First time Internet Marketers learn quickly that there are numerous way to publicize and advertise. So, if you’ve got a product, or a website or a service that you’d like to offer to the world, what is the best way to spread the word? And, perhaps, more importantly, what’s the cheapest way?

Article marketing is the way. It’s quite easy and, best of all, it free!

Writing The Articles
For the purpose of article marketing, the typical article runs from 350 to 750 words, making this a very east task to accomplish. It only amounts to 6 to 9 paragraphs… short paragraphs, at that! Take into consideration everything you want to tell your future readers. Make an outline of your high points. From this, you will easily begin to construct the paragraphs.

Make the entire article easy to read. Paragraphs should be short, 2-4 sentences. If you were faced with a single paragraph that spanned half a page, would you bother to read it? As it is too easy for people to “click away” from your article, it is in your best interest to make the reading of your article as easy as possible.

Bullet points are very popular these days. The “information super-highway” has become like the Autobahn, and the faster you can get your message across to readers, the more likely they will be to actually read what you have to say. Use bullet points for your readers to scan.

What To Do With Your Article
Now that you’ve written the article, where do you send it to get the most exposure? Well, first things first. Many out there will warn you about the duplicate content issue. It’s really not as bad as some would have you believe. I have covered the issue extensively in other articles, so I will not rehash it here. Suffice to say that the best thing to do is to post the article first to your own website. Google gives more weight to the first instance of an article that it finds.

Next, start sending the article to article directories. Directories, like eZineArticles.com and others, are repositories for articles where webmasters may come and take articles they like for their own websites, with the one requirement being that they leave the article completely intact, including the author’s resource box. The resource box will have links back to your site within it.

Some writer’s use article spinners to create variations to send out to article directories, further avoiding the duplicate content issue. You can do this, if you so desire, but remember this: if Google penalized duplicate content more harshly than they actually do, then all those article directories would have been shut down long ago!

After directories, the next place to go is Squidoo, Hub Pages and other authority sites where you can create a page. Google considers these sites authority sites and will give more weight to the links back to your site from there. Create a page at these sites and include your article, replete with your links.

Other things you can do involve social marketing, like Tweeting about your article, posting about it in forums and commenting in other people’s blog posts of similar subjects.

That’s basically it for article marketing, and best of all, every single one of these methods is free. Now, notice this article. It is 10 paragraphs and 585 words. Because I know my subject matter, it took me all of 10 minutes to write it. You can do this, too!

Stumble it!