Article Marketing and Social Bookmarking

The reason why some webmasters use articles from free content directories is to drive targeted traffic to their website and to increase their income. More and more site owners have seen the effects articles have done for the traffic of their sites.

Article marketing is a very good method, especially for those new entrepreneurs who have just begun to work as an affiliate for several different companies and are in need of funding, yet at the same time they need to build a small niche website to steer visitors towards their site so they are able to begin earning income.

Writing and submitting new articles is a crucial part of any website promotion strategy. A well written, informative article helps to build your credibility in your subject area. The links in the article resource box provide targeted traffic and effectively help to optimize your site for the search engines.

Writing and submitting new articles to article directories is an continuously task that should be performed at least on a weekly basis. Each article that is approved and published by an article directory is "hot" only for a day or two. This is because it will be displayed on the "latest articles" pages which receive more traffic than the category pages. A new article will typically remain in Google primary search results for only a week or two before it will be sent to the supplementary index. You should keep in mind though that most articles submitted in bulk to many directories will be interpreted as duplicate content and will end up in the supplemental index.

This is the reason why it is so important to submit your articles on a regular, frequent basis. If you submit at least one article a week, then you will always have a few articles that are in the primary index and getting more readers.

Submitting new articles to article directories might not be enough though. Promoting your articles while they are still "hot" is also very important. One of the most powerful promotional methods is to take advantage of the explosive growth of social bookmarking sites.

Social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Reddit, Digg and Technorati allow users to bookmark and share their favorite web pages (blogs, dynamic or static web pages, articles and so on). If you bookmark your articles in various directories, you can increase the number of people that are exposed to your article. As they click through on your headline and they read your article, they may choose to click your active hyperlink to visit your website, bringing you indirect, but targeted traffic.

The more links an article has pointing to it, the better it will rank in the search results, so these links have a very important SEO value as well. Social bookmarking sites are a very powerful tool to get more links pointing to your articles, providing a higher ranking in the search results.

By its own, article marketing is an extremely effective method to promote your site and improve your search engine optimization, but by taking advantage of the viral nature of social bookmarking, you can dramatically increase the range of your audience and ultimately, bring more visitors to your site.

The author is webmaster at Articleated.com a free article directory.