Guest post by Harold Loyola
One of the most effective ways of making money online is article marketing. It is also a very effective means to promote your online business and other sites. The process involves submitting your articles to various web properties that publish them on their sites and this allows you to build links back to your own sites. This then increases your exposure to both internet surfers and search engines, and thus helps in driving traffic to your site which you use to convert into sales, leads, clicks, etc.
Article Directories are not the only way.
There was a time when article directories were the best way to do article marketing. Today it is no longer the case, and article directory submission has become only an arm of the article marketing engine, whereas it used to be the primary means to do it. Don't get me wrong, it is still an effective way on it's own but now there are other equally powerful means to do it.
The sheer quantity of article directories, however still make it a viable means to get good relevant one way backlinks. It is best to start off with the most popular ones such as EzineArticles and GoArticles among others, as they already have good foothold in this niche. You can then extend to the other smaller article directories to diversify your reach.
The Web 2.0 Revolution
Sites such as Squidoo, Hubpages, Wetpaint, and others have opened up many opportunities for article marketing. With some of these sites alone you can already make money online selling products, either of your own or as an affiliate without having your own website. All you need is good quality content, a good product to promote and a well structured page on these Web 2.0 sites. As far as article marketing is concerned, it is also a very powerful way to get links back to your online business or websites.
The popular Web 2.0 sites already generate a lot of traffic and building your own pages on them allows you leverage the popularity of these sites to promote your own sites, through backlinking and RSS feeds. If you create content on these sites that are relevant and compelling your page may become more popular and increases the possibilities of readers looking at the sites you are linking to for more information.
The Rise of the Blog Networks
How do you get other blogs on related topics to your site link back to you? First of all, you will need very good and unique content, with information that other site owners like and will gladly link back to. Easier said than done, as it is not always easy to come up with great content on a consistent basis. This limits the amount of link you may get. What if I told you that there are blog networks that exist where members are able to submit versions of their articles to certain blogs on specific niches within these networks thereby getting one-way, targeted, keyword backlinks to their own sites.
A number of networks such as these have existed for the past few years, however a majority of them are only accessible to members who pay a fixed monthly fee to access the blogs in each network. Each of these networks can have from as little as 100 blogs to as many as 10,000 or even more, with a wide variety of niche blogs in their networks. This is a very powerful article marketing strategy as it can target a specific niche with highly relevant keyword links, and when used over various networks increases it's effectiveness. An example of such membership based blog networks is the one from Portal Feeder.
Promoting your online business or website with the use of article marketing is not hard, however you need to keep a few things in mind when doing it.
The best results come with the use of all these methods of article marketing together as a cohesive article marketing strategy. Sticking to one method limits the potential the areas that a particular method can cover. If you believe that search engine rankings, Google in particular rely a lot on the number quality backlinks to a site in order to rank them on their indexes, then it would be foolish not to utilize every article marketing method available as it will increase the number on links you can potentially have.
The quality of your content plays as much a part of your success in article marketing as the number of links you get. Using any of the methods above still require you to create content that is worthy of being read. Your authority on a specific topic determines whether or not you will get the most out of your article marketing campaign. Remember, you are marketing articles to provide information, and the search for good information is what makes people read your articles. Make your articles good, compelling and unique, make them stand out and you will get both search engine and human interest traffic coming your way.
So now you know that these are methods exist for you to use in promoting your online business or websites. If you need more information on the Article marketing you can read more at http://www.services.ph.