If you are new to online marketing, then one of the most powerful yet simple methods to grab targeted traffic to your web site is definitely article marketing.

Article marketing can be divided into 2 sections, namely article writing and article submission.

Simply put, all it takes is your time and effort to write the article, proof read it and then submit it to the relevant article directories.

For starters, let us kick things off with article writing. If you have the talent for writing, then writing articles should be an easyand relaxing way to promote your website.

Articles like the one you are reading has many benefits and serves many purposes as well.

 

(1) Articles help build trust & credibility between your online business and potential customers.

There is a common saying "If they don't know you, they will not buy from you".

Article writing increases the awareness of the written subject and positions you as an "Expert" on the subject matter.

By doing so, you are actually promoting yourself or your website, something which i commonly refer to as self-branding.

 

(2) Articles help build one way backlinks leading back to your site.

Normally, webmasters from other sites can syndicate your articles and use it as content on their own websites, more commonly refer to as RSS ( Really Simple Syndication ).

In return for allowing these webmasters for publishing your article, the article must include the original author's bio box containing a link back to your own site.

Eventually, as you write more articles and more webmasters keep publishing them online, gradually the total number of back links to your own site will subsequently increase.

Take note that, search engines place high importance on incoming links to your website. This is their way of determining how relevant your website is and the more relevant your website becomes, the higher rankings it will get in the search engine results.

Unfortunately, some unscrupulous webmasters do rip off your article without leaving the author's link intact,  and if you are one of them, you should be ashamed of yourself.

 

(3) Articles can act as a warm lead / sales generator.

Beside checking emails, most people go online to look for information. Chances are, there are many people actually looking for the information you are writing about and the allowable link within the author resources box or bio box is often closely related to the content of the written article.

By doing so, most people who have read the article are more likely to buy whatever you are promoting after they are "warmed up" to the idea. This is commonly referred to as "pre-selling".

Pre selling tends to increase the probability of your potential customers making that vital sale once they visit your site.

 

Unfortunately, there's 2 sides of a coin to article marketing, and with article writing out of the way, here comes the boring part, namely article submission.

Like they say, it takes 2 hands to clap, although article submission is uninteresting and tiresome, it is still an vital part of article marketing.

 

So how do we go about it then?

Well, if you are a full time internet marketer or have heaps of free time on your hands, what i recommend is to first churn out at least 90 articles, perhaps 3 articles a day, then submitting it to at the top 3 article directories of your niche everyday for a month.

Let me assure you that this is a very effective way of getting sales conversions.

You must be curious now, which are the popular article directories to submit to then? There must be hundreds, even thousands of directories out there!

For beginers, you can take down the address of this article directory. Hey I submitted my article here so it must have worked right!

If you do not have time to manually submit your articles to the various article directories, there are many programs out there that can instantly submit your articles to hundreds of directory saving you the trouble of doing it yourself if you find it too tiresome but do take note of the different guidelines for submission.

 

Otherwise, simply just submit your articles to the major article directories and these include the following :

(1) Ezine Articles

(2) Go Articles

(3) Easy Articles

(4) Article Directory

(5) Article Dashboard

 

In my opinion, article marketing is often regarded to be a form of viral marketing, meaning that the popularity of your article has the potential to grow as more and more people become aware of it.

It is a great and free way to get high quality traffic back to your online business or website.  

However, when using article marketing, you must understand that the propagation of the article takes time and the pay off might not be straight away.

But if the article written is well written and received, rest assured that it will result in an increase in website traffic and subsequently increased sales conversions.