My colleague and guest blogger David Carmichael will be contributing a total of ten posts over the next few months aimed at providing techniques for marketing your online business. In this first post, David looks at Article Marketing.

Most business experts agree that marketing is everything. This art comes first in every business venture. Marketing blends and integrates all the functions of the business together and presents them to customers in the form of advertising, promotion and other marketing activities.

This is why most online businesses or websites consider marketing seriously. The importance of marketing lies in its ability to bring the business to the market – where customers dwell and opportunities thrive. In the case of websites, if one wishes to have his site linked to thousands of other sites in the internet, also known as backlinking, then you may consider article marketing as your first option.

Apparently, the benefits of article marketing are endless, probably because countless possibilities could happen to you. But these things are certain and fundamental. What’s so great about article marketing is that it is the easiest and fastest way to promote your site. Not to mention, not only is it easy and fast, it’s free of charge. Contrary to the typical marketing strategy in the corporate world, where hundreds and even thousands of dollars are spent, article marketing is free. Later on, we will run through some of the basics in article marketing.

Another benefit is that it gives you instant exposure. Ever heard of stories where a song or a book gets that instant success overnight? This is also true with article marketing. It gives you a direct and instant exposure, period. Another proven benefit of article marketing is 100% efficiency. This technique is sure to win if used as a strategy. Then of course since it is marketing, once the effort is done and the seeds have been sowed to the field, all you have to do is watch and see your website get promoted passively! This means that everyday your site will be promoted, more and more customers will link you, and more visitors will attach your site, and this will go on and on.

So how will I do it? Let’s get our hands dirty now as we learn the basic type of article marketing. Here it is.

1. First, try to make an article or a review about your brand, in your case – your website, what you are selling or what you are about. For example, if your site is about guitars, you may want to make an article about guitars.
2. Then post it to popular article directories in the internet.


Probably the top directory we have today is www.ezinearticles.com. Post it there and have it published. Ezine Articles hosts thousands of articles and are categorized in many sections. You may check in their site for further reference.

3. Then here is the one last thing you shouldn’t miss out – attach your website at the end of your article post, i.e. www.mydomainname.com. You may want to attach “for more resources or for further reference, please visit my site at www.mydomainname.com” or “Click here to Learn guitar tabs” as anchor text text.

Here’s a good example I got from ezinearticles.com:

When you do this, visitors can follow you to your website, which is our main goal by the way. There are other article directories out there. But these site directories are at the top: EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com and SearchWarp.com. You may consider these sites in your priority list. Since article marketing is limitless, other web masters can take your content to their own site. Talk about passive marketing.