Fast forward to the 21st Century and you quickly see that not much has changed in the fundamentals of the written word. Writers still write one word at a time. Readers still read to obtain information or amuse themselves. Of course, the craft has been honed, polished and refined a good bit, but essentially it remains the same. Simply put, it is the main way humans disseminate information.

Articles have many uses and purposes. Our focus, however, targets their importance as an internet marketing tool.

This article answers these questions:

* What is article marketing?

* How and why does it work?

* What benefits does it offer the internet marketer?

What Is Article Marketing?

Article marketing is a practice used by internet marketers to enhance their expert status in their particular field and to improve their ranking in the search engines. The intent is to increase exposure and attract pre-qualified targeted traffic back to a specific web page.

Articles written for distribution should not be confused with web copy. Web copy is more akin to direct response sales copy in the print world. Distribution articles, written for submission to article directories and publishers across the Internet, have a different focus and purpose. They don’t sell products or services directly but rather sell the expert status of the author.

This is usually the hardest concept for new article marketers to grasp; “how can I make sales if I don’t push my product?” The answer is you can’t and you will pitch your product or service once you get the reader to your web page. That’s the whole idea behind article marketing: get the reader off some obscure article directory or blog and onto your web site where actual conversions take place.

How And Why Does Article Marketing Work?

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Envision what their shopping experience is like before they ever see your article:

You’re curious about a new widget. The one you have now has been a lifesaver over and over again. But alas, like everything else in life, it’s getting a few years on it. The power cord is frayed, half the attachments are lost or broken and it simply doesn’t get the job done anymore. You hate to let the old guy go but you just can’t suffer through his poor performance any longer. You need a new widget.

You’ve heard the gossip at work about a new type of widget on the market that does everything but make the bed. It’s all the rave on the radio and ads for it are popping up everywhere. Ever the skeptic, you need more information before you’ll be sold on hearsay. The man who sold you the old widget has retired, so that option’s out. It’s time to pound the pavement again.

You drive over to Gadgettown, park the car and start down the street on foot. By the time you get to the far end of the shopping district, you’ve been pinched, poked, prodded and pitched to in every way possible. Everyone will sell you something but no one will tell you anything. You sit down on a bench to rest a bit before you fight your way back to the car and home. Empty-handed.

Across the street, a scholarly looking man is standing back in a recessed doorway quietly smoking a pipe and gazing upon the street hawkers up the way. The subtle blue neon letters in his shop window spell out “Widget World.” The smaller red ones underneath reveal that he is an “Authorized Factory Dealer.”

You stroll over and strike up a conversation and quickly discover this is a guy that really knows his widgets! He answers your questions in a friendly yet knowledgeable way. He tells you he has some additional free information in the office from corporate. He also has some floor models of the new Blue Fuzzy Widget if you would like to step inside and see for yourself. Thirty minutes later, you’re out the door with a new widget under one arm and a box of attachments under the other.

The shop owner (article) didn’t sell you a widget. What he sold you was trust in his expert status. He gave you answers to your general questions and offered the rest of the story inside the shop. His signs (links) gave credibility to his status and told you exactly what you could expect from him: he is an authorized dealer.

That’s how article marketing works. You have to get the customer off of the street and into your shop in order to conduct sales. It’s a pretty simple concept.

What Are The Benefits Of Article Marketing?

* It builds your reputation as an accepted expert in your chosen field

* It brands you and your product

* It improves your value to search engines by creating large numbers of backlinks

* It’s 100 percent “White Hat” and won’t get you in trouble with the search engines

* It provides you with content you may recycle through blogs, forums, newsletters and emails

* Depending on niche and quality, articles continue to drive traffic for years

* It’s very cost effective. Once a piece is distributed, that’s it, no more financial outlay regardless of length of effectiveness

No doubt you will think of many more benefits, but you get the idea. In a nutshell, article marketing is about building your expert status, generating traffic and leading qualified prospects to your website.

About the Author:Brad McGovern is the Marketing Manager at Article Marketer, and offers advice and news of note to article marketers. Watch for more from Brad in the coming days!

Find more help with your article marketing program here: Custom Articles

No longer are blogs restricted to personal online journals published for friends and family. Blogs are big business and are used by big business to enhance the companies that run them. There are quite a few blogs out there netting in the millions of dollars every year.

Forum sites, for example, are often affiliated with many blog sites; all inter-linked and mutually supportive of one another. Of course, the goals of many of those sites and blogs is not to make money except through residual advertising to offset the time and expense of running them.

The potential is there and limitless, however, to make a killing through this medium of communication. Where else can you publicly market, sell, ship and deliver your wares to a world-wide market for virtually no overhead? For about $300/year you can run a large variety of web sites, blogs and e-commerce sites that reach a global market. If you can reach and sell to 1/10,000th of that market, you will be living pretty high up on the hog; all done from the privacy of your home or off your mobile laptop.

There are probably as many marketing strategies to build a successful blog as there are blogs. The Internet is rife with sites that do nothing but teach you how to be a better, more successful blogger. I have reviewed several hundred of these sites and I have found what I believe to be the common core secret to them all. It’s so simple and obvious that a lot of people just overlook it.

People don’t visit blogs to look at all the pretty colors and flashing lights or hear the bells ring and whistles blow. They come because they are in search of content; the meat and potatoes.

Imagine, if you will, a fine five-star restaurant you have stumbled upon. They’ve had a cancellation and usher you in to be seated right away. Pretty good so far, eh? A whole staff of servants waits on you and flutters about while you wait on your menu. It finally arrives in the hands of a smiling server and you open it and are immediately perplexed!

It only offers one thing: PB&J Sandwich – $40.00 ($50 w/chips and a drink).

My guess is you would lose whatever appetite you had and let your feet do the talking as you headed for the door!

Blogs, or any other website for that matter, need to offer up the ‘meat and potatoes’ if they want return customers. And the way you do that is by offering a variety fine, delectable treats that they can’t wait to be served – each and every trip.

To sell something to anyone, you first have to get them inside your shop. Window dressing may catch their eye and get them to peep inside, but if they view empty shelves and cobwebs, chances are they will never be back again. You failed to offer the incentive to return.

If there is one truth in the business world, it is this:

“It is often very hard to gain customers, but it’s almost impossible to get them back once you’ve lost them.”

Content. That’s the secret thread that holds all successful online sites together. It is no easy task writing good, effective web content, but it can be done with a little study and good practices.

Many writers’ forums are available across the Internet to develop these skills in authors wishing to write articles for marketing. Blogs with good, well written articles and web content gets much attention and use. It is the wave of the future in all manner of commerce, whether you are selling a product, service or even yourself (as a writer). If you are looking to learn or improve upon your skills in this area, find a good writer’s forum to tutor you along the way.

About the Author: Mike Lawson is a freelance writer, entrepreneur and internet marketing professional. Learn more about effectively marketing your business here:

Cutting-edge internet marketing information, products and services: Bluegrass Merchants.

Custom web content, articles and copywriting from an established professional writing service: Bluegrass Solutions.

Ebooks are a relatively new invention. Standing for “electronic book,” ebooks offer as much information as their printed counterparts. Of course, that’s assuming you’re in the mood for something informative. If you want to entertain yourself with fiction, there are plenty of ebooks out there to satisfy your mood.

Anyway, the beauty of the ebook is not in its simplicity, but rather its ease of distribution. Virtually anyone can sell an ebook, regardless of their previous writing experience. In fact, some of the best selling ebooks have been written by people who have average writing skills. What makes their material attractive is what they are offering in addition to their conversational tone.

Yet, some would argue that self publishing can offer the same benefits to independent authors. In some cases, distribution might even be easier because there are places like Lulu or Createspace that will sell your work for free. You just have to be willing to collect royalties.

And this is where the problem lies. With an ebook, you get to keep the majority of your profits, even if you sell it on networks like Clickbank. So, it won’t hurt you if you decide to sell it at a lower price. In the end, you would end up getting more money because your ebook’s price would be more attractive to your audience.

However, with many self publishing companies, lowering your price could mean earning next to nothing even if your book sells many copies. Consider Createspace, where over 40 of your earnings are taken. True, your book will be exposed on Amazon, but depending on its length, a $5 book may only earn you a couple of dollars, if that. And if you sell it at $3 or less, you’ll be looking at cents for your earnings, not dollars.

In addition, as popular as Amazon is, customers do have to wait for their book to ship This is never the case with an ebook. After a customer pays their fee, they are given immediate access. Indeed, ebooks offer instant gratification, which is what customers are craving for.

On the downside, though, there is a lot of legwork associated with writing and publishing an ebook. With ebooks, you must design the book itself as well as the website. On top of that, you will need to pay hosting fees. If you get your book put on Amazon, you don’t have to worry about paying any fees upfront. True, your money will be taken out of your royalties, but at least such a setup gets your work out there.

So, when it comes down to it, what will earn you money faster, ebooks or self publishing? Ultimately, it will depend on your own skills If you already know the ins and outs of website design, ebook design and Internet marketing, you’ll probably make money faster with ebooks.

But if you lack this knowledge, self publishing through networks like Createspace will give you a lot of exposure with no monetary investment. Basically, you’ll be given a chance to do what matters most, writing the material.

Download Almost 30,000 Products Including Business to Business Education Industrial Management Promotion Publishing Reports Web Design Computing & Internet Browsers Domains Email Services Graphics Network Administration Programming Site Design and much much more at http://www.ebayjam.com

Article Source: Bluegrass Solutions Article Directory

The sad news for the book publishing industry is that book store sales are down. One of the biggest book publishers have recently reported that their book store sales are down by a whopping 10 percent! This is all scary news for publishers and most of them have already started evasive action against this down turn in sales.

Some publishing companies have already gone out of business while others have started cutting back on the number of books they publish. And even others have stopped accepting new book manuscripts altogether.

But if you were considering self publishing your own book, don’t be disheartened because all this news of lower book sales is great news for the self published author, or anyone thinking about self publishing.

You see most self published authors never see their books available through book stores, unless customers order it. Some self published authors never expect to see their books sitting on book store shelves and have still become millionaire authors.

The trend in book sales now is that more and more people are buying their books online. Online book stores will happily list self published books on their web sites because they don’t need to stock them so if they don t make a sale then nothing is lost.

You see most self published books are sold by POD (Print On Demand). This means that unless someone specifically orders a copy of your book – through a book store or an online store – your book isn t printed.

So self publishing through POD means that you don t have to keep a huge stock of you books and they can be sold all over the world automatically.

But how many book sales can you get using POD publishing?

Well, that obviously depends of the popularity of your book and how well it s marketed.

And with all the big publishing companies struggling to make sales now, you may wonder what hope there is for the self published author. And there answer is that there is more hope than ever for the self published author to prosper.

You see the problem with the big publishing houses is that they have so many overheads (stock, premises, staff, transport, etc) that they need to make huge book sales to survive. So if they publish a book they need to feel reasonably confident that they will sell tens of thousands of copies.

Whereas the self published author will be happy with less sales..

If you want to look at it as dollars and cents consider this:

If you self published a book and sold it through online book stores, libraries, etc and you sold only 2,000 copies per year. To a publishing company that would be disastrous. But to the self published author who is earning around $10 or more per book , it is good news, even with so few sales.

And if you wrote several books and sold 2,000 copies or more of each book every year, you d be earning in excess of $100,000 a year. And remember that selling 2,000 books a year is actually very low sales, and you could easily sell twice that many.

And the more books you write, the more book you can sell We all have favorite authors and will usually buy all the books they write. So if you could write and publish several books and build up a loyal fan base, then the number of books you could sell is unlimited.

But don t take my word for it. Self publishing a book costs very little and is easy to do. If you know the steps to publishing a book, know which companies you can use to help you and know how to market your book with minimal effort and outlay, then you could write book after book and feel safe in the knowledge that every one of them will be published.

So take advantage of the of the currently publishing climate and start publishing all your own books.

Can you imagine how great it would be to work at home as a self published author and wave goodbye to the 9 to 5 rat race forever?

You can learn how easy and inexpensive it is to write and publish every book you write and sell them worldwide at http://SelfPublishWorldwide.com.

Article Source: Bluegrass Solutions Article Directory