By Dana Wallert

Article marketing is a fairly new, very effective internet marketing tool that allows you to promote yourself, your product, website or service. But, this seemingly simply marketing technique can have explosive results!

As a business owner or marketer, you simply write articles about your product, service or website. In other words, you write about what you know. Once you’ve written your article(s), you start to submit those articles to directories and sites that accept them. From that point, your articles will be spreading across the internet like wildfire…wildfire with your name, site’s name and usually a link to your site included! You see, whenever you submit an article, you include an “author resource box” that includes any information about yourself, your experience, your business and your site’s URL. Anytime that article is published, including on the directory sites, your information must appear along with it!

As a webmaster or publisher, you know that one of the keys to keep your site popular with search engines and to keep your visitors coming back is to have fresh, new, relevant content. Article directories can be the answer to your prayers! You simply search the articles or browse the site and you will find as many articles as you could want to add to your site or publication. All articles submitted to these directories are free to re-print as long as they are reprinted exactly as presented and include the author’s information. There can be site-specific conditions on the reprinting (so be sure to check the terms of each site), but for the most part just stick to the article as presented with all author info included and you’ll be safe!

Some people can get put off by the idea of actually writing something for publication. It can send them back into freshman English class-like anxiety attacks. But, don’t worry most people that use article marketing aren’t Pulitzer Prize worthy writers! In my experience, the best articles and the ones that are picked up and spread the most are the ones that are written in a very reader-friendly manner. Yes, grammar and spelling are important, but what’s most important is that your information is easily accessible and helpful or interesting to potential readers.

If you simply don’t have time or really dislike writing, you can always hire a copywriter or ghost writer to do the work for you. Just make sure that the terms are very clear from the beginning as to whose name will appear on the article, the links to be included, the keywords you’d like the articles to focus on, etc.

If you’re looking for a new marketing strategy, and you don’t have a huge budget…write a few articles! Get your name out there and start getting recognized as the expert that you are. And best of all get mass distribution of the all-mighty links to your website.

About The Author

Dana Wallert is the owner of a free article directory - DW Article Directory. Find more about Dana and sign up to receive her free monthly newsletter at DW Office Solutions - Virtual Assistant Services

By Jason Johns

Over the years search engine technology has advanced. Once all you needed was a website and some meta tags to get listed. Now as the search engines and the search engine spammers race against each other to stay ahead, technology has advanced significantly.

As well as keywords, meta tags and content, search engines take into consideration the number of links from other sites to your own. These are known in the trade as backlinks.

And as a website owner and Internet Marketer you want your site to have a very high ranking, and so you need as many backlinks as you can get.

The first method is to join a link exchange program. These can allow you to build a huge number of links very rapidly, but the big problem with them is many of the sites tend to be spammy and junk sites desperate to get to the top of the search engines. Some search engines will penalise you for links to these sort of sites, which is something you want to avoid.

You also want to avoid your links being on link farms – if there are too many external links on a single site then you may again get penalised by the search engines. In these link exchanges you will often find these link farms.

You can also search for relevant sites and manually create links to them. Now obviously this is a painstaking approach and will take absolutely forever.

There are some definite advantages to having backlinks and you want as many as possible pointing to your site. Now in order for them to be most effective, you need to know a trick or two.

Usually when you are link exchanging or writing articles you are in control of the text that is displayed with your link. A lot of marketers will just write any old blurb and then list their website.

Yes, you get a back link, but you don’t harness the full power of it. It’s like buying a Ferrari and then driving everywhere at twenty miles per hour.

To truly harness this power and drive your backlinks at full speed you need to use what is called anchor text. This is where you have certain words which are a hyperlink to your website. The words you use are your keywords.

For example, if your keywords were “Dancing Elephants” the usual link would be “Visit Michael Angelo’s site on dancing elephants at dancingelephants dot com.”

In order to really enhance your listing and boost the relevance of your site massively in the search engines, you need to make the “dancing elephants” reference a link to your website too. Your text then contains two links to your website – one being the website address and the other the keywords. Because the keywords and linking directly to your sites the search engines love it because they think your site must be more relevant to those keywords due to the link.

About The Author

Jason E Johns is an successful Internet Marketer & personal success coach. He helps people like you become achieve success. To find out more about search engine optimization, visit http://www” title=”http://www.stateofhypnosis.com/recommends/SE\”>http://www” target=”_blank”>www.stateofhypnosis.com/recommends/SE”>http://www. Posted in Online Marketing April 21st, 2006 by Sellportal | No comments