Article Marketing Strategy 101

How to use your articles for increasing website traffic to keep people coming to your site from every corner of the web.

Article Marketing is essentially writing and distributing short articles to a variety of outlets, including article repositories, which are also called article directories and article banks, forums, and newsletter publishers. Article marketing is one of the most effective types of marketing that one can do – it is also one of the least expensive ways to market a business. In fact, it can even be free, costing you nothing more than your time.

There are many benefits to article marketing. Because articles become viral, your message literally travels far and wide, increasing traffic to your website and increasing newsletter signups. Article marketing is also used to make sales and to build credibility. Anyone who wants to establish themselves as an expert in their niche should take advantage of all that article marketing has to offer.

Distributing an article can be a very time consuming task. Many people outsource this work, and pay a fee for someone else to do the distribution work. Other’s do it themselves using software that automates the process. You should note, however, that a large number of the best article repositories do not allow or approve articles that are auto submitted – and they can tell when this is done. Manual submissions – whether done by you or someone else – is always best.

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Article Marketing with Repositories

The article is distributed to the article repositories first. There are hundreds of these in existence, and some are better than others. For these repositories, you will need your article, the title, possibly a sub title, your author’s resource box, your website URL, your email address, a short description of your article, and a list of keywords, separated by commas, for your article.

Essentially, you visit each article repository, either sign up for a new account or log in, and copy and paste all of the information into a form that is provided for article submissions. Most article repositories have a manual approval process, so it may take a week or more before your article appears on their website.

Article Marketing with Ezines

Once you have submitted to the article repositories, you will want to distribute your article to ezine publishers that cover topics within your niche. You can build your own database of these publishers. You find them by visiting the ezine directories.

Look first for ezines in your niche, and then check each ezine to see if they accept articles. Load those article submission email addresses into your autoresponder, and each time you write a new article, send it to these publishers, asking them to publish the article.

Article Marketing with Forums

Next, you visit forums that are of interest to your target market. If your niche is weight loss, you visit weight loss forums, and look to see if they have a place for articles. If so, submit your article there. If not, post the article on your own website, and then become an active member in the forum. If your article is about cellulite, look for posts concerning cellulite.

It is perfectly acceptable to make a post and say that you have an article about this on your website, and leave the link directly to the article. Just make sure that your post is relevant and on topic, and that your article provides useful information that is also relevant.

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The Future of Article Marketing

As in the past, marketing methods will come and go. It’s getting harder to send email. It’s getting harder to get listed in the search engines. It’s getting harder to use Pay-Per-Click search engines. The rules are constantly changing – and they change so incredibly fast that most marketers can’t keep up with all of it.

But article marketing will remain. The changing rules that affect other methods of marketing will not affect article marketing, for the most part. There may come a time when it is no longer safe to email ezine publishers – but even if that happens, another method for getting your articles in the right hands will come along to replace that method.

For more information on article marketing, read David O’Connell’s Article Writing Secrets book, which includes a copy of the”Quick and Easy Guide to Article Marketing” by Richard Driver.

If you’re looking for a little help marketing your articles, check out ArticleMarketer.com.