by Andre Sanchez

If you know how to use article marketing to promote your website, you can be sure of a stream of traffic for years to come.  Article marketing is not yet fully understood as being one of the best ways to advertise your website:  even better than pay per click advertising.

Let’s first look at the benefits, and then what you must do to achieve them. If you write an article that is relevant to your website or theme of your niche, then you can either publish it on your website as a web page, or submit it to article directories. If you take the former route, and publish your article on your own website, then the search engines will regard it as good fresh content and give the page on your website that it is published the benefit for that in the listing for that page. 

This might not be enough to guarantee anybody ever finding your page, since it might be one of another million using the same keyword and topic. That does not mean to say that you should not do it, since your web page listing (Google lists individual web pages, not complete web sites) is determined by a large number of factors of which freshness and relevant content are only two. They are, however, two necessary factors to include in your whole website design if you are using search engine optimization as a major part of your traffic generation strategy.

On the other hand, if you submit your article for publishing on article directories, and the article is approved, then it can do a lot more for you that if it were only on your own website. Article directories generally allow you what is known as an ‘author’s resource box’, in which you can provide some information about yourself and a link to your website.  You can use that link to your advantage.

If your article is interesting or authoritative enough for a reader to want to know more about what you have written, then you should provide them with a way of doing so.  You do this through your use of your resource box.  Make a statement to the effect that ‘For more information on this subject, check out ‘myname’s’ website on ‘xxxx.com’.  For ‘xxxx.com’ provide a URL that leads the reader directly to a page on your site that provides more information on that topic.

That page must be relevant to the topic.  If you have written an article about emeralds, don’t lead them to a page on sapphires, or even your gemstones home page. It must be emeralds.  That page must also include an opt-in form, or even be a squeeze page designed to secure their email address and first name.  Never let anybody visit any page on your website and leave without you seducing their name and email address from them. You must build up an email list of people interested in gemstones in general so that you can keep in contact with special offers from time to time.

This is using article marketing to its best advantage because here is what you have just achieved with very little work other that writing an article. First, you have published the URL to a page on your site that any reader can click to visit your website. This is exactly what you have to work so hard to achieve on search engines like Google, and pay so much for on pay per click advertising programs such as Adwords.  Yet by writing an article you get it free!

Now only that, but Google regards a link back to your site from another website as indicating the importance of the page to which the other site is linked. That improves your listing position on Google.  Every article directory that accepts your article also provides you with a one-way link back to the web page you have stated in your resource box URL.

However, that is not the end of it!  Many people who are unable to write their own content copy articles from directories to their own sites.  They are allowed to do this as long as they also include the author’s name and resource box. This provides you not only with another one way link back to your website, but also with more opportunities for visitors to the other site to click on your link. 

In order to achieve all of these benefits however, your article must be well written and provide information that is useful to the person reading it.  Make sure that you keep spell checking because readers will think that if you are sloppy with your spelling then you might be sloppy with your information.  Poor grammar is also something you should try to avoid, although you are not expected to be perfect.  Spelling is more important than grammar, although to write “John and me is working on the similar thing” does not provide a lot of confidence to the reader in your abilities.

If English is not your language, or if you are not sure about your writing abilities, have your articles written by a ghostwriter.  The benefits that articles give you are well worth the effort, and if you learn how to use article marketing to promote your website, then there is no reason why you should not succeed in driving lots of traffic to your chosen web pages. 

How to use Article Marketing to Promote Your Website was originally published  at http://www.affiliatemarketinglife.com