Article Marketing is the publication of written content on websites other than your own. Sometimes these websites may have similar content or products as your business. Sound like helping your competition? Here’s the catch. Your article includes a backlink – a link that leads to your own website. Simply put, you provide an article on other people’s websites that ends with a link back to your own website. The idea is that for those sites using your article, they must include the link back to your site.

The quality of your article’s content is a deciding factor in how many people will publish it on their sites. This is why it is very important that your articles be well written, purposeful, and relevant to the subject. If you don’t or can’t write the articles yourself, you might want to consider paying for someone to write for you. In the long run it will be worth it.

Is Article Marketing Effective

Article Marketing has become extremely popular because of the way search engines do their searching. There was a time when the number of visitors to a site was a critical factor in its listings with search engines such as Google or Yahoo. Today, however, the key determinant is the number of backlinks: pointers from other sites to yours. To understand how the backlinks work in relevancy to your page listing, you must first understand the search engine process.

Your page’s popularity, known as the page rank, is judged by two factors: how many backlinks there are to your site; and the popularity of the sites that those backlinks are on. For example, let’s say you have two backlinks to your site listed on two different websites. One of those sites, say Microsoft, has a very high page rank. The other, BobsDoItYourselfComputerRepair, has a pretty low page rank. Your site will receive more notice from the search engines because of the link on the more popular site. So, backlinks on high-profile sites will inevitably raise your page ranking.

Creating and Submitting Articles

When creating your articles, remember that quality is of utmost importance. People are looking for information, and a well-written, relevant article will position you as someone who knows what they are talking about in a reader’s mind. If you don’t think you can write your own articles, there are many online outlets for finding writers.

Once the article is written, add a link to your site along with your by-line. This is called a resource box and can include a little bit about you and your business as well as the link to your website.

Next, you will need to get your article submitted to other sites. You don’t have to do this yourself. There are literally thousands of article marketing source sites on the Internet that can do it for you. However, the more popular ones are those that produce the most effective traffic. Among these are EzineArticles, ArticleDashboard, and GoArticles. Each of these will provide excellent sources for backlinks, but be prepared to submit only well-written articles, as they tend to be quite thorough in their screening process.

Check Your Article Marketing Campaign

Once you have submitted your article, give it a few weeks to make its way out onto the World Wide Web. Then, use one of the many backlink-checking tools available on the net. Most are free and can be found by doing a simple web search. Domain-Pop and IWebTool provide some of the more popular tools. The larger search engines (i.e. Google) provide backlink-checking tools also. These programs are usually easy to use and require no download. Simply go to the site, put the web address of your site into the appropriate space, and hit enter. In a few seconds you will be able to see how many backlinks your site has and, in most cases, exactly what sites those backlinks are listed on.

Article Marketing is not only one of the most effective techniques for building your page rank and popularity, but is also one of the most simple and most inexpensive, particularly if you have good writing skills of your own. Remember to keep your article content similar to the content of your site. People surfing for the information in your articles will only click on the link in your resource box if it is relevant to their own personal interests. Also remember that article marketing takes time and effort. It doesn’t happen overnight. With every article you put out onto the web, you are putting out another way for potential visitors to find you. Over time, this will increase the traffic to your website and will eventually increase your sales.

So you have decided to get a website designed for your company, the first and foremost question that’s most likely to come into your mind is about its ‘cost’. Answering this question how much exactly a website design would cost is rather a complicated question as there are many factors that influences it. Especially those starting new or have limited budget have difficulty deciding it. Some people think it takes few hundred dollars, some other think it takes at least thousand dollars and so on. But it largely depends upon your website design company and your project type and size.

Some web designers charge less and some more for similar kind of project. The reasons could be many for those charging more. They might be devoting extra hours to it, use effective SEO tools, website templates, interesting placement of the content, use effective graphical images and so on.

Basically a website should have a professional, clean and simple look. Those designers who agree to do a designing work in lesser money may not be giving as much time as needed by it. Thus resulting in sites that might fail to attract the visitors and don’t get the desired output. You can get the idea of a website design company’s work by looking at their portfolio section and the previous assignments.

Sometimes you might not want to tell about your budget to the to the designer thinking that they might take some advantage out of it. You might be quoted hefty fees by few web designers. But it is advisable to do a bit of research and ask for free quotes for more than one designer or design company. It would give an idea as to what general fees can be charged for your website design project and also you can find out their work quality.

When you find the website design service provider according to your likes, discuss with them the price issue. The elements that are useful for your website should be used. There might be many things that would look great on your site but are not important from functional point of view.

Using certain features in your website may cost you more than usual. For instance flash animations, interaction features, slide show presentations, audio elements, etc are some of costly features.