There are many benefits to article marketing. Because articles become viral, your message literally travels far and wide, increasing traffic to your website and increasing newsletter signups. Article marketing is also used to make sales and to build credibility. Anyone who wants to establish themselves as an expert in their niche should take advantage of all that article marketing has to offer. Article Marketing is essentially writing and distributing short articles to a variety of outlets, including article repositories, which are also called article directories and article banks, forums, and newsletter publishers. Article marketing is one of the most effective types of marketing that one can do - it is also one of the least expensive ways to market a business. In fact, it can even be free, costing you nothing more than your time. Here is how it works. Let's say that you are in the weight loss niche, and you sell various weight loss products, whether they are your own products or products of which you are an affiliate. You write a weight loss article, preferably one that is closely related to one of your products - but you don't want to necessarily advertise the product in the article. Instead, you want to address a problem that the product can help to solve in your article - without mentioning the product. For instance, if you sell a cellulite cream, you can write an article about what cellulite is, what causes it, and the various methods used to get rid of it. The article should be no more than 750 words, and have a compelling title. At the bottom of your article, you include an author's resource box. This is basically a block of text, made up of one paragraph that is anywhere from five to seven lines long. In this paragraph, you might say something like this: John Doe is a weight loss expert who has helped hundreds of people get and keep weight off. You can find more valuable weight loss information and help at his website, John Doe's Weight Loss Secrets, located at johndoe.com. You can find specific information for getting rid of cellulite at johndoe.com/cellulite.html . Once you have written your article, ensured that you have made all of the points that you wanted to make, and checked the article for spelling and grammar mistakes, you are ready to distribute it. Distributing an article can be a very time consuming task. Many people outsource this work, and pay a fee for someone else to do the distribution work. Other's do it themselves using software that automates the process. You should note, however, that a large number of the best article repositories do not allow or approve articles that are auto submitted - and they can tell when this is done. Manual submissions - whether done by you or someone else - is always best. The article is distributed to the article repositories first. There are hundreds of these in existence, and some are better than others. For these repositories, you will need your article, the title, possibly a sub title, your author's resource box, your website Url, your email address, a short description of your article, and a list of keywords, separated by commas, for your article. Essentially, you visit each article repository, either sign up for a new account or log in, and copy and paste all of the information into a form that is provided for article submissions. Most article repositories have a manual approval process, so it may take a week or more before your article appears on their website.
