Unless you’re completely brand new to doing business on the internet, you’ll have heard about article marketing. Article marketing is how a regular person like you or me can gain a foothold into niche markets and target interested and motivated visitors and turn them into interested and motivated buyers.

Without a doubt article marketing is the most powerful way in which one can promote a website. Done properly article marketing is the effective way for getting targeted traffic to your site as well as helping to build backlinks. A short but informative article in order to promote a site may seem to take a lot of effort, but the returns you get are quite phenomenal. So just how does article marketing work for an online business?

For a start it cost little or not to write an article and then submit it to various article directories or even to other websites. Then in turn a directory or website will publish the article you have written on them. The affect is that the rankings for your site on search engines will begin to rise because of all the backlinks which have been created because other sites are now using your content.

Article marketing is extremely viral since a single article, if well-written and targeting good keywords, can generate dozens and dozens of links back to the author’s site or other designated landing page.

Article marketing also provides the added benefit allowing even a new website owner or author to develop a reputation as an authority in a niche. When a reader comes across your article through an article directory and is interested enough to click through your links and visit your site, you’ve been handed the opportunity to develop a relationship with that reader. It’s up to you to cultivate that relationship by offering even more relevant content for your readers that addresses their questions, needs or wants.

Sometimes you may hear from others that article marketing is not longer effective or that by submitting your article to numerous article directories only results in duplicate content, and which may put your site at risk of being de-indexed by search engines.

Putting aside any arguments for or against duplicate content for the moment, article marketing is every bit as effective as any traffic or promotional tactic touted these days. Various promotional strategies will come and go, but the strength of article marketing lies in the fact that the World Wide Web is built upon and needs fresh, relevant content continuously.

By creating content in the form of articles you will start to attract a steady stream of visitors to your site. Everyday millions of people go online looking for answers. With your articles you can place yourself in a strong position to provide the answers to their questions and convert the traffic into sales.

Article marketing today remains the one free or almost free way of being able to promote your website or product. It is the best way of being able to bring targeted traffic to you, as long as you are willing to work at it and produce consistent good quality articles over the long term.

By writing informative articles using well-researched keywords in whatever niche you select, you can gain more exposure and higher search engine rankings. But, just submitting the same article over and over to hundreds of article repositories and niche websites can dilute the effectiveness of your article marketing efforts.

The real key to article marketing success is to submit unique versions of your articles to the different directories and websites. Daunting as this may sound the results are truly extraordinary and well worth the effort. Gone are the risks of duplicate content and slippage of ranking. While the definition of what constitutes duplicate content continues to be the subject of hot debate, many experienced webmasters are comfortable with ranges above 30%.

However, the more different there is between each version of an article you submit then the better. It is important that you keep in mind that all the top search engines spiders will take numerous elements of each page into consideration as well as the whole webpage when reviewing it. So just by making 30% of small changes to your articles will be more than enough to prevent it from being completely skipped over.

Submitting unique versions of your articles is the smartest way to undertake article marketing. Not only are you gaining targeted traffic, but the boost in ranking tends to last longer from backlinks you build through marketing unique articles.