Article Marketing > Article Marketing For Dummies – The Easiest Way To Explain What It Is

What is Article Marketing?

Quite simply put, article marketing is the promotion of your website through meaningful content-rich articles that are on the same subject as your website is about.

Suppose that you have a website about a hair care product. When you use article marketing to promote it, this is what you actually do. You write an informative article about hair care, making sure that it has content that the average reader would want to read. Then you submit this article to places on the Internet that are known as article directories. Below the article, you write a short bio about yourself and your business and provide the link of your business.

You will not stop at one article and nor will you submit your article on just one directory. You can theoretically write an infinite number of articles relating to your business and put it up on as many directories as you can. Practically, you must write at least two to four articles a week to promote your website.

How does Article Marketing help Get Traffic?

To understand this, you must understand the concept of keywords. Every article that you write will be centered on a keyword. This is actually a word or group of words that people generally search for. In the example we have taken, "hair loss products" might be a popular term that people search for. In that case, "hair loss products" becomes your keyword. There are methods to find keywords over the Internet, which are known as keyword tracker tools. They will tell you what people are searching for the most. The best keyword analysis tool is Overture, though Google's Keyword External Tool provides almost the same service.

Now, when you write the article, you make a judicious use of the keyword in your article. You put it in the heading and you put it several times in the main body of your article. So, when people search for information using that particular keyword, the chances of your article showing up in the search results are high because it contains the keyword they are looking for. And when they come to read the article, if they are impressed, they will click on the URL of your website below the article and visit there. From then on, it depends on the strength of your website and the product to convert this visitor into a customer.

Of course, there are various other parameters at work here, but the presence of the keyword and the visibility of your article on the basis of that is the most important parameter.

What are the Main Duties of the Article Marketers?

If you think that an article marketer has to simply write articles, you are severely mistaken. A very important part of the article marketer's duties is to find the right kinds of keywords. Then they have to either write the article themselves or get it written. Once that is done, they will have to scout for good article directories where they can submit their articles. They have to make accounts on those directories and then actually submit the article. They will have to then get more quality articles and keep submitting on the directories in a bid to get as much traffic as possible.

Why Article Marketing?

There are many reasons why article marketing is today considered to be one of the most popular methods of marketing in the world. But the most prominent reason is that your business gets a lot of value in the minds of the customers. Since you have written a meaningful article on it, the readers will accept that you are some kind of authority on the subject. They will place their confidence in you. This certainly helps for the business prospects.

The other reason is a purely practical one. This is one of the methods in which you can bring niche traffic to your website. The whole concept of article marketing is that someone must be looking for the keyword. Certainly someone with an interest in the subject will do that. That means, the person who is looking for information may be already looking at buying the product. Hence, the people that land up on your website through your article marketing exercise are almost genuine customers to whom you have half sold your product.