Article Marketing - Drive Traffic and Become Recognized as an Expert in Your Field

Article Marketing is a very valuable and low-cost technique to promote your site, your products and yourself.

You've constructed your web site and got it looking just the way you want it. Now is time when you suddenly realize, your website serves no purpose until people start visiting it. ‘If you build it, they will come’ does not work on the Internet… Not when you are competing against billions of other web sites! You now need to promote your website and get traffic to it.

The good news is that there are literally hundreds of ways to do this!  Writing and posting articles, often called Article Marketing, is a great place to start. Article Marketing has been around and effective since the earliest days of the commercial Internet, and will continue to be forever. It works, and it's free!

The articles you will write and post have multiple beneficial effects...

- They are a means of providing great content and value to your readers.  The more value you offer, the more interested readers will become about you and your products or services.

- You will be in a position to enhance your notoriety as you write more articles, and ultimately, you can become known as an expert in your field.

- Your articles will include a signature file (AKA: resource box) where you can include a link back your website. This area can also contain biographical information about you, and/or a short sales pitch for your offer. The links in your signature file will drive traffic to your site directly. The more articles you write, the greater the number of backlinks you will get!

- People who like what you write may also decide to take your articles and place them on their own websites. This gets your content, your name, and your links distributed even more widely.

Start by writing an engaging and useful article related to your business market or niche. Really compelling and valuable content will increase your readers' interest in you and the likelihood that they will click on your link. Your articles must not be mini sales letters. In fact, the article directories will likely reject your articles if they are promotional or trying to sell anything.

Make sure to grab your readers' attention by making the content attention-grabbing and useful. It if isn't, the reader will not read it through, and won't click on your link. This is doubly important for your article headline and summary. These are often your only chances to entice someone to read your article and ultimately see your link.

Make certain your writing is original. Copying and re-posting an article which already exists will create problems for you. Search engines and article directories don't want to give their users a bad experience by returning the same content multiple times.  They will check your writing against their existing index to make sure it is not duplicate. If they discover your content is duplicates other articles, the directories will refuse your submission, and the search engines will not give you credit for the backlinks. Not to mention, your readers may catch on too. The idea behind article marketing is to build your reputation, not to damage it.

Now, if you are concerned that you aren't a particularly great writer, or that you may not have time to write this much material, you have the option of hiring someone to write articles for you. A simple web search will turn up many people and services which can write articles for you.  You may be able to give them nothing more than a few keywords, and they will research and write everything for you. Additionally, experienced ghost writers often are familiar with search engine optimization (SEO) practices, which they can incorporate into your articles, making them even more effective for you. Make it clear that you need completely original writing, and that you will be buying the exclusive ownership rights to these articles.

You can check to see whether your articles are original by entering them into the Plagiarism Checker at http://www.articlechecker.com/.

Then post your article to the any directories you like.  There are literally hundreds of these on the Internet, which you can uncover through a web search. The top directories are important to your search engine results page (SERP) rankings. Posting to the hundreds of other directories out there may not have as profound an impact on your traffic or SERP rankings. But having hundreds of backlinks out there which point to your site is better than having just a handful.

You can get hundreds of links from just one article. By writing just one new article per day you can have thousands of backlinks in a couple of weeks.