Article marketing is the use of informatively written text designed to catch the interest of the target market. A target market is the type of customers researched and identified to be the most likely to want or need a certain product or service. Used mainly in Internet advertising, article marketing is a popular method of driving qualified traffic to a website or blog.
Qualified traffic is basically the same thing as the identified target market. Rather than just happening upon a business website by sheer accident, consumers interested in certain products or subjects read informative articles about them. Within, or at the end of, these written pieces are links to a web page or blog. A blog, or personal web log, may be independent from a website or a part of it.
People following a link from the articles to the website or blog are doing so because they were intrigued by the information and are looking for more. In this way, they are the targeted or qualified audience that the article marketer wants to drive to his or her blog or website. Qualified audiences are more likely to click on web ads or order merchandise than random web page visitors.
The website or blog that the article marketer links the qualified audience to may be one of three types. It could be an e-commerce site selling a product that relates to the information in the article marketing pieces. Or, it could be a blog containing more of the same types of information that appeals to the target market, only this time advertising appears in which the article marketer earns profit, such as with the pay per click (PPC) model. In a PPC business model, advertisers get paid only when a site visitor clicks on one of the ads appearing on the web page. The third type of business advertising model that Internet articles may link to is a company website; these have no ads, but connect the target market with the home page, thus introducing qualified potential customers to the firm's products, services, background and contact information.
Article marketing is easily done by placing the informative pieces in Internet directories. There are many free article directory websites on the Internet. It's a matter of typing the phrase "free article directories" into a search engine to find a large list of them. Article marketers typically choose several directories to start, then keep adding more articles as well as new directory sites. Keywords, such as "shoes" for a footwear company, that the targeted consumers are likely to use in their search for products and information should be used in each article, along with links to the website or blog.