When I was doing my yearly planning for 2010, I listed the five eBook marketing strategies that I intend to carry out. Number one on that list was more Article marketing. I personally try to write and submit an article at least once a week.
In case you're not familiar with article marketing yet, it involves writing informative and useful articles and distributing them to article directories – and giving permission to anyone to reprint your article as long as your author resource box is left intact.
Here are some of the benefits I have personally experienced from article marketing:
Free traffic to my site
High authority article directories, like EzineArticles, enjoy a lot of traffic (we're talking millions of eyesball every month). Many of those who read my articles invariably click on the links in my author resource box and end up going to my site. This is free traffic that I otherwise would not have been able to attract to my site!
In fact, visitors from article directories make up a significant portion of my website visitors. So much so that, once, my site fell from its Google rankings and I hardly noticed it. I kept getting a lot of site visits, and most were coming from articles I had written and published in article directories. Some of them are couple of years old.
Increased rankings in Google
Search engine optimization (SEO) experts say that one of the most important ways to get high Google rankings for your target keywords is to have lots of links from other sites pointing to yours. The key is the anchor text of those links should be the keywords you'd like to rank high for.
These are the same links you get from the usually high-authority article directories all linking back to your website through your resource box.
Affiliate sales
Some article directories allow you to link, not just to your website, but to an affiliate product's sales page. This means that your article gets blasted all over the Internet, so increasing the chances of someone clicking on your affiliate links and buying your affiliate products. This in turn, means more affiliates agreements for you.
This concept is called "bum marketing" or lazy marketing, which does not even require you to have a website. All you need to do is write and submit articles to article directories and you make affiliate commissions from those articles for as long as they're online.
Another benefit of article marketing is that you will become a published author and, therefore, people will begin to recognize you as an expert on the topic.
