What is article marketing? It is a form of advertising wherein a business hires a writer or does it themselves to write short articles in the hopes that this will promote their business. These articles are made for distribution and publication which means this can viewed by just about anybody both in the print and online form.

So people will know who wrote the article, at the bottom there is usually a bio box and byline which shows the references and contact person of the one who wrote it. If the reader liked the article so much, they can get in touch with him or her which, translates to increased sales.

Article marketing has been around for quite awhile. Some say this was first used when mass print became available. In the print form, this type of advertising was used by entrepreneurs as a means of obtaining free space. This is given to a newspaper free of charge in exchange for the business’ contact information with the article. Most newspapers are happy to accept this kind of arrangement because their budget was very limited in compensating writers for their work.

The setup is not that different for online article marketing because writers may post their work in different websites as well as put it in their own. Articles that are posted elsewhere are known as an article directory.

The reason why articles posted in such sites are free is because the directory owner puts advertisements on the side and collects revenue from it. As more traffic is achieved, both the directory owner and the writer gain something from it.

Some websites give the writer the option of choosing the kind of advertising to be displayed on the page. If you don’t like the options, you can always go for the page without any advertisements.

There are differences though between printed and online article marketing. For one, it is much faster to look for a certain article online because keywords are often used for search engine optimization. This means if you are looking for a certain topic, you will be able to see what you are looking for in just a matter of seconds.

If you think that the articles posted can only be seen in sites such as www.ezinearticles.com or www.about.com, think again because some have now used social networks to their message across. Examples of sites include Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendster. This strategy is known as Web 2.0 generation.

Some people say that the rise in the number of people who use article marketing has a negative effect because it has brought down the quality in the articles written. To prevent this from happening, you have to post articles that are relevant and informative.

Article marketing is just one way of promoting a service or product. If you don’t have enough money to market it using other means, this will be a good way to get started. In posting elsewhere or in your own website, the most important thing to do is to use relevant keywords so it will be easy for visitors to see your site.

For that, you have to think what words will a person likely type to see your site. If you are able to figure that out, it won’t be long before you will get a lot of traffic which translates to additional sales to your business.

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