Article in General Business

Article marketing, also sometimes called bum marketing, is the marketing of your website, usually an affiliate website, through external articles. Typically, a webmaster writes an article related to the niche of his site. Inside the article or in the article credits, the author includes a link back to his site with the relevant anchor text. They will then publish these article on external pages, often other blogs or article repositories.

What is the purpose of article marketing? There are two main things. Most commonly, people use article marketing to generate backlinks. These backlinks are typically placed to either get the site indexed or to target specific keywords that are the anchor text of the link. The second reason people use article marketing is to get direct affiliate sales. This is more rare, but some people have done it successfully. One will usually post a link to their site that automatically redirects to an affiliate. More rarely, some webmasters may link directly to the affiliate in the article.

After the article is written, you have the option of submitting it two multiple article repositories that typically republish and allow their users to distribute it with your link, or to post it on it’s own one time. Both have their pros and cons. If you submit to an article repository that allows republication or to multiple sites, you are, in effect, creating duplicate content. Since the content likely won’t be hosted on your server, it’s highly unlikely it will affect the site you’re marketing directly. However, it may lower the amount of effect the articles will have at your site. Google and other search engines might not count the backlinks in your niche article very much or at all if it’s been spread around the internet repeatedly. You other option is to simply publish the article once with your anchor text. However, while the search engines will eventually find it, it may be slower. Moreover, it’s just one backlink. I recommend you do a combination of both methods; additionally, in each article you should come up with different anchor keyword text to distinguish it in the search engines. This will ideally help in getting your site to rank well.

Lastly, you must consider the content of the article itself. The content should be related to the site (and likewise, your site should be related to the affiliate program it promotes). It should be of decent length and productive, useful content. Don’t just write useless stuff. In addition to getting search engine rankings from article marketing, you can also get visitors who find their way to your articles. Also make sure that you don’t use too many keywords to your site. Some search engines have been said to penalize websites (in this case, your article and it’s ability to promote your site) because of “keyword stuffing.” Keyword stuffing is, effectively, putting as many related keywords as possible into an article to get that article to rank well for the terms in it. Many search engines don’t like this and will penalize you for it.

There are a few other aspects of article marketing, but this article covers the basics and the definition. Ultimately, article marketing can be a good search engine optimization tool if done correctly