Promoting your business is essential for driving traffic to your website or blog.  There are several methods of marketing from ad campaigns to social networking.  A free (or low cost) and easy way to attract attention is through Article Marketing.

What is Article Marketing?

Article Marketing is basically writing informational articles on topics that would be beneficial to others and submit them to article directories, content publishers, e-groups and forums around the Web. In turn, you will be given an opportunity to automatically drive traffic to your website.

Successful marketers have learned that good content will pre-sell a potential customer, because you are providing valuable information they are searching for.

Benefits of Article Marketing

• Be Known As an Expert

Writing articles and getting published on a topic will position you as an expert. If you are just starting out, stay with only one topic. When you get published using one topic, you will be known as an expert in that field over a course of time. You are not limited to being an expert in only one field.

Anyone can be an expert by starting out writing 10 articles on one topic.  Your articles has to have good information and not ads or a sales pitch. Most articlebanks will not accept ad based articles.

Once you become an expert in a field, then people will begin to contact you. They will be asking your permission to use your published network marketing articles in their newsletters or e-zines. Other people can use your articles in some really good ways to help them as well as you. Just be sure your copywrite information is at the bottom so that you get credit for the article's content.

• Increased Amount of Traffic to Your Website

When your articles are published on the internet, they increase the amount of active links going to your website. Active links is one of the tools search engines use to rate your site.

Content sharing sites (i.e., Squidoo, Hubpages and EzineArticles) give you an opportunity to write a little sales box at the end of your articles called an author's box or a resource box. In this box, you want to put a link back to your website that pertains to your article's content.

The purpose of an article is not only to give good information but to keep your reader's attention long enough to get them to the resource box. This is where you give your reader's a "call of action" -- to click on that link to learn more.

• Prospect Signing Up for Your Newsletter

By doing article marketing research and becoming an expert, you will start to get people who wants to follow you. When you provided a link to your site in the resource box, people will sign up for your newsletter.

You want people to sign up for your newsletter so that you can follow-up with them.

• Keep in Contact with People

Let's say you attend an event and you meet a few new contacts. You want to continuously follow up with them either monthly or quarterly.

One way to follow up is to take one of your articles, print it out on your stationary, and mail it to your new contact. Just add a little post-it note saying something like "Thought you would be interested in this". Make sure your copywrite information is at the bottom, along with your website address and a brief description of your additional income opportunity.

The most important reason why we write and post articles on the internet is to attract prospects and build relationships. Article Marketing will help build strong relationships with your prospects. So writing articles is a good and inexpensive way to market your business and keep in touch with other contacts.