There is no denying the marvelous potency of article marketing. It is a relatively easy strategy that is loaded with a lot of advantages for your online business. Article marketing involves the submission of articles to as many article directories as possible.

There is more to it than just that, of course. You could use the steps outlined below for a truly efficient article marketing campaign.

1. Pick a topic relevant to the subject of your website. As with our running example, if your website is dedicated to dog grooming, dog grooming tips or dog grooming items are good topics to discuss.

2. Research on your chosen topic. Try to discover something novel about it that hasn’t been discussed to death in other channels.

3. Write an article that will share the information you have pinpointed. The length should be between 350 to 1,400 words. Anything less would be too short to successfully convey what you want to convey. Anything more would be too long to sustain your readers’ attention.

If you are not that confident about your writing prowess or if you simply don’t have the time to write an article, you could hire a freelancer to do the job for you. The usual rates range from $2 to $30 per article. Price should only be a secondary consideration next to quality, however. Writing is one of those services where you get what you pay for most of the time. Don’t proceed with this option blindly, however. There are many risks to consider. I would suggest The Outsourcing Survival Kit, a comprehensive tome, which is the first of its kind, dealing with all manners of digital outsourcing as well as the steps you should take to protect the interests of your business.

4. Include a resource box at the end of your article. Your resource box should contain a concise introduction of yourself and your business, as well as a link to your website.

5. Then, it is time to submit your article to the many, many, many article directories on the World Wide Web. You might ask how a process which seems so simple could generate a lot of traffic for your website. That is a very valid question, but do consider the following benefits offered by article marketing.

   • Article directories figure prominently well is SERPs. Hence, having your link displayed in the articles you submit will mean that your link will be exposed to the millions of visitors who visit the said article directories.

   • Article directories have high PR. Having an article published, with an inbound link to your website, will give the latter a boost in its own PR.

          • If the article you submit is of excellent quality, it will have a good chance of getting picked up by eZine editors and other webmasters. This means more inbound links for you and this means more visitors.

          • There are so many article directories on the World Wide Web. Suppose you submit the same exact article to a hundred of them; that would mean a hundred inbound links guaranteed. But what if you submit ten or twenty articles? Again, traffic is a numbers game.

          • Articles are low cost investments, and for most, they actually require zero cost. This is an excellent option, considering that one article submitted to just one article directory could be generating traffic for your website for many years to come. Just like the launch booster, the search engines, and the affiliates, articles are additional sources of fuel for your traffic tank. In our running analogy of a car, this is how the machine should look like at this point…

Articles, as I always mention in my writings, are marketing seeds. You have to plant them first and they do have a gestation period of three weeks on the average before search engines, eZine publishers, and webmasters start picking them up.