Writing articles can be a very effective way to market your site. Problem: It can also be a very ineffective way to market your site. Read on to learn how to do it effectively.

How Article Marketing Works
Article marketing is 100% about getting links from other sites. There are thousands of free article directories on the internet. They accept articles from writers, and publish them for free. If you write a half-decent article, you can easily get it published on at least 50 sites.

Each free article directory will allow you to create an author bio at the bottom of your article. You can say who you are if want, but the important part of the author bio is adding a link back to your site.

Here’s a marketed article that I wrote to get a link to one of my sites that I’ll use eventually. The article is decent, but I didn’t spend a ton of time on it. I basically wrote a 500 word article in 30 minutes. If you read the article, I think you will agree that it’s not anything spectacular. I was able to get that article published about 500 times. On every single one of the sites I got published on, you will find a link to my site. If you don’t understand why these links are beneficial, let me point you towards two of my other articles:

1. Offsite Optimization - SEO That Works For A Change
2. Going From PR Zero To PR Hero

Mistakes People Make With Article Marketing

• They use articles that they have published on their own sites. Never use anything that you have published on your site. You never want to have anything on your site that is published somewhere else.
• They don’t target keywords. When you make the link to your site, put keywords in it.
• They don’t put their keywords in the title of the article. Whatever words you are going to use in the link that points back to your site, you should add in the title of the article. I will better show you how to do this in my example below.
• They don’t write an article that is related to their site.

Example Of An Article Done The Right Way
In order to show you how to create an article the right way, I’m going to just create one start to finish and show you everything I did.

Let’s Start With The Topic
My most popular post on this site is called “5,263 Words On Starting A Profitable Blog“. I haven’t ever used article marketing to promote it, and I think I’ll use that topic for our example, that will help me to get some more traffic to that post.

Creating The Title
In order to create a good title for the new article, I am going to find out what related keywords are actually searched for. I’m going to use the Overture Keyword Selector Tool to find out. I’m going to type in start blog and hit enter. It will take the tool a few seconds to return the keyword phrases that contain start blog and are searched for the most. It looks like the keyword phrase that gets searched for the most is how to start a blog, it gets searched for 1500 times per month, or about 50 times per day.

The Overture tool uses Yahoo search queries to calculate to results. We can estimate that if the keyword phrase gets searched for 1500 times per month in Yahoo, it probably gets searched for about 5000 times per month between all the search engines in the world. 5000 is a pretty decent number, enough to justify marketing that keyword.

In order to achieve the maximum effect, I want each word in the keyword phrase to appear in my title. I think I’ll use the title, “How To Start A Blog That Makes Money.” That title relates well to make homepage, which is designed to target make money online, and it also relates well to my 5,263 Words On Starting A Profitable Blog post.

Writing The Article Itself
I already have a good resource to use to write an article about how to start a blog. My 5,263 Words On Starting A Profitable Blog post is where I’m going to go for the information. Remember that I don’t want to use something that is already published on my site, so I’m going to rewrite and shorten it to about 500 words.

I just rewrote and shortened the article, you can find it here. Don’t spend a bazillion hours writing the article! I just spent about 20 minutes writing mine, and I’m sure that it will do quite well.

The About The Author Box
Each time you submit an article to a free article directory, you will fill in an about the author box. This is the box where you need to place code for a link! If you don’t create the link in HTML code, you won’t get a link and the whole thing will be a waste. Here’s the code that I used to make mine:

Courtney Tuttle helps people to <a href=”http://courtneytuttle.com”>make money online</a>. He shows them <a href=”http://courtneytuttle.com/2007/02/25/starting-a-blog-in-5263-words/”>how to start a blog</a>, market it, and create income from it.

If you need to copy my code, go ahead. Make sure that you change over to URLs so that the links point to your site. Change your name, and what the message says.

You’ll notice that I made two links in there, one points to my homepage using the keyword make money online and the other points to my 5,263 Words On Starting A Profitable Blog post, using the keyword how to start a blog. Hopefully you can see how a few hundred links that point to these pages will help me out! For the best effect, link to your homepage, and to one of your posts that you want to promote.

Submitting The Article
Once the article is all done, you are going to submit it to a ton of free article directories. There are a few ways to go about this. The slow, free way is to hand submit to all of the directories you can get your hands on. Here are some to get you started if you decide to submit them by hand:

• http://www.abcarticledirectory.com
• http://21stcenturyarticles.com
• http://www.absolutearticle.com
• http://www.allarticles.co.uk
• http://www.amazingarticles.co.uk
• http://articlesshack.com
• http://www.articleammo.com
• http://www.articleblender.com
• http://www.articlecommunity.com
• http://www.articlecompilation.com
• http://www.articlecounty.com
• http://www.articledirectory.com
• http://www.articlefame.com
• http://www.articlegoldmine.com
• http://www.articlemetropolis.com
• http://www.articlepartners.com
• http://www.articlesnare.com
• http://www.articlereap.com
• http://www.articlesamerica.com
• http://www.bestsuccessarticles.com
• http://www.blogticles.com
• http://www.bookseven.com
• http://www.clickarticle.com
• http://www.doarticles.com
• http://www.earticlesonline.com
• http://www.ezinearticles.com
• http://www.fantasticarticles.com
• http://www.freearticlesandcontent.com
• http://www.freeinfoarticles.com
• http://www.articlecrash.com
• http://www.mainlyarticles.com
• http://www.myarticlemall.com
• http://www.partyarticles.com
• http://www.millionviewers.com
• http://www.superarchives.com

Submitting The Fast Way
I really value my time and so I wouldn’t take the time to submit by hand to hundreds of directories. I just plain don’t have all day to do it. I use a service called Article Marketer to do it for me. You can actually sign up for a free account that gives you a partial distribution, or pay to have full distribution. I pay for the full distribution, but you can get a good amount of submissions with even the free service.

If you use Article Marketer, you will only submit once. You submit it to them, and they submit it to everyone else.

My Overall Thoughts On Marketing With Articles
Using articles can get you tons of links that have your keywords in them. If you aren’t using them for marketing, you probably aren’t achieving as many search engines hits as you could! In order to rank well for keywords, you need to get links that have your keywords in them. This is an extremely effective way to do it!

Mix this with submitting to regular directories, and some other link building methods, and you will have yourself a winning combination.