Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia defines 'article marketing' as "a type of advertising through which a business writes short articles related to its respective industry."

I'm here to tell you that internet article marketing works! Why do you think so many article directories are popping up all over the internet the past couple of years? Internet article marketing is a great method to get tons of traffic to your website without breaking the bank by spending your hard earned money on advertising services like Google Adwords(tm), Yahoo Search Marketing(tm), or Microsoft adCenter(tm).

If your niche is very competitive, your costs can begin to add up fast. Sometimes you'll tally up your finances and find that you have a negative ROI. This is easily avoided by using internet article marketing.

When you use article marketing effectively, you'll soon become recognized by others as as an expert in your particular niche.

Internet article marketing builds many incoming back-links to your website which will benefit you with lots more targeted visitors in the long run.

How Does Internet Article Marketing Work?

You know, the web is made of lots of websites. These sites contain tons of content. People usually search for this content with a particular subject in mind. This information is found easily by a search engine. What a search engine does is go out and follow from link to link on the internet. The search engine collect this information and digests it and catalog and index it using the information and the keywords found on each page.

The search engines are able to give you the best information possible by carefully indexing and cataloging what they find by using the information that they discovered when they were crawling the internet. The information that they provide to you has to closely relate to the search term that you used as well as be accurate. When written well, articles are considered a very good source of information.

In order for visitors to keep returning to their websites, webmasters must provide their visitors with timely, interesting, and accurate information. This is very important for someone who maintains a blog on a daily basis. For the blogger to climb to and maintain high in the search results, he must make posts to his blog every day.

As I'm sure you are aware, you need to post everyday to your website, and this can gobble up alot of your valuable time. As a webmaster, you can supplement the content on your site with quality, well-written articles authored by other people. The only requirement is that you leave the author's resource box intact including keeping the links live if that is how they were when you retrieved the article from the article directory.

Ok, What Is An Article Directory?

An article directory is composed of a big database of articles about a variety of subjects in a variety of categories. People who write articles are encouraged to submit their articles there. Webmasters, that's usually you- are able to gather free articles for posting on their own websites as long as they credit the original author by leaving the resource box intact including the author's links. Article directories hold alot of information about almost any subject that you can think up. There are probably some subjects that you probably haven't even thought of that you could find there.

Some article directories only accept articles written on certain niches such as computer technology, or internet marketing or even particular health issues. All that you have to do is read their submission rules and see what is allowed and what is prohibited. At most large article sites you can submit your article on just about any subject as long as it doesn't promote hate, put down someone's religion, or sexual orientation, or advocate violence. Other than that, the world is wide open on what you can write about.

What Do I Get Back For Giving the Articles that I've Written to an Article Directory?

Following the last paragraph, there is a place where the author can place his resource box. This usually contains one or two sentences about the author and invites the reader to visit his or her website for more information beyond the article.

Submitting your articles to an article directory has many benefits. You not only get free marketing from it, but you get lots of exposure. You can turn yourself into an expert. It creates a win-win situation for both you and the publishers that get to use your articles.

Research Is Crucial

Like any leg of internet marketing, internet article marketing is not any different. You'll do some research on the topic area of the articles that you intend to write. This research is very easy to do. Visiting forums and visiting websites which center around your chosen subject will provide you with alot of information from which to write an article of between 250-750 words.

Ok, Now That I've Written My Article, What Next?

You should post your article on your own blog or put it on your website, first. Then wait for a couple of weeks or a month until your article is crawled by the search engines. You'll be able ton find out if your article has been indexed by searching for your article's title in the search engines. When you find it, then you can submit it to the article directories. The reason you would want to do it this way is that you'll want to avoid duplicate content possible.

Are you Serious? Wait A Month?

There is a new way right now of writing and submitting your articles to your own website or article directory, as well as about 700+ as of this writing. Each article directory is submitted a unique, well written version of your article. This provides well written , non-duplicate versions of your article eliminating worries of duplicate content. This is called the Unique Article Wizard, and right now it's so confidential that I can't tell you about it here. I had to sign an agreement with the creator promising that I would not discuss the methods in detail. Check my resource box for more information.