Are you looking for an easy and free way to promote your products and services online? If you need to increase traffic to either your website or your affiliate marketing page, and don't have a large budget for your advertising, then writing an online marketing article is a perfect solution.

This is a great way to do free advertising and you don't need your own website. This article will discuss what article marketing is, how to write your content and submit it to an article directory, and recommend a resource that will teach you step-by-step how to make money online with article marketing. In summary, once you have picked your niche product or service to sell, you then need to submit an article to one of the article marketing directories such as:

Hubpages.com, Squidoo.com, EzineArticles.com, USFreeAds.com, or GoArticles.com.

AM is simply another name for using Search Engine Optimized (SEO) websites to drive free traffic to your website or affiliate marketing page. The article engines mentioned above are already highly ranked in the search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Live. Page rank is a measure of a site's popularity and you may determine any website's page rank by using the Google PageRank Checker.

Your task is to write and submit an article that has relevant content to the niche market you are targeting so that the search engines will pick up your information during their crawl searches through the article directory. For example, when you are searching for something on the internet, you type relevant "keywords" into the search engines. This delivers results based on your keywords. Those items listed on the left-hand side of the search page are called natural listings (they are free listings!), while the ones to the right are paid ads.

Typically, the page rank of the natural listings will be lower than the score for the article directory where you submit your content. Therefore, by writing an online marketing article and submitting it to an article directory, you will benefit from that directory's page rank and SEO.

To write an effective and strategic online advertising article, you really need to know your niche market and determine:

• Who is your audience?
• What are they looking for?
• Where can they get this information (can you solve their problem or provide what they are looking for)?
• Why do they need this information?
• How can my article assist them?

The key to article marketing is to identify relevant keywords and use them throughout your content. Try to think about the words that people will search on when looking for your article. The more relevant your keyword choices, the higher your natural listings will be in the major search engines. One of your primary goals is to use keywords that have low competition in the search engines, but decent search volume.

Put quotes around your word choices (e.g., "best affiliate marketing training") and look for results with less than 5,000 hits. This will provide you with more probability of ending on the first or second page of the natural listings. Google's Keyword Tool is an excellent place to locate keywords for your content.

If you want to learn, step-by-step, how to write online marketing articles, then the best resource that I have found is Click Here.

Wealthy Affiliate has very easy to follow online tutorials that are designed to teach you the very basics all the way to becoming an expert writer. You will quickly excel at article marketing, pay-per-click marketing, website design, or any other aspect of internet marketing that you may want to learn.

My very first online marketing article appeared on the first page of Google's natural listings, and all I did was follow exactly what I learned through Wealthy Affiliate's Online Training.