clients.

Some authors try to build their reputation through limited distribution of their articles. For instance, they can choose to write articles for one authority website or they handpick the places they want their expert articles published. And then there are authors who do their own research and find specific e-zines and websites looking for the kind of content they write and then submit directly to those.
 

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