The Ultimate Guide to Article Marketing

Article marketing is a simple way for you to build both short term traffic and long term traffic.
Article marketing benefits you both because you get instantaneous exposure and links which obviously benefits you when it comes to getting traffic from search engines like yahoo.

Precisely what is Article Marketing?
Article Marketing is the act of writing and submitting articles them to different sites. These sites are called “Article Directories”.
They let authors publish their work and let webmasters republish articles on his or her site as long as they link back to the original.

This results in a win-win-win relationship.
- The author gets immediate traffic and lots of links.
- Website owners get excellent articles for their sites.
- The article directory receives a large amount of free content and links from the different publishers.

Which article directories are best?
Due to the ease of starting an article directory many have been created through the years.
I personally use a wide range myself in promoting my business.

The top article directory is EzineArticles.com,

The rest worth mentioning are:
ArticleDashboard
ArticlesBase
GoArticles
ArticleBlast
Buzzle.com
ArticleAlley.com
Amazines.com
webpronews
selfgrowth
constant-content
articlecounty
gather.com
Salesopedia
ChangingMinds
RainToday.com
articleclick.com

Something That Works Well
The technique which has worked best for me is the following:

1. Write an article
It is crucial for you to write an original, high quality article if you are going to do article marketing. This is the article that gets shown to lots of people and becomes your face to the crowd. Spend some time on it!

2. Create variations of the article
We've read quite a bit relating to this point and no one really agrees on how this impacts you considering the search engines and their policies on duplicate content and syndicated content.

I prefer to write multiple versions of the article to make sure every site I publish my article to doesn’t get the same one.

Because of this you will be everywhere, without it being exactly the same article, meaning people will be more prone to take a look and then click your link. It can also cause Google to include multiple versions of your article to their listing, giving you more visitors.

This can either be done manually or by using an article spinner.If you do use a spinner make sure the articles are of great quality. Most spinners can create unreadable variations; some though do it very well.

3. Publish your articles to a great deal of directories
I publish my articles to about 45 directories which brings me several links and traffic and in some cases some income since some directories will share advertising revenue with you as a writer.

4. See what works and what doesn’t - Split test
It is important is to see what's working and what isn’t. A site that doesn’t send you any traffic, it isn’t worth wasting time for.
If you see that a specific style of title is popular, use that template for more articles, if you have a call to action that works well, use that call to action often.