How Article Marketing Works

Article marketing is essentially a form of borrowing or even "stealing" (depending on how you want to look at it) traffic online.

How does this work?

Article Submissions

When you submit an article to an article directory, the question is: Why would you do that instead of just publishing the article on your own website? And the answer is, of course, that your own website may be small, obscure and relatively unknown, whereas an article directory like Ezinearticles or Goarticles is very well known and gets lots and lots of visitors daily.

By publishing your article on one of these sites, you are inserting yourself in front of this large traffic stream and some visitors will find your article that would never have found your own website.

Borrowing Traffic

But what do you do with this traffic? That's where the "marketing" bit comes in. There's basically a deal between an article directory and the authors. The directory gets fresh content and in return, the authors get to place a link or two in the article or (more commonly for traditional article directories) in the "bio box" at the end of the article.

In this bio box, you get to pitch your offer, your product, your website or whatever. If you make it compelling enough, people will click on those links to go check out your site. This way, you have effectively borrowed traffic from the directory.

The Search Engine Optimization Aspect

There's more to it than that, though: An additional benefit is that those backlinks are great for search engine optimization. You get to choose the anchor text of the links yourself and the more such links you have pointing to your site, the better it will rank in the search engine results.

Finally, because a large article directory is an authority site, it's easier to get an article ranked for a specific keyword than it is to get a new, unknown website ranked for that same keyword. This lets you promote your article until it gets lots of search engine traffic and thus increase the amount of visitors you can "borrow" from the directory.

Conclusion

Clearly, there are lots of benefits to article marketing. And since more links are better and more content is better, many marketers submit articles to several (sometimes even hundreds of) article directories. In an attempt to leverage article marketing and be able to create more content, article spinning is often utilized. Rewrtiting and spinning new content using article spinning software can be quite problematic, as it often leads to spamming. But it's an example that goes to show how eager people are to get their content and their links published.

In a nutshell, article marketing means inserting your content in an already existing traffic-stream.