The Basics of Article Marketing

Article marketing is one of the most potent methods for internet marketing. Articles have always been used even before the advent of internet to create brand awareness, push products and create a business image in print publications. With the arrival of internet, article marketing has exploded and is being used as the primary vehicle to promote, sell and inform about products, services and web presence.

Articles carry value and trust

How many times have you taken interest and spent time reading a few hundred words of advertisement copy? The chances are that you or anybody for that matter has rarely done so. But reading articles is something done voluntarily and it carries trust and value in comparison to plain advertisement copy. The sales message or suggestive text leading to some product, information or a web link is very subtle and done in a covert fashion.

This subtlety in articles does what an aggressive sales message cannot hope to do, because most people who are targeted simply dislike the in-your-face type of hard sell tactics. When a reader is gently led to a course of action, it happens without their even realizing it.

Unique and original content is the key

Simple copy paste of stolen content will quickly kill your article marketing campaign as soon as it is launched. If this was permitted, cyber space will be carrying thousands of articles of exactly same content penned by different names and defeat the very purpose of drawing online community to the internet.

Nothing either online or offline is 100% original research. Every author or writer draws information and data from various sources. Applying a personal touch, angle, twist and selection of words and phrases to what he or she has gathered in the article makes it unique and original.

The search engine algorithms and powerful software weed out duplicate content and bury such articles deep into the cyber wilderness to be never found again. The most important and fundamental basics of article marketing relates to original and unique content and you should never forget it. Such a situation calls for writers who can deliver exactly that consistently. It is definitely tome consuming, but has to done for effective article marketing effort.

Articles should prompt for action

The whole idea of article marketing is to lead the reader to a certain action you want done. This could be a back link to your website, subscribing to a newsletter, registering with a website, taking a poll, shopping on an ecommerce website or anything that can elicit some positive response from the reader.

For your article to reach a larger audience and to target specific readers, it must contain keywords strategically placed in the article to be picked up by the search engines.