What is article marketing exactly? It’s about writing articles and getting them distributed to Article Directories.

When you begin to understand and use article marketing, you’ll discover that it’s one of the more effective kinds of traffic generation you can do without it costing you anything other than your time.

One of the many benefits derived from article marketing is the fact your articles are able to go viral; the message of the article can travel far and increase traffic to your own website. One example would be that you write an article on golf tips because you have a website in the golf market. When you finish your article you would include an author’s resource box at the bottom. The block of text in the box will basically consist of one paragraph, and it will contain from five to seven lines. In this particular paragraph you may choose to say something like:

You’ll be able to locate even more help, and some valuable golf information, at Golfing Lessons Online, www.johndoe.com. If you’re looking for more specific information concerning left-handed golf tips, go to www.johndoe.com/left-handed golf.html.

Once you’ve finished writing your article; made sure you’ve covered all the important points, and proof read it for any grammar or spelling errors, you’ll be ready to begin distributing it.

Be aware that the distribution of articles is often rather time consuming, and a lot of people choose to outsource that task but of course that will cost you money. There is also software available that will help you automate the process, and investing in a tool like that is worth it when have the income to do so.

When you submit to the article directories, you’ll need to have your article, the title and possibly a sub title; the author’s resource box, your email address, your website’s URL, a brief description of the article, as well as a keyword list separated by commas.

Basically, you will visit each of the article repositories to log in, or sign up for a new account, and then proceed to copy/paste into the form that’s provided by the repository for submission of the article. It might be a week or so until your article will appear on their specific website; the majority of article repositories use a manual approval process.

There are hundreds of article directories, some of them being better than others; Ezine Articles is one of the most popular directories.

Essentially, all that I’ve covered above is what article marketing is about and basically how it works.