Compared to other methods of online marketing, article marketing is low-cost if you can write it yourself and the results are long-lasting as the articles are distributed and remain for a long time.

The method is to write articles related to your website and submit it to as many articles directories as possible using article submission tools.

What articles will you write for your audience? Find out what they are thinking about, their concerns, their problems? How do you know? You can browse through the forums related to your niche and see the kind of questions they ask. Look at Yahoo Answers for clues. Browse through magazines and see the kind of headlines on magazine covers. Feel the pulse of your target readers.

Do keyword research with the free Google Adwords keyword tool. Use phases with three words or more. These long-tail keywords have less competition. Find exact phases with has between 100 to 2,000 searches a month. A good phrase to start with is “How to”

To increase the chance of getting your articles found by the readers, you optimize your articles by putting keywords in the title, in the first paragraph, last paragraph and sprinkle a few more in the body of the articles.

Below each article is the bio box that includes a link to your website. These backlinks will increase your website ranking and increase its visibility in the search result, while a good content attracts readers to follow you via the bio box to your website.

Here are some tips to write the article well. Your article title must be catchy and arouse the reader’s curiosity for them to click on your article to read it. Take some time to brainstorm on the best title for your article.

In your content, do not give the readers all the answers. The aim of your article is to entice them to click on the link to your website. If you give them all the answers, where is the incentive to visit your website. One way is to give them only a few tips and tell them to visit your website to read the complete text for the rest of the tips.

After you have written your articles, I recommend submitting it(manually) to the major article directories such as ezinearticles.com, articlebase.com and goarticles.com. If you want even more exposure then you can use automated submission software submit to hundreds of articles directories.

Before you start doing article marketing you need to know that it’s a long term game. Commit to spending an hour a day to write an article for the next 2 months. You may not see the result immediately, but after 2 months or so you will notice an increase in traffic to your website. Take action today!

1. Start blogging for your business – you can have a third party hosted blog up and running in 10 minutes. Write quality contents that your customers would like to read. A regularly updated blog can drive not only traffic to your main web site, but can also help your website’s search engine ranking. If you are serious about blogging you should host it on your server and use an unique domain for it.
2. Offer free articles to other websites – most people know that search engines ‘love’ quality unique contents. Contact other website owners and tell them they can post your articles on their websites as long as they provide a link back to your website.
3. Email signature – by having a small call-to-action message in your email’s signature can greatly increase the chance of being found by potential customers.
4. Give away a free e-product – e-books or reports are great for getting the words around on the Internet. You need to make sure the information is top notch quality – something that people would normally have to pay for. Never be afraid to give away a lot for free!
5. Social networking sites – these are web sites where your customers ‘hang out’ and spend time on. If you try to advertise or sell your service or product.
6. Templates and themes – if you are a website designer you can do this yourself, otherwise you can simply hire someone to design the templates or themes for you. Make sure to put a link at the bottom of all the themes.
7. Use videos – videos are getting more and more popular on the net now. There are many ways of using videos to promote your website. One good example would be to make a video to show people how to do a particular task. So if you sell fishing rods, then you would make a video on how to choose a fishing rod, what should people look out for when buying a fishing rod and which one is good for beginners etc.

If you take the time to implement and study these seven methods, you will see the traffic of your website shoot up within weeks.

Most people who are new to article marketing will face many problems because they don’t understand the right ways of structuring and placing articles in article directories, therefore the results they get would be limited.

Not all article directories are the same; some have good traffic for all subjects while others only have traffic to a few very specific topics, and some doesn’t have any traffic at all. So if you submit your articles to one of the bad article directories, Google will assume your website link is part of the “bad neighbourhoods”.

Understanding the differences among article directories is the key to success. You will find so many so-called “article blasting” services that will spam article directories with poorly written contents, which are often filled with spelling and grammar errors. These type of articles will seriously affect the quality of the directory, and this can happen very quickly because many people are using these “blasting” services. If these sites do not pay attention to the bad contents they will develop a bad reputation, which means the search engines will ignore them.

So what’s the ideal way to get around this issue?
The short answer is to do it by manually. You can use a professional article marketing company or you can simply do it yourself. By submitting articles manually to hand-picked directories you will get the best search engine ranking results. Remember that success is all about quality and not quantity. After all, why would you want your articles on hundreds of article directories that are banned by Google?

When you submit the articles manually you won’t have to worry about getting negative effects in the search engines, instead you’ll get the quality one way links that would give you the value you need. Good quality article directories are normally visited by both humans and search engine bots on a regular basis. Finding them isn’t difficult; a good starting point would be Google.

Once you have collected a list of article directories, you need to visit each one and look at the submitted articles. The next thing you want to check is Pagerank. An easy way to do this is that if you are using Firefox you can install a plugin called SearchStatus. With this simple plugin you can instantly see the Pagerank number at the bottom of the browser when you visit any sites. Avoid submitting articles to Pagerank 0 directories because that’s the indication of banned sites. One last thing you want to check is the Alexa rank. This number tells you how much traffic a site receives. It isn’t 100% accurate, but it can be used as a guideline. If you have installed the SearchStatus plugin you should be able to see this next to the Pagerank – the blue bar. Move the mouse pointer over this blue and a fairly long number will pop up. A good article directory should have the Alexa rank below 1,000,000.

After finding the good article directories, you can then import them into an article submission software like this one here.