How To Promote Your Site with Article Marketing For Free

Have you used articles to promote your website yet? If not, article marketing is an extremely valuable and often overlooked area of promotion that you should look into. It is possibly one of the easiest and cheapest manners to draw attention to your business as well as create backlinks.

To get started in article marketing, all you need are some writing skills or the ability to hire someone who has them. Choose topics that relate to your business and write short, but useful articles on them. For example, if you have a website that sells diapers, you could write articles on the advantages of disposable or cloth diapers, how to prevent diaper rash, etc. The articles need to be between 400-600 words long and should offer valuable tidbits and information.

Use relevant keywords in your article marketing documents so the search engines can pick them up easily. The title and first and last paragraph should contain the most important keywords relating to the story. If you utilize valuable keywords, that is ones that are often searched for, you will also gain the interest of webmasters and ezine publishers.

Now for the promotion part, the resource box. This handy little bio at the end of your article is where you are allowed to talk about yourself and your business. Keep it short, most resource boxes can only contain 3-5 lines, but that is more than enough to add what you need to. You should have one line about yourself as the author, a line or two about your business and a link to your website. That is really all you need.

So, how does article marketing help you draw traffic to your site? Well, you can give these handy, informative little articles away for free so that webmasters and anyone else looking for free content can come and copy your article, resource box and all, for use in other places. Each and every time someone uses your article on their website or blog or in an ezine, you are getting free publicity. And that is the basis of article marketing.

For widespread article marketing you can submit your articles to free article directories like Ezine Articles or other similar websites. There, webmasters and other free content-seekers will browse through the articles and pick up the ones they like and can use. The conditions of use require them to include your name as author and your bio box in every single copy of the article. This is article marketing at its finest! A decent writer can whip off a few articles in an hour and they will continue to produce backlinks and promote your product for years!

For more specialized article marketing, you might consider offering articles exclusively to one or two websites that fit your theme. Simply write a brief email with the article included, explaining that you would like to offer use of your article, along with a link to your site for free. If you are only offering this opportunity to one website, mention that it is a unique offer and the webmaster will be more likely to take you up on it.