Article marketing can be used to market your website by generating more traffic. Which means you make more money online. This article explains the basics of article marketing so you can understand how it fits into the bigger picture. This really helps you to get it right the first time and get the most from your efforts.

What is article marketing? The process works as follows: you write an article on a topic related to your website or for a product you want to sell. Submit it to directories such as EzineArticles.com. You get many people visiting EzineArticles.com on daily basis who will read your article and click a link at the bottom back to your website. This is how you get traffic from directories.

This type of marketing is also good for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Because it increases backlinks to your site. Google loves backlinks from article directories and ranks you accordingly for your chosen keyword (also known as search term). This means you get rankings and free traffic from Google.

People also want content for their websites and blogs but don't want to write it themselves. So they will go to these directories and use articles like yours on their site or blog. This means you will also get traffic from those sites too.

How do you market your article? Once you write it, you submit it to article directories such as EzineArticles.com.

You just pick your topic and paste your article in, it's as simple as that. Directories do have their editorial guidelines. But these are quite simple to adhere to once you get used to them.

There are many directories you can use. I would recommend you start with the top 5. These are (in order of traffic rank):

- EzineArticles.com - HubPages.com - ArticleBase.com - ArticleSnatch.com - GoArticles.com

This way you learn the editorial guidelines and writing standards for articles. This really helps to get your articles accepted the first time and save you having to go back to correct things which can be a real pain.

If you want to automate the process, you can also use a submission service. I recommend SubmitYourArticle.com. Their software can submit your article to 100s of article directories. You just have to enter your article once.

Beware though, some submission services don't always submit to all the top directories as mentioned above. So make sure at least 3 of these directories are included if you do use a submission service.