Article marketing is a form of advertising where one writes interesting and informative articles on a specific niche or topic and submits them to popular article directories, ezines and newsletters in order to brand your name, product and/or service. It is a very cost-effective method for marketing your website and services/products, increasing your search engine ranking and is ideal for providing original and unique content for the thousands of website owners that are looking for it. It provides quality exposure for your website, helps establish its credibility amongst high competition and is probably the most effective one way link building strategy.

Article marketing has many benefits; some include establishing yourself as an expert in your niche market, lead generation, increased site traffic and a boost in the search engine rankings. It has become very popular among internet marketers as a method to get exposure and quality traffic for their websites. It is a perfect form of one way link building for your website for your most important search phrases and keywords. It will help you increase your link popularity, search engine positioning, it will help you reach more potential customers for your products and/or services and is a tremendous way to generate traffic to your site.

Article marketing does work if done correctly. There is fear among the internet marketing community about placing duplicate content on their sites. If you write an article make sure to post a different version of your article on your blog or website. Change the article by at least 30%, but try for 50%. Submit the other version to article directories. Also, I would recommend changing the "about the author" section for each article you send out to the directories, using a different keyword phrase linking to your homepage in each one. You want your incoming links to look as natural as possible. The search engines will usually only rank one version of the same article, so vary your articles and change the keywords in the resource box. If the search engines find hundreds of duplicates of the exact same articles you will most likely not get credit for the backlinks and this will limit the impact of your article marketing efforts.

Writing articles in a poor manner is far more damaging then if you didn't use the technique at all. The high popularity of marketing with articles has caused a big reduction in the quality of articles. This is because many individuals write low-quality articles as a quick one way link building strategy just to get their website free exposure. They don't care about the quality of the article as long as they have a link to their website. You do no want this to be you. While gaining backlinks is important, efficient use of writing articles requires a lot of time and effort on your part to write high-quality and relevant articles. Also keep in mind that a good word count for your articles is around 500-700 words in length.

Article marketing is a very hot topic in the internet marketing community and for good reasons because it has proven itself as a very effective marketing strategy time and time again and shows no signs of becoming stale. You many not consider yourself to be a "writer", but you don't know until you try and may find out that you have a hidden talent. You could even hire a "ghost writer" to write your articles for you. Just make sure you own the rights to the articles and they are in fact unique, and you will do well in your efforts. Either way, you will have to figure out a way to produce quality articles on a consistent basis if you plan on using article marketing as one of your marketing and one way link building strategies.