Article Marketing: One of the Best Ways to Drive Traffic to your Web Site
If you have a web site or blog, then you may have heard of article marketing. If not, article marketing is when you write an article and then distribute it over the Internet. The goal of the distribution is to drive traffic to your web site, especially web sites where you are an affiliate and earning commissions on page views and/or ad clicks.
When it comes to article marketing, you want to have your content be viral. This means that you want as much coverage as possible when distributing your articles. Instead of having just one publisher pick up your article and feature it on their web site, you want tens, or even hundreds, of publishers to be showing your article.
Who are these publishers? Quite often, they are owners of multiple affiliate web sites that contain AdSense and other monetization tools. The publishers attract readers to their web sites by posting useful content on their pages- such as the content that you have submitted. When readers go to the article, they may become so interested in the products described that they click on an affiliated ad, thereby making the publisher some money.
Publishers love submitted articles, because it saves them the time of writing content or the money of having content written for them. Even though, in many cases, your submitted article will refer people back to your own web site or products, it is still an advantage compared to the publisher making all web content from scratch. If the publisher can obtain all web content for free, then the only overhead is for the hosting of the domain, which is a negligible cost.
In other cases, publishers may have a newsletter that promises new information every week or month. If the publishers are busy with other areas of their business, they would rather just pick up free content from article marketing sites, rather than have to constantly create unique content.
So, now that you know the what and why of article marketing, it’s time to look at where you can submit your content. As with many web-based services, there are the free sites and the paid sites. Free sites distribute your content in much the same way as paid sites; however, the time for article approval and distribution may be longer. Paid sites, on the other hand, will approve and distribute your article much more quickly, so you’ll see site traffic increase almost immediately after article approval.
Some paid sites perform additional services in order to gain continual traffic to your site, such as article leveraging. Briefly described, article leveraging is when directories change the title and first and last paragraphs of your content, then re-distribute your article as new content. This provides you with more exposure for no additional writing. Sites like SubmitYourArticle.com perform such a service and describe it quite well on their services web site.
If you are not yet sure about how much article marketing can help you, then check out the following directories. Some of these sites, like Ezine Articles and Go Articles, are completely free to use. Other sites offer you either paid or free versions of their services.
If all these directories are still not enough, you can always perform a Google search of your own, using a key phrase like “article directory” to find new submission directories.
Also, if you would like to keep track of where your article gets used, then choose an author name (based on your own) that has not yet been used online. To do this, perform a Google search on combinations of your first, middle, and last names in quotation marks. When you find a name with no matches, you can use this one as your pen name. Once your article is submitted and approved for distribution, you can find out where it has gone by doing a Google search on the pen name you selected earlier.
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