Monday, October 27, 2008

Online Advertising Secrets: What Is Article Marketing?

By Don Bethune

Businesses and entrepreneurs have come to define article marketing as a brilliant way to advertise. This is because articles can be used to promote goods, but they also identify the marketers themselves as the experts in the field. Articles are used to convey ideas, in a journalism sense, but they can also strengthen legitimacy beyond what customers might read in local or see on the late night infomercials.

The concept of article marketing has been around a long time. You can find relationships between businesses and publishers as far back as when mass printing was invented. These relationships involved business people providing information and expertise in articles that were provided freely to publishers who printed the articles, essentially advertisements, for the public. The target population for these articles was of course, the readers of the publication.

Now that you understand the concept of article marketing, you may be wondering how you can participate in this strategy. How do you write your own articles? The first thing to understand is that the articles are short written pieces that convey the important information about the type of business you want to conduct.

Well written articles are valuable because they increase client-lists as well as enhancing reputations and credibility. They can be powerful enough to legitimize a business. Therefore, when you are writing an article, certain crucial information must be relayed to the reader: name, title, biography and contact information. If the article is being written for the internet, then a website or URL must be provided. Itas important to establish yourself as trustworthy and an expert in your field. Ideally, the biography will contain the information necessary to establish these two goals by containing credentials, educational background and achievements in your field.

As stated above, the explosion of online commerce and marketing for businesses, web-based or not, has broadened the use and need for article marketing. The original concept of publisher-business symbiosis is still the core relationship which drives article marketing, even in cyberspace. If anything, the relationship is stronger, and the possibilities for reaching target markets and populations are even greater.

The identification of target markets for article marketing is the key, and this information can be obtained by studying search engines: who is using them, what is being searched, and which sites are showing up in the search results. You will want your online article to address a subject containing certain \"keywords\" so the search engines can find you easily. This is referred to as \"Search Engine Optimization\", or SEO.

Any business or website that uses optimization strategies can increase traffic to their site. The more people, or visitors you can attract, the greater the potential for higher sales and profits. The role of the well written article in getting this higher number of sales is proof of the effectiveness of your marketing strategy. Including a business owneras website address also helps the site in getting a higher rank for search engine results.

One problem with the success of online article advertising is that it has fostered an explosion of topical articles on the web. Not all articles contain correct information or good writing. This may lower the usefulness of article advertising online, and hapless internet users may unwittingly take away bad information, which can lower the credibility of the articles themselves and their authors. A solution to the article content quality problem has been found in the use of article marketing services. These services can help businesses with the generation of well-written, accurate and well-distributed pieces.

The above information only scratches the surface of the answer to the question aWhat is article marketing?a Hopefully, business owners who are not quite as internet savvy as the rest of the cyber marketing industry can take some of this information to make use of advertising through informative, industry-related articles and to gain a better understanding of the all the potential that exists in online marketing.

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