Making Your Living Online

Unless you're completely brand new to doing business on the internet, you'll have heard about article marketing. Article marketing is how a regular person like you or me can gain a foothold into niche markets and target interested and motivated visitors and turn them into interested and motivated buyers.

Article marketing without any shadow of a doubt is a very powerful tool for using to promote a website. Certainly, if done properly it is an extremely effective method of getting targeted traffic to your site and building backlinks. By using informative articles that are short to promote your site may seem a waste of time, but the actual return on the time you investment can be astounding. But just how does article marketing work?

To start with, for little or no cost, you can write articles and submit them to various article directories and other websites. In turn, these directories and websites publish your articles on their sites. The cumulative affect of this is that your site's search engine rankings will naturally rise due to all the backlinks you've gained from other sites using your content.

Article marketing is very viral and just one article if it has been written well and contains the appropriate keywords for targeting specific visitors can generate plenty of links. All of the links then come back to your site or to another page you have designated as being the landing one.

Article marketing also provides the added benefit allowing even a new website owner or author to develop a reputation as an authority in a niche. When a reader comes across your article through an article directory and is interested enough to click through your links and visit your site, you've been handed the opportunity to develop a relationship with that reader. It's up to you to cultivate that relationship by offering even more relevant content for your readers that addresses their questions, needs or wants.

On occasion you may hear that article marketing is not as effective as it use to be. Also by submitting an article to a number of different article directories is only actually helping to create duplicate content, and which is putting your site at risk of the major search engines choosing to de-index it.

Putting aside any arguments for or against duplicate content for the moment, article marketing is every bit as effective as any traffic or promotional tactic touted these days. Various promotional strategies will come and go, but the strength of article marketing lies in the fact that the World Wide Web is built upon and needs fresh, relevant content continuously.

Each and every day millions of potential customers are going online searching for information. By giving these potential customers the information they want you are placing yourself in a position from which you can profit. By writing many articles you will soon attact a steady stream of traffic to your websites. It's then just down to your site whether you convert that traffic into sales.

Article marketing is the one free or nearly free strategy to promote a product or website that anyone can do. It is an excellent way to bring in targeted traffic if you are willing to work at it consistently and for the long-term.

By writing informative articles using well-researched keywords in whatever niche you select, you can gain more exposure and higher search engine rankings. But, just submitting the same article over and over to hundreds of article repositories and niche websites can dilute the effectiveness of your article marketing efforts.

The real key to article marketing success is to submit unique versions of your articles to the different directories and websites. Daunting as this may sound the results are truly extraordinary and well worth the effort. Gone are the risks of duplicate content and slippage of ranking. While the definition of what constitutes duplicate content continues to be the subject of hot debate, many experienced webmasters are comfortable with ranges above 30%.

However, the more different there is between each version of an article you submit then the better. It is important that you keep in mind that all the top search engines spiders will take numerous elements of each page into consideration as well as the whole webpage when reviewing it. So just by making 30% of small changes to your articles will be more than enough to prevent it from being completely skipped over.

Submitting unique versions of your articles is the smartest way to undertake article marketing. Not only are you gaining targeted traffic, but the boost in ranking tends to last longer from backlinks you build through marketing unique articles.

by Mark Thompson

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