By Michele Scism,
The Results Lady

A recent survey of online marketers asked what was the one thing that they got the best results from?  The number one answer was…Article marketing.

In case you're not familiar with article marketing yet, it involves writing informative and useful articles and distributing them to article directories – giving permission to anyone to republish your article as long as your author resource box is left intact.

Here are some results I have personally experienced from article marketing:

Free traffic to my site

High authority article directories, like Ezine Articles, enjoy a lot of traffic (we're talking millions of eyeballs every month). Many of those who read my articles invariably click on the links in my author resource box and end up going to my site. This is free traffic that I otherwise would not have been able to attract to my site!

In fact, visitors from article directories make up a significant portion of my website visitors.

Increased rankings in Google and other search engines

Search engine optimization (SEO) experts say that one of the most important ways to get high Google rankings for your target keywords is to have lots of links from other sites pointing to yours. The key is the anchor text of those links should be the keywords you'd like to rank high for.

This strategy works so well that a Internet marketing guru once succeeded in having his website rank number one in Google for the keywords “coolest guy on earth” (or something like that!) – just by having all his buddies link to his site with that anchor text. That's how powerful linking is.

These are the same links you get from the usually high-authority article directories all linking back to your website through the author resource box.

Affiliate sales

Some article directories allow you to link, not just to your website, but to an affiliate product's sales page with your affiliate links. This means that your article gets blasted all over the Internet, thus increasing the chances of somebody clicking on your affiliate links and buying the product. The result? More affiliate commissions for you.

This concept is the essence of the so-called “bum marketing” or lazy marketing, which doesn't even require you to have a website. All you need to do is write and submit articles to article directories and you make affiliate commissions from those articles for as long as they're online. We're talking years here.

Another benefit of article marketing is that you become a published author and, therefore, an expert on the topic. In fact, a friend of mine got interviewed on national TV because the reporter read one of her articles online. That's media publicity that would have cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars! (Unfortunately, I have not had that opportunity – yet)

Whoops, I just realized I may have been sounding Greek throughout this blog post. “Resource box”, “anchor text”, “affiliate links” – are all these terms new to you?

If you haven't tried article marketing yet and would like to know more, I recommend this free article marketing eCourse from my friend Nicole Dean, founder of Lady Pens (an article directory).

Just go to Easy Article Marketing to sign up for the eCourse. It's free but you do have to give your name and email address.