How Can Article Marketing Help Your Business?

Article marketing has long been one of the most popular ways that business owners and webmasters go about promoting their website on the Internet. Considering how much the world of online marketing has evolved over the last few years, is article marketing still viable and how exactly will it help your online business or your website?

To begin with, yes, article marketing is still a successful way to promote your online business. If you're unfamiliar with the practice, article marketing is the process of distributing uniquely created articles to different online article directories.

Unlike with a platform such as Associated Content, you don't get paid for your efforts. Instead, you get to include a resource box with all of your articles that includes information about yourself, your business or your website. You can also link back usually once or twice to any of your website pages.

Why would you want to spend your time with article marketing if you don't get paid? Here are some of the benefits:

Link Building and SEO

Your Google PageRank plays a big role in determining how highly your website gets listed in the results for a particular search query. The main factor that determines your PageRank is the quantity and quality of incoming links leading to your website.

Therefore, link building is a must for any webmaster that's serious about improving the presence of his online business. Article marketing is one of the most effective ways to do this for several reasons.

For one thing, the major article directories carry high PageRank's themselves. This adds more credibility and value to the links that lead to your website(s). Additionally, the links are all one way links, meaning you don't need to link to the article directories to get the links leading to your own site. This also adds value to the links over other methods of link building such as link exchanges.

Additionally, all of the links are entirely in your own control, meaning you can make them extremely relevant and targeted to your particular website or niche. You get to choose the anchor text that your link includes and the links are found on web pages with highly targeted content you created.

All of these factors mean the links that you get from article marketing are of a very high quality. The more articles you write, the more links you can create and the bigger the boost you'll see on your website's PageRank and overall SEO.

Reputation and Presence

When you distribute your articles you will also be increasing the reputation and the presence of your website and your business. Your reputation is increased as you provide insightful, informative articles related to your field.

If you've written several books on coaching football for example, you could write articles centered around different tips, drills, workouts, motivational tools and so forth. By doing so you'll be showing the world your knowledge of the subject and will therefore be promoting the value your books in the process.

Your presence is increased with every article that you write. This presence will provide a further jolt to your reputation, and will also help you see more website traffic. This traffic comes when people actually click through on the links in your resource box and end up on your website. The more engaging and useful the articles you write are, the more people will click on your links, thirsty for more information from you and your website.

A few of the more popular article directories you may want to consider are:

Ezine Articles

Articles Base

Article Dashboard

Go Articles

Article Alley

Like anything else, you need to put real time and effort into your article marketing program to succeed with it. If you do, you'll see that your website's standing in the search engines will improve, as will the credibility, reputation and presence of your business.