Article marketing is a low cost advertising avenue that can be explored by many online businesses to promote their services/products. Articles can help you increase the credibility of your business within its market as well as attract new potential clients.

A great way to write your articles is to write about an interesting topic using “smart terms” as your main subject. “Smart terms” are specific keyword niches used in your articles. Articles can be distributed via simple syndication methods which furthers their distribution to content publishers that cater to those markets, thereby helping in obtaining free press space. Each article contains an author’s bio to provide references and contact information of your business. The body and the bio of the article allow you to provide hyperlinks that point to your website, thus generating more links that lead back to the website. As a result, over a period of time, as these articles get picked up by the search engines, you manage to create mass backlinks to the relevant pages of your website.

This not only enables you to get your articles to rank for smart terms that may not be possible to target on your website (a spello for example) but also gain an SEO value through the mass backlinks. All this eventually helps drive visitors to your website through the article.

You can write on a wide array of subjects and gain a lot of popularity through viral propagation, [also known as social media optimization ] via social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook and social bookmark websites like Digg & Del.icio.us.

If you own an e-commerce website that markets a new product, it will require a considerable amount of time to get your product page indexed by the search engine spiders, acquire an SEO value & begin to rank. Hence, considering the amount of time involved for the above, there’s a high possibility that by the time your product page just manages to rank well you would miss out on a great opportunity to sell huge volumes of the product.

Article marketing could be a great way to counter this problem. You could write & distribute an article talking about your new product, build links within the body directly to your product page & the bio talking about the credibility of your business. Thus, the exposure to the deep pages of your website and number of backlinks to them can be increased greatly.