Article Marketing – Five Key Reasons to Just Do It | Online Marketing Business Builder

Article marketing is the practice of writing and submitting articles for publication by one or more of the thousands of online article marketing directories that serve as both as publishing platforms and, perhaps more importantly, sources of traffic to your website\s. Article marketing has been around for quite a while now (in “Internet years” anyway) and many article writers have been reaping some great rewards from their article marketing efforts. And yet, many budding online entrepreneurs and many more well-established offline businesses have never done any article marketing.

traffic1 1024x768 Article Marketing – Five Key Reasons to Just Do It

Traffic - lots of it - can come from effective article marketing efforts

There seem to be two reasons for this:

They do not know that “this thing” called article marketing exists
They do not really grasp the benefits of article marketing

While not knowing that “this thing” called article marketing exists is an issue whose solution is beyond the scope of this article (and one that really falls in the lap of article marketing directories), not grasping the benefits of article marketing is a relatively easy issue to address.

The way I see it, there are five key benefits to article marketing:

1. Article marketing can help you to establish yourself as an authority in your niche

Article marketing gives you the opportunity to showcase your knowledge and expertise and, in the process, build your credibility in the eyes of your target markets.

2. Article marketing can help to boost the rankings of the pages to which the backlinks point

Article marketing directories allow you to add quality links to other sites you’re promoting and since links boost a website’s authority – and authority is a key search engine ranking factor – the links you get from article marketing directories can help you climb the search engine ranking “ladder.”

3. Article marketing can send traffic directly to your site

Those same links that article marketing directories allow you to place in you resource box or body copy are also sources of direct, highly targeted traffic as interested readers click on the link to learn more about the subject of the article and are taken to the online destination of your choice (additionally, article marketing directories allow for ezine and newsletter publishers to republish your content for their benefit of their readers, which, in turn, provides an additional channel for direct traffic to a site you’re trying to promote)

4. Article marketing may be your best/only shot at top search engine rankings

High authority article marketing directories confer some of their authority onto the page an article is published to, which means that they often have a higher probability of achieving a high ranking in the search results than the same content published (originally) to a low authority website.

5. Article marketing can help you to extend the “mileage” of your content

While the rules vary, article marketing directories generally allow you to republish content that you originally (and only) published to your blog or website, which actually makes it possible for both your article and your blog post or website page to achieve top rankings in the search results (even though search engines are reputed to discount duplicate content, it seems that they let you get away with some duplicate content – to the point that an article republished to an article marketing directory can actually rank higher than the exact same article published originally as a post on your blog or page on your website).

If you haven’t been bitten by the article marketing bug by this point in this article, then you need to know one more thing: article marketing directories do not charge you for publishing your articles. That’s right: article marketing is free.

So now that you know – for sure – about “this thing” called article marketing and you know about some of its more compelling benefits, it’s time for you to make a commitment and add article marketing to your online marketing toolkit.

If you time and/or talent issues have you stuck in “article marketing inertia,” make sure you read Outsourcing Your Article Marketing Through oDesk.