by James Comer

Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia defines 'article marketing' as "a type of advertising through which a business writes short articles related to its respective industry."

Internet article marketing works! Have you ever wondered why there have been alot of article directories cropping up on the internet for the last year or so? Article marketing works very well at getting lots of traffic to your website without costing you any hard earned money spent on advertising services.

Depending on how competitive your niche is, the costs can begin to add up very quickly. Often times you end up with a negative return on your investment. This can be easily overcome by using internet article marketing.

When you use article marketing effectively, you'll soon become recognized by others as as an expert in your particular niche.

Article marketing builds lots of incoming back-links for your website from all over the internet.

How Does Internet Article Marketing Work?

You know, the web is made of lots of websites. These sites contain tons of content. People usually search for this content with a particular subject in mind. This information is found easily by a search engine. What a search engine does is go out and follow from link to link on the internet. The search engine collect this information and digests it and catalog and index it using the information and the keywords found on each page.

The search engines are able to give you the best information possible by carefully indexing and cataloging what they find by using the information that they discovered when they were crawling the internet. The information that they provide to you has to closely relate to the search term that you used as well as be accurate. When written well, articles are considered a very good source of information.

In order for visitors to keep returning to their websites, webmasters must provide their visitors with timely, interesting, and accurate information. This is very important for someone who maintains a blog on a daily basis. For the blogger to climb to and maintain high in the search results, he must make posts to his blog every day.

As I'm sure you are aware, you need to post everyday to your website, and this can gobble up alot of your valuable time. As a webmaster, you can supplement the content on your site with quality, well-written articles authored by other people. The only requirement is that you leave the author's resource box intact including keeping the links live if that is how they were when you retrieved the article from the article directory.

Tell Me What An Article Directory Is

An article directory is composed of a big database of articles about a variety of subjects in a variety of categories. People who write articles are encouraged to submit their articles there. Webmasters, that's usually you- are able to gather free articles for posting on their own websites as long as they credit the original author by leaving the resource box intact including the author's links. Article directories hold alot of information about almost any subject that you can think up. There are probably some subjects that you probably haven't even thought of that you could find there.

Some article directories only accept articles written on certain niches such as computer technology, or internet marketing or even particular health issues. All that you have to do is read their submission rules and see what is allowed and what is prohibited. At most large article sites you can submit your article on just about any subject as long as it doesn't promote hate, put down someone's religion, or sexual orientation, or advocate violence. Other than that, the world is wide open on what you can write about.

What Do I Get Back For Giving the Articles that I've Written to an Article Directory?

At the end of each article there is a place where the author can place his or her 'resource box'. This resource box contains a short blurb of one or two sentences about the author as well as a sentence or two with a link embedded pointing them to the blog, or website of the author for more information regarding the subject that the article was written about.

Submitting your articles to an article directory has many benefits. You not only get free marketing from it, but you get lots of exposure. You can turn yourself into an expert. It creates a win-win situation for both you and the publishers that get to use your articles.

Research Is Crucial

Like any facet of marketing, internet article marketing is no different. You just have to research the subjects of your articles. You can do this research by simply looking at and visiting and reading forums which center around your subject. Pay attention to what people are "talking about". Now that you have chosen your topic, or probably several of them to write about, it shouldn't be too hard to be able to write an article which is between 250-750 words.

I've Written My Article, Now What?

First, make sure to post your article on your own blog, or website. Wait for a couple of weeks to a month until after your article is indexed by the search engines. You can tell if your article has been indexed by the search engines by searching for the title in in "quotes". Once you find it, it's ok to submit it to the article directories. You would want to do it this way becuase you'll want to avoid any possible duplicate content penalties as much as possible.

Are You Serious About Waiting A Month?

There is a new method of writing unique versions and submitting them to your articles directories and your own website. It's possible to easily submit this article to over 700 websites as well. This serves two purposes- first, you aren't trashing the article directories with more duplicant content, they get enough of that everyday. All you have to do is pick a few articles from one of the top directories, and search for them and then read the links you find and you'll see how almost completely, if not 'comepletely' the articles are word for word the same as on other sites.

About the Author:

James Comer is a freelancer who writes about internet article marketing on the net. Discover a 100% legitimate way to totally dominate your niche with unique content. Go now to Unique Article Wizard. Click here for other unique 'internet marketing' articles. Pdf ebooks.