It sounds counterintuitive.

Giving away free content that just anyone can use?

How could that possibly help anyone?

Two words for you, my friend: viral marketing.

In the article “Building Traffic with Article Marketing,” Brian Clark of Copyblogger describes article marketing as

submitting short articles to directories such as Ezine Articles, with permission for others to republish your work on their blog, website or in their email newsletter. In return, you get one or more links back to the site of your choice.

Over at Associated Content, Michael Brito takes the definition to the next level when he says,

By distributing articles to various article directories on the Internet, your business can reap the benefits ranging from an increase in web traffic, lead generation, new customers and a solid reputation. It’s a simple concept that has the potential to take your business to the next level and higher.

Article marketing is not writing content for article mills (which I fondly think of a plagiarism factories) for $.00002/word. Article marketing is a targeted, planned business technique that’s specifically geared to bring more people to your website/newsletter/whatever, increase your search engine ranking, and give you and your business more exposure.

Says Arnie Kuenn in “Using Article Marketing to Establish Trust,”

Here are some key points to remember with article marketing:

• Introduce information rather than pitch sales items
• Establish your credibility and authority
• Offer free and useful information
• Create actions that the reader can take such as signing up for newsletters,
  free reports, etc.
• Give the reader your contact information.

We’re not talking about War and Peace; we’re talking about 250- to 400- word articles that can be written in a matter of minutes. We’re talking about free publicity over a long period of time with little to no effort. We’re talking about giving people a taste of the milk so they’ll feel compelled to buy the cow.

Tim Robinson at Instant Expert Author gives eight reasons to try article marketing (paraphrased):

1. Branding.
2. Publicity, virtually free.
3. Website traffic.
4. Long-term article archiving means far-reaching benefits.
5. Identification as a subject expert.
6. Web-wide distribution potential.
7. Free exposure from reprinting.
8. Article swapping with e-publications.

To learn more about the benefits of article marketing, download Copyblogger’s free 10-page PDF article marketing report, and check out inactive but still invaluable Article Marketing blog.

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