Article Marketing: The Promotional Vehicle that Never Stops Working

Do you think there might be value in an e-Marketing technique which drives traffic to your sites, increases how highly your site is listed on search engine results pages, and builds your reputation as an expert in your marketing niche? How about if you could do all of that for free?

Article Marketing is a very effective and inexpensive way to promote your site, your products and yourself.

You've built your web site... now how do you get people to find it? 'If you build it, they will come' doesn't work on the Internet... You are competing billions of other web sites. No one will find your site unless you promote it.
The good news is that there are literally hundreds of ways to do this. But writing and posting articles is one method which has stood the test of time, will continue to work forever, and best of all, can be completely free!
Your articles work for you on many levels simultaneously...

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

• The more high quality articles you write, the more you build your reputation and authority as an expert in your field.

• Your articles and your signature (AKA: resource box) will contain links back your website. It can also contain a bit of biographical info about yourself, and/or a quick pitch for your site, or product or service. The links in your signature file will drive traffic to your site directly.  And, as you write and post more and more articles, these backlinks will increase your rankings in the search engines.

• Your articles may be picked up from the article directories by other publishers looking for great content for their sites. 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. Make the information in your article useful, interesting and valuable. Giving your readers compelling, valuable information builds their relationship with you, and makes it more likely that they will click through to your site to learn more. Your articles should not be mini sales letters. In fact, the article directories will likely reject them if they are.
An article which doesn't grab the attention of your reader is not likely to get them to take notice. This goes for your article's headline and summary too. Make these stand out, encouraging people to click and read more.
Make sure your content is original. Copying and re-posting an article which already exists will create problems for you. The search engines and article directories will compare your article to all the others it has already indexed.  If it finds your content is a duplicate of other articles, the article directories will reject your submission, and the search engines won't give you the benefits you are hoping for in their rankings. Not to mention, your readers may catch on too. The idea behind article marketing is to build your reputation, not to hurt it.
If you aren't a great writer, or don't have the time to produce a number of articles, you can always hire a ghost writer to create articles for you. There are many services and writers you can find through web searches who offer these services.  Experienced ghost writers will not only be able to crank out articles for you, but should also already be experienced with search engine optimization (SEO) practices, which they can weave into the articles they write for you. Just be careful that you really are getting original writing from them, and that they are giving you exclusive ownership rights on the articles.
You can check to see whether your articles are original by entering them into the Plagarism Checker at articlechecker.com.
You can then post your article to the article directories.  There are literally hundreds of these on the Internet.  The top directories are important to your search engine results page (SERP) rankings. Those include:

• ezineArticles.com
• GoArticles
• ArticleBase
• Isnare
• Article City
• Article Alley

If you post to the hundreds of other directories out there, they may not have as profound an impact on your traffic or SERP rankings, but having hundreds of backlinks to your site out there is better than having just a handful.
What do you think?

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