Article Marketing - Three Tips to Using Articles to Promote Your Online Business

If you've started an online business, you know that you need to promote consistently to get traffic and sales. Although there are many ways you can promote, article marketing delivers great, on-going results at minimal cost. In this article we'll look at the top three tips for using articles to market your business.

Here they are:

1. Post articles on article directories

Not familiar with article marketing? Marketing using articles means offering free information as a form of advertising. Not only will your business become more widely known, it will also gain respect and credibility.

Article marketing is a form of advertising, but it's much more effective than advertising, because when you stop paying for an ad, you lose traffic. Your articles stay online, and will bring traffic to your Web site for years.

Once you've written an article, post it to article directories online. You can choose a general directory, or one which is more targeted to your audience.

Over time, your articles will spread across the Web, bringing a flow of traffic. You won't see the full effects of your article publishing push for months, so it's important that when you start article marketing, you keep creating and publishing them - their effect on your site's traffic is cumulative.

2. Post articles to your own Web sites and blogs

In addition to posting articles on article directories, post them to your site as well. This increases your site's content, and will boost your site in the search engine rankings.

Before you start publishing your articles to your site, create a structure, so that your articles form a real resource for your site's visitors. Although you'll still get traffic if you just dump all your articles into an "Articles" directory, you'll get better results if you think about leading your site's visitors around your site to make a purchase or take other action when they arrive at one of your articles.

After you've published an article on your site, don't move it elsewhere on your site unless it's absolutely necessary, because if you do, you'll break links which other sites have created to reference specific articles.

3. Post article collections to sites like Squidoo and Scribd

The more backlinks (links pointing to your site) the better. There are many ways you can get more backlinks. One of the easiest ways is to post your articles on sites like Squidoo and Scribd.

Squidoo allows you to create "lenses", one-page topic sites. Create several lenses on topics relevant to your site, and post article collections to these lenses, pointing back to your site. Not only are your lenses a source of backlinks, they're also a source of traffic.

Squidoo is very popular; you can build a real community there, providing further support to your site.

The Scribd site lets you put documents online, and make them public. Think of Scribd as YouTube for documents. Collect your articles into collections, and post them to Scribd. You can post your articles in a variety of formats: text, HTML, Adobe PDF, and more.

As with Squidoo, you can build a community at Scribd when people make your documents favorites. Scribd will bring your site traffic, and will increase your backlinks too.

So there you are - you now have three powerful ways in which you can use article marketing to promote your online business.

Copywriter and marketing expert Angela Booth can help you to market your online business in many ways. Visit her Creativity Factory blog http://angelabooth.com/wp for more great free information on marketing. You can also contact Angela for a marketing consultation directly at her site - http://angelabooth.com