One of the easiest and least expensive Internet marketing techniques is article marketing. It can be extremely effective for promoting any type of website whether it's an affiliate site, a blog or a commercial website.
The premise is simply to write articles that will be used to both advertise the site or items being sold on the site and include a link back to that site. The link provides a backlink which helps to raise the page rank of the website. The major search engines count the number of links to a website when deciding which sites should come first in a particular search.
Submitting to Article Directories
One way to publish articles is to post them to article directories. Article directories have different requirements as far as acceptable subject matter and required article length. However, most of them do accept a wide range of topics and accept anything that is not plagiarized and overly promotional.
Most articles submitted to article directories follow the standard Web article guideline of 400-600 words. The articles contain a resource box at the end of the piece that contains the backlink. Some article directories allow two or three links in the box.
The articles may attract readers who click the links, or it may attract other people engaged in Internet marketing who will reprint the article on their page- links and all. This gives the marketer still more backlinks each time someone reprints the article. Directories are easy Internet marketing tools because they generally have a high page rank and can therefore offer high-quality one-way links.
Blogs and Search Engine Marketing
Blogs rank well with search engines because of the regular influx of new content. This makes blogs an ideal place to post articles to be used in Internet marketing. A blog post is very much like an article, though a more casual style of writing is usually expected on blogs. A blog post that promotes a website or a writer who has a website of interest can bring a lot of traffic to that website.