Susan Suarez

One of the biggest draws to writing an article is knowing that you are getting a link back. In most article sites, you are allowed to include a link or two within the resource box used only by the author. Other website publishers are allowed to reprint the article on their website as long as they keep the resource box intact.

Article marketing can be used as a win/win for both the author and publisher, as the author will gain exposure having the content reproduced around the internet earning lots of one-way incoming links, free of charge. These one-way links will reward the site with better search engine rankings than having to exchange links. As a publisher, they get free content and can reprint the article (within reproduction rules) within a newsletter, blog or website to either help with content workload or populating their websites faster.

EzineArticles is one of the most popular article sites and I feel the most successful. After submitting my very first article awhile back, I received 4 one-way incoming links on the first week. There are a few other article sites worthy of mentioning you could try out like Articles Base, Site Reference and Go Articles.

When writing an article pay special attention to the following to get your article noticed.

• Article titles are important. The goal is to get your article noticed and then republished. To do that, choose the right keywords as most publishers look for content by searching through article directories.
• Be careful of duplicate content. If you plan on using some of your blog posts to create an article, be careful about duplicating that content as you could be penalized by Google. Modify your articles so it’s not a direct reproduction of the content.

There are a few article submission services that you could pay to submit your article to hundreds of directories. I’m a bit cheap and like to do much of it for free but you can check out Article Marketer to review their service.

Is article marketing worth it? I think it can be. There is the potential of receiving a lot of one-way backlinks but not all of them may be quality sites. There is of course a potential that you hit a viral explosion and therefore get awesome results. Definitely try it out and test the results. The biggest positive is that it can only contribute to your overall exposure one little bit at a time and will build your brand and possibly your name.