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Article marketing is one of the easiest and fastest ways to get traffic to a brand new website. It’s used both by beginning marketers and by multi-million dollar companies.

What is article marketing? How does it work? Let’s go over a broad overview of the basics.

How It Works

The term “article marketing” actually encompasses a pretty wide range of different techniques. In the broadest sense, any time you’re distributing articles with a link back to your website for the purposes of SEO, branding or traffic, you’re using article marketing.

Article marketing, when done well, can consistently drive hundreds if not thousands of visitors to your site. Because you’re getting more backlinks, you’ll also rank better in the search engines. Finally, because people keep seeing your name on different sites all over the net, you’ll build your brand.

Why Put Articles on Other People’s Sites?

Why put articles on other people’s websites, instead of on your own? There are a few reasons.

First of all, if your site is relatively new, it doesn’t yet have the weight and reputation that some of these other sites have. Other sites already have backlinks, longevity and reputation.

In other words, the same article that might rank in the top five on someone else’s site may not rank at all when it’s placed on your site, simply because your site doesn’t pull the same weight (yet).

Also, if you get your article on someone else’s website in your industry, you get to tap into their existing reader base and existing base of traffic.

Finally, the one-way backlinks you get by writing articles for others can make a big different in your rankings.

The Process from A to Z

The process of article marketing usually looks something like this:

First, you start with a title or keyword that you want to target. The title is attention catching, designed to get people from search engines or other people’s sites to click on the article. The keyword should also be carefully chosen to maximize search engine traffic.

You write the article; doing whatever research you need throughout the process. The final article should be at least 400 words long, preferably as long as 1,000 words.

The article is then submitted to other site(s). These can be sites of other bloggers, other industry websites or just article directories.

Once your article gets ranked, you’ll start to see a consistent flow of traffic coming in from the articles and from search engines.

That’s an overview of the overall process. Of course, each segment has its own quirks and challenges. For example, how do you choose a good keyword? How do you get someone to click on the link to your website? How do you get other bloggers to let you write on their blogs?

In this article series, we’ll explore these questions in depth and a lot more.

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