Article Marketing -- The Basics

Ever wonder how to get a virtual flood of FREE traffic to your websites? Yeah, me too! Then I discovered article marketing.

What is Article Marketing?

The best definition I have ever found for article marketing is "writing and distributing articles to get visitors to any given website".

There are two main purposes of article marketing.

1.) To gain valuable backlinks from high page rank sites to your website or affiliate page
2.) To drive traffic to your website or affiliate page

**So how do you write good articles?**

To start off with, the number one rule for writing articles is to provide value to the reader! This can be done by explaining a topic (like this article does) or by solving a problem the potential reader has. Providing Value is very important because if you are trying to get people to your website or affiliate page, what is the chance they are going to click through at the bottom of the article if you do not write a good article? Probably, no chance at all.

The 2nd rule when writing articles for maximum effect is to include a byline or signature that seems to be a natural extension of the article itself. Way too many people do not obey or even know about this rule. What do I mean by this?

Well instead of writing an author's signature like this (99% of people do this):

Chris Gustafson is a expert in the field of search engine optimization. To find out more about him visit his blog here:

[blog link]

Write something like this:

Now that you have been given the basics for topic X, you will undoubtedly need more in-depth information to proceed. You can find that and more by clicking on the link below. For more information on topic XYZ, you can click on link below:

[blog/affiliate link]

When you write a signature like the 2nd one your click through rate on your articles will go from 5% to above 20%. No I am not kidding, it is about a 400% difference!!!!

So there are your two golden rules that if followed will put you ahead of 99% of the other people out there who are using article marketing as a strategy. The next thing you need to know how to do is distribute your article. To do this you really have two options:

1.) Manually submit your article to all the top article directories
2.) Pay an article submission service to do this for you

Option #1 is time consuming and get's old real fast. Option #2 will cost you some money but may be worth it if you are in this for the long haul. To get a good idea of all the article submission services out there, it is a simple as typing "article submission" into a search engine! There will be a ton of results; all you have to do is pick one. Make sure to do your homework first though.

In closing, I hope you enjoyed this article. I hope you learned something and it leads you to great article marketing success!