Writing articles on subjects within your selected niche has proven to be one of the most effective forms of marketing a website or business. Articles placed in the online article banks are very inexpensive to create and will be there promoting your efforts from now on. As with any business venture there are some good points to article writing and marketing and a few downsides to consider.

With even a small bit of writing talent, a person can put together an informative article of three hundred to five hundred words to explain a point about their chosen field. While writing articles can be a bit time consuming, they can be hired out to a ghostwriter for a small initial price and let you devote your time to improving your site or product. Once placed in several of the article directories, your article will provide one-way backlinks to your site from your Resource Box. This can help the page rank for your site and improve the chances of gaining a high position in a Search Engine Results Page.

The directories are a mixed blessing however. Different directories are given greater or lesser value by the Search Engines. It is important to make sure you are submitting to quality directories to prevent your banked articles from being ignored. On the other hand, the primary purpose of these directories is to provide ‘free’ content for other webmasters. Your article may be chosen for inclusion on their website, in an e-zine or an informational book. This works to your advantage as this increases the backlinks to your site since they must keep your Resource Box intact with the article.

This is part of what is known as ‘viral marketing’. From your initial article submission to a directory, your article may then be picked up and placed on yet another website. The more informative and popular your article becomes the greater the number of potential copies may be placed on a wide range of websites. Greater exposure means a greater number of people who have the opportunity of finding your website and becoming a customer.

Another advantage to writing articles is that they will help establish you as an expert in your chosen field of endeavor. Your articles should not be written like a sales letter. Its purpose is to interest the reader into following the link to your website. With this traffic you can present your product or service to them there. The article is to convince them you will be able to help them with whatever problem they are seeking a solution for.

Probably the greatest disadvantage to using articles to promote your website is the time involved in submitting them to the directories. There are software programs designed to make this quicker but many of the directories will disallow automatic submissions or are formatted in such a way as to render such submissions void. There are services that will do this work for you but they often charge more than you would pay someone to actually ghostwrite the article originally.

Regardless of which process you use to get your articles onto the directories, you can be assured that they will remain a perpetual source of interest and traffic after that. The more articles you publish, the greater will be your reputation and the more likely it will be your site that a reader with a problem will come to you for a solution.

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