Article Marketing

What is article marketing? Article marketing is often called “affiliate article marketing” because it is so popular with internet affiliate marketers. Article marketing is an internet business practice that is used mostly by marketing affiliates, but is also used by online businesses to promote all kinds of products.

Article marketing as a concept is quite simple:

* You write articles. Your articles include a link to your website or to an affiliate page

* You submit articles to free online article directories

* People read your articles online and click the link to visit your website

* Once at your website (or affiliate page) your readers purchase the item you are promoting and you earn commission.

Article marketing can also be used to send visitors (also known as “traffic”) to websites or blogs which contain classified advertisements. In this case you will get paid a small amount by the advertisers each time a visitor clicks on one of the advertisements. The actual amount depends upon the popularity of the keywords in the ad. These ads are called pay per click advertisements (usually referred to as “PPC”). The most popular source of these ads is Google “Adsense” but there are other companies who run PPC advertising.

Another aspect of affiliate article marketing is the writing of articles to use as content on your own websites or blogs. If your websites or blogs contain fresh unique content, they are more likely to achieve higher placement in search engine results.

To harness the full power of article marketing, affiliates (or other online business owners) would write articles for their own websites or blogs as well as submitting articles to online article directories and posting articles on various “Web 2.0″ or social media sites to form a “link wheel” (how to build a link wheel will be examined in a later article).

Article marketing has many advantages for internet marketers, and for affiliate marketers in particular. Here are a few of those advantages:

- Article marketing is free

- Article marketing is simple

- Anyone can do article marketing (if you can’t write your own articles, you can use a ghost writer)

- Article marketing is entirely legitimate.

The growing popularity of article marketing is largely due to the fact that it is free, but it is also popular because it works so effectively. By employing article marketing techniques it is entirely possible for affiliate marketers to make money at home using 100% free resources.

The most successful affiliate article marketers use a combination of free and paid for tools and resources. You have probably heard the saying “less is more” but on the internet more is definitely more: the more you promote your affiliate products, the more you will earn. You can succeed at making money online using free tools and resources, but you can increase your profits exponentially by investing in good tools.