Article marketing basically just means using articles for marketing purposes. The way that it works is that you write an article, usually around 300-600 words long, on a subject that is related to the product, service or website that you want to promote and then allow other people to publish your article on their website in return for included a couple of links back to your website (or other contact information if you are an offline business) which are included with an author bio underneath the published article.

Wether you have a specific product that you wish to get sales for, or you want to drive traffic to a website or blog that you run, or if you want to promote yourself and the services that you have to offer, writing articles can be a great way to get free promotion and free targeted traffic.

There are two kinds of website that you can submit article to for this kind of marketing - user driven content sites, like this one, and article syndication websites. The former will allow you to add your article and links to their website and will generally give you a share of the profits that it makes so you can make money whilst getting free promotion, will publish your article on their website and then allow their visitors to reproduce your articles on other websites as long as they keep your links. The best strategy is to use both; here are a few of the top sites in each category:

User Driven Content Sites:

• www.Hubpages.com
• www.squidoo.com
• www.associatedcontent.com

Article Syndication Sites:

• www.ezinearticles.com
• www.goarticles.com
• www.isnare.com

Niche Article Directories:

• www.spiritualarticledirectory.com
• www.martialarticledirectory.com

The best thing about article marketing is the simple fact that it is an effective way to generate traffic and sales for free. Many of the sites like those listed above are very high traffic websites which can send many visitors to your article, and by publishing quality content within a specific niche you can gain a reputation for yourself as an expert within that field, meaning that they pay real attention your links, and you can generate both trust and prestige with your potential customers before they even get to your site. It can also be a great way to improve your position in the results pages for search enginee like google. Search engines determine the position of sites in their search results largely based on how many links they have coming in, and the relevance and quality of the page that the links are from. Links from article pages can be highly targeted to the search terms you wish to promote, and are often from pages that google considers to be high quality.

 These tips for beginners will help you to get the maximum benefit for your business:

1. Choose Your Keywords First: To get the best benefit from your articles for seo (search engine optimization) they need to be targeted to a specific keyword - just writing an article on the same general topic is not the best way to go. Think about what words or phrases people are likely to search for that you would like to lead to your product / website / webpage and then write an article with this key word or phrase in the title, in the first sentence or two of the main body, and then again roughly once every 100 words.
2. Write an Interesting Article: This one should be really obvious, but it is remarkable how many people submit poorly written articles, or writing that is just a sales blurb with nothing interesting to say. People won't read, reproduce and link to your work if it is shoddy, and spending a bit of time writing something good is well worth the extra time that it takes.
3. Submit Unique Articles: When you are submitting to several of these sites it can be very tempting to add the same piece of work to all of them, but search engines do check for duplicate content so this will reduce both the potential for direct traffic and the seo benefit. Even if you want to write on the same subject for them all, it is well worth spending a bit of time rewriting your article so that each sumbission is a unique piece of work.

Once you get into it you can end up spending a huge amount of time on article marketing, and although the benefits can be big too no-one has unlimited time, and so unless your in a position to hire a full-time article marketer for your business this can limit the amount you are able to do.

Going from beginner to professional in article marketing basically means getting the tools to save you time and allow you to do more work in less time. There are two main software programs that are an absolute must have for a professional. Below you will find a description of each and a link to where you can get them from:

1. Article Submission Software - The small list of article directories that I gave earlier is tiny compared to the thousands that there are out there. Submitting even one article to them all would take days, which is not only incredibly boring, but is also a complete waste of time when you can let this sofware do it for you automatically.
2. Article Writing Wizard - This software combines a powerful research tool with a really clever content generation tool that generates paragraph structure and individual sentences of actual writing based on the research, and provides you with options lists and an easy to use interface that can dramatically reduce the amount of time that it takes to write a really good quality article on any subject.