Article marketing can be seen as a form of offline and online marketing using written articles. The print media offers businesses a platform for reaching its millions or thousands of readers. The service can be free or paid but the content must be written according to guidelines. Newspaper and magazine articles are usually written by a person with extensive knowledge in the field. These experts are well versed in certain topics, ranging from sports to financial matters. If you browse through a local newspaper, you will find specific sections allocated for various articles. Issues published weekly may have topics on relationships and youth activities. A well known newspaper will do its best to cater for diverse readers. Print articles come with credits, references, acknowledgements, and contact details at the end of the article. This is important if you want readers to know your business. An article is meant to be informative as well as being an advertising tool. Either way, even if you are a non-profit making organisation, you will want people to know about your community service or charity work, so that they can donate money to the cause.

The growth of the internet has seen offline article marketing being applied online. Online article advertising is more advanced and open to any good writer. Yes indeed, there are millions of websites and blogs which need fresh content on a regular basis. This is an golden opportunity to thousands of new writers who would not qualify writing for a popular newspaper or magazine. Like offline marketing articles, online marketing articles must have references and contact details. These details are in the form of personal website links, referral links and e-mail addresses.

Online article marketing uses the article directory as the medium of outreach. First of all, the article must be written and posted on a website or blog. It can be a personal website, community blog or affiliate website. Many web masters need content so badly. Written content is like gold and indeed the opium of many a website. Secondly, the content must be written in a way which improves the search engine ranking of the website. Thirdly, if the content is not written in a way which improves the search engine ranking, then it must be valuable and captivating to its audience. Readers will keep coming back for more, and inviting their friends in the process. After satisfying all these requirements, you must then submit your website for directory listing. After a couple of months, 2 or more, you should expect to see your website ranking in the search engines.

Search engine optimization is one great method for online article marketing. An article which is search engine optimized will find its way in the top most searched articles. This means that thousands or millions of web surfers will come across your article online. On the other hand, if your article is not search engine optimized, none or very few searchers will come across your article. Search engine optimization is both easy and difficult. You may plug some great keywords at the right places in your article you wrote, but you will have to wait for months to see results. Patience is needed here. Even more so, Google and Yahoo are constantly changing the rules for search engine ranking. Some of these changes are necessary because there are always one or more web masters who try to abuse the system.

There in no doubt that online [1] article marketing is cheaper than newspaper advertising. The good thing about internet is that it has broken the rules for competition. An internet whiz kid can now easily compete on a level field with any big corporation. You don’t need thousands of dollars to implement your marketing plan anymore. There is a lot of successful websites which grew up from nothing but content. Some of these websites are making thousands and millions of dollars each year. By participating in forums and blogs increases your backlinks to other websites. Backlinking to your website can be free or paid. Webmasters with no or little time for forum participation will buy backlinks at a low cost.

Online [1] article marketing thrives on good content. Unfortunately; there are web masters and affiliates who post low quality articles. Google and Yahoo have introduced rules that reward high quality articles and penalize poor quality articles. The aim is to reduce or eliminate junk from search engines. In the beginning, it was believed that using the right keywords will increase traffic to your website. Web masters started abusing the system, and Google smelled the rot. Google has a new rule where it penelizes keyword spamming. The density of keywords required for an article was set at 15%. This is roughly one or two keywords per paragraph.

[3] Online article marketing has spawned many platforms for writing articles. Besides community forums and networks which rely on user generated content, there is a number of websites which offer web pages or mini websites to members. Sites like Squidoo and Hub Pages allow members to create a web page on their platform. All the web pages are hosted by the parent site owners. If you are looking to create a good website but you have no money for hosting or designing a new website, then this is an opportunity for you. Squidoo and Hub Pages allow content in the form of text, photos, polaroid, videos, html, payment gateways and many other cool widgets. There are many websites online which will allow you to create a free website or web page in exchange for quality content. Content attracts visitors. Visitors and advertisers generate revenue for website and blog owners.