So, you’ve got a product, a website or something you want to promote. When people realized how much easier it became to reach a targeted market with the inception of the Internet, people came on in droves. But there’s always a balancing act going on. The relative ease of marketing made the competition factor multiply exponentially.

It isn’t enough to build a website and tell a few of your friends about it, although, back in the day, that was enough. Bask in the late ‘90’s, all it took was telling a few people at whatever forum you frequented, and soon enough, word of mouth was enough.

That’s not true any longer. You still need people to come to your website, but getting them there has very nearly become an art form. You now need to think about things like Search Engine ranking, page ranking and forming all-out marketing strategies. This can cost a pretty penny. Unfortunately, many of those “droves” of people who try to eke out a living on the Internet are not so well financed at first.

Which is why article writing and article marketing is such a Godsend. So, how does it help?

1. You Find Your Target Audience.
You can reach many more people with article marketing than you can just telling a few people at the forums. If you have a talent for writing—or at, if you can string together a coherent sentence or two—then you’ve got what it takes to take advantage of one of the easiest marketing methods ever to hit the industry. Article marketing will reach a larger target audience than you can imagine, thanks to the search engines. People go to the search engines every day looking for something. If you work your marketing plan correctly, your work will be one of the first things they see, which may lead them back to your site.

2. Little To No Out-Of-Pocket Costs
Article marketing is, basically, a free method of advertising. You could pay to have other write articles for you, or have others submit your articles to the directories, or a number of other little tasks that may cost—but all of these tasks are not impossible to do, yourself, and therefore, won’t cost you anything unless you decide to outsource the work.

3.Search Engines Are Your Best Friend.
That is, IF you do it right. You’ve got to learn how to optimize your articles for keyword densities—keywords that you diligently researched beforehand. Once you submit the article, or post it on your website, the search engines will “spider” it—send a ‘bot to index it—and you will start to see traffic arrive for your efforts. The more articles you create and post like this, the more pages you have indexed, the more traffic you get.

A keyword density for the average article is from 1% to 3%, i.e., 1 to 3 keywords for every 100 words in your article. More than that will offend the search engines and you will likely never find your articles in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages).

4.Backlinking Becomes Gold In Your Pockets
It used to be that you could exchange links with your friends and that would be sufficient for the search engines to think your site was popular enough to rank well. But that was “back in the day.” Search engines do not like link exchanges any more and will penalize your site for them. One-way links back to your site are what the search engines want to see. Posting articles to other websites and creating profiles at high PR (page rank) sites are excellent ways to create those one-way backlinks. Look for any website with a high PR where you can either post an article or create a profile and you will find your website gaining momentum in the race to the top.

5. You Get And Maintain A Good Impression And Reputation
Writing quality, relevant articles that provides valuable information to Internet users will garner for you a sterling reputation that you cannot pay for anywhere. People who come to recognize your byline on your article will start to know that whatever you have to say will be valuable and useful. People will link back to you, your articles and/or your website, and your own PR for your site will rise.

There’s a whole lot more value to article writing and article marketing than these few things I’ve mentioned. As you get better at this type of marketing, you’ll find your own benefits. But you won’t gain anything if you don’t get in gear and start writing.

Stumble it!