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.
Here is how it works. Let's say that you are in the weight loss niche, and you sell various weight loss products, whether they are your own products or products of which you are an affiliate. You write a weight loss article, preferably one that is closely related to one of your products – but you don't want to necessarily advertise the product in the article.
Instead, you want to address a problem that the product can help to solve in your article – without mentioning the product. For instance, if you sell a cellulite cream, you can write an article about what cellulite is, what causes it, and the various methods used to get rid of it. The article should be no more than 750 words, and have a compelling title.
At the bottom of your article, you include an author's resource box. This is basically a block of text, made up of one paragraph that is anywhere from five to seven lines long. In this paragraph, you might say something like this:
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John Doe is a weight loss expert who has helped hundreds of people get and keep weight off. You can find more valuable weight loss information and help at his website, John Doe's Weight Loss Secrets, located at http://www.johndoe.com . You can find specific information for getting rid of cellulite at http://www.johndoe.com/cellulite.html .
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Once you have written your article, ensured that you have made all of the points that you wanted to make, and checked the article for spelling and grammar mistakes, you are ready to distribute it.
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. Others 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.
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.
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.
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.
All of this is essentially what article marketing is, and how it is done, however, there is a great deal more to learn and know about article marketing in order to become successful at it.
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