Welcome to FreeLanceSubmit.com

Your one-stop site for Article Marketing for your Web business.

How Article Marketing Works

You've thought about your objectives, and you know the major steps of creating, publishing, and marketing a Web site. And you've read what we have to say about where Article Marketing and FreeLanceSubmit.com can fit into your "road map" to achieving your goals. Now it's time to learn exactly what we're talking about.

On this page, you'll learn:

• What Article Marketing is
• What Article Marketing does
• Why Article Marketing works
• Why the various Ezine Web Sites offer this powerful marketing vehicle for free

Article Marketing is a technique and system for promoting Web sites by publishing articles in on-line Article Directories or "Ezines" ("electronic magazines").

A few things may jump out at you as you think about that. On the one hand, it may seem both inane and innocuous. Why would anyone bother to read articles about Web sites, especially when they could simply go to the Web sites themselves? And something this inane can't possibly be very powerful, therefore it can not be used to do evil, or at least not much evil.

On the other hand, as you think about it a little more, it may begin to seem devious and deceptive. People are obviously being fed a bunch of salesy hooey in the guise of informative articles. And the search engines, in their diligent efforts to discover and index the rich content on the Web, are being tricked into seeing something as an informative article when it's really nothing more than "spam" in a thin disguise. Something so powerful must only be used for unsavory purposes.

The truth, as with so many things, is somewhere in between, and if you study the world of Article Marketing, you will realize that it absolutely must be so. Article marketing is neither powerless nor evil. The power that it has to promote Web sites can not be used for deceptive purposes, or the search engines would "blacklist" the deceptive Web sites, which would die in oblivion. The drive for the search engines to find and index valuable content, and the drive of the Web marketers to get their sites noticed by the search engines yield a balance that maintains itself. Article Marketing presents valuable content, and offers little hooks of enticement to visit a Web site, and the balance between content and marketing is maintained by the Article Directory's desire to remain in the good graces of the search engines.

Article Marketing, then, consists of many (many, many, many) Web sites called Article Directories or "Ezines" that solicit and publish articles on just about any subject imaginable. Authors provide these articles to the Ezines, receiving no compensation except for the potential traffic to their Web site that the tiny hook of enticement in the article may generate.

Side Note: Some Article Directories are better than others. Perhaps the majority fall into the category of "junk," or at least skirt the boundaries. As you will discover in reading more about our services, we identify the highest-quality Article Directories, and we take the extra effort required to get your articles published there. It sounds like doing things the hard way, but it is actually much more effective. Your articles will be published on the best Article Directories, and will not get lost in a flood of questionable content.

Standard mode of operation of these Ezines and Article Directories is that they freely share their articles with each other, so that any Ezine (or indeed any Web site or blog) may copy these articles and repost them on their own Web sites. The agreement among these Ezines (and others) is that the articles must be reposted intact, complete with attribution to the original author, and complete with whatever "hooks of enticement" the original author put into the article.

In order to facilitate this sharing, a standard format of these articles has been developed, so that the summary, body, and "hook" (often called a "Resource Box") can be recognized and posted correctly, regardless of the Ezine's individual formatting.

Maybe the big picture is beginning to become obvious now. A Web site owner writes an article that includes both valuable informational content (a lot of it) and an enticement to visit his or her Web site (a little enticement), and sends it to an Ezine. The Ezine editor examines it and, if they decide that it has quality content, and the right balance of content and enticement so that they won't look like a spammer, they publish it on their Ezine. If the content is especially good, other Ezine operators, Web site operators, and bloggers, always hungry for new content, may copy the article and publish it on their own Ezines, Web sites, and blogs. Meanwhile, the search engines, always hungry to index new content, find this article and make it available to people browsing the Web.

• It gets the name of the author and the name of the author's Web site out onto the Web. The author and the Web site are associated with the valuable informational content of the article, and so the author comes to be recognized as an expert in the subject matter of the article, and the Web site comes to be recognized as a source of valuable information.
• It gets the "hooks of enticement" out onto the Web where they do two things. They entice human readers to click and visit the author's Web site, and they display to the search engines the fact that there are links to that Web site in a number of other Web pages, thus raising the perceived value and importance of the author's Web site.
• The magic: It allows the author's name, the Web site name, and the "hooks" to propagate across the Web, from one Ezine and blog to another, to another, as if the article were something alive. Indeed, a good article does take on a life of its own.

Article Marketing provides two phenomena that get your Web site noticed.

1. In effect, it multiplies your Web site.
2. It boosts the search engine ranking of your Web site.

Multiplying Your Web Site

The published article constitutes yet another Web page with the same keywords as your Web site, but this page links back to your Web site!

For example, let's consider the HikingWithChuck.com Web site, and its page about good-quality inexpensive hiking boots. When a person uses a search engine to find information about good-quality inexpensive hiking boots, the list of matching sites will include HikingWithChuck.com, but also many thousands of other sites. (As of this writing, a search on Google for "good-quality inexpensive hiking boots" without the quotes yields about 17,400 results.) Just in terms of pure odds, the user is not very likely to choose Chuck's Web site.

Side note: Ironically, this page is beginning to place fairly high in search results for "hiking boots"! Just goes to show you the power of Article Marketing! If you came here looking for information about hiking equipment, try HikingWithChuck. Sorry about that! But now that you're here, if you want to know how the power of Article Marketing can help your Web site, you're certainly welcome to look around!

Now, suppose Chuck publishes one article on one Article Directory that uses the exact same keywords as his Web page about hiking boots. Now, when the Web surfer enters the same search, they'll get 17,401 results. (No, it's not really that simple, but let's go with it for purposes of illustration.) Now, two of those results contain Chuck's message and entice the user to buy their hiking boots through Chuck's Web page. With only one article, Chuck has effectively doubled his presence on the Web.

But of course, there's more. Being no dummy, Chuck submitted that article to many Article Directories. And since it was a very high-quality article, it got picked up by many more Ezines and Article Directories. So now, the user might get about 17,500 results for their search, and 100 of them are Chuck's! From one out of 17,400 results (about 0.006%), Chuck now "owns" 100 out of 17,500 (about 0.6%). Granted, 0.6% is a pretty small share, but the point here is that publishing this one good article increased Chuck's Web presence for these keywords by a factor of 100!

"Owning" a greater number of search engine results is good, but not really good enough. The problem here is that the odds of a Web surfer clicking any given result out of that set are not evenly distributed among all 17,400 or so results. The person is far, far, far more likely to click on one of the results in the first page or two of results than on any of the following 17,380 results.

That's where the next phenomenon of Article Marketing comes in.

Boosting Your Ranking

When the search engines return a list of pages that match the keywords the user typed in, they give preference to Web pages that are considered "higher quality" Web pages. And one important factor in assigning a "quality" value (or, as Google calls it, "PageRank") is counting how many other pages on the Web contain links to that page.

In other words, of the thousands of Web pages that match the keywords being searched, the pages most likely to be listed among the first ten or twenty results are the ones that have the most external links pointing to them.

That's why you want to have other Web sites exchanging links with you. Their link to your site enhances your "PageRank," and your link to their site enhances their "PageRank."

Some unscrupulous operators have tried to exploit this in the past by creating Web sites that contain nothing but links to other Web sites. Sometimes they would get people to pay to have their sites linked on these "link farms." But this technique doesn't work anymore. The better search engines, such as Google, now assign a "PageRank" based not only on the number of links back to the page, but also on the "PageRank" of the page that contains the link.

Remember, too, that the number of pages linking to a page is only one factor in determining its "PageRank." Another factor is the content of the page.

So a "link farm" page containing only links and/or ads and no content will have a very low "PageRank" of its own. And pages to which it links will not have their "PageRank" enhanced by virtue of the link on the "link farm," because that link is of poor quality.

What does this mean for Ezines and Article Marketing?

The Ezines are not empty "link farms," but sites with real content, and thus with moderately high "PageRank." (Their "PageRank" will not be extremely high, because few pages link to them, but it will be moderately high because they are content-rich and not simply link farms or ad farms.) And any page to which they link via their articles will have its "PageRank" enhanced because it has a link from a page with moderately high "PageRank."

Going back to the example described above, Chuck's Web page on hiking boots and his Ezine article linking to it, we see the power at work. By publishing this article on the Article Directories and Ezines, and having it republished on many other Ezines because of the quality of the article, Chuck's hiking boots page now has a high "PageRank." There are a hundred or so pages out there on the Web, each with a moderately high "PageRank," all linking to Chuck's original hiking boots page.

So now, when the user searches for high-quality inexpensive hiking boots, they'll still get more than 17,000 results, but the first page of results is likely to contain Chuck's original hiking boots page, because it matches the keywords and it has a high "PageRank." And incidentally, even if the user scrolls past the first ten or twenty results, there are fairly good odds that they will choose a link to one of the copies of Chuck's article, because there are many copies in the list of results, and each of them has a moderately high "PageRank."

So, why are the Article Directories and Ezines giving away this free publicity and allowing "just anyone" to use their Web sites to boost the "PageRank" of their own Web sites? Simple: Content.

The Ezine publishers are getting huge volumes of high-quality content, essentially for free. (It's not really "free," but we'll get back to that in a moment.) Having these hundreds and hundreds of pages of fresh, high-quality content every week enables the Ezine publishers to keep their own "PageRank" very high.

They support themselves by displaying advertisements. They generate advertising revenue in proportion to the number of visitors they receive and, in the case of Google AdSense and most other reputable advertising services, in proportion to the quality of their content as measured by their "PageRank."

And they enhance both the number of visitors they attract and their "PageRank" by having more content, and better-quality content.

Those like us who use Article Marketing to enhance the "PageRank" and visitor traffic to our own Web sites are providing the Ezine publishers with the content they need for "free." And the Ezine publishers are providing us with this marketing venue for "free."

As was mentioned a few paragraphs above, the content is not really "free" for the Ezine publishers. They pay their own staff, a considerable number of people in some cases, to screen out the garbage articles. They want to publish only those articles that meet their standards of quality, because they don't want their "PageRank" to suffer, as it would if they began publishing garbage.

There is also an intangible cost to the Ezine publishers for this "free" content. That is, they give something away to the authors of these articles: "Free" publicity.

Similarly, there is a cost to the author for this "free" publicity. They must work to ensure that their articles conform to the Ezine publisher's standards of quality, and they must "give away" some of their information and knowledge.

It's a classic give-and-take. Ezine publishers give away publicity for the authors and take informational Web page content. Authors give away information and take publicity.

Next Steps

Now it's time to learn FreeLanceSubmit.com can Help to get you started in Article Marketing.

If you haven't already, you might want to review Your Objectives to understand how Article Marketing can fit into your plans for your Web site.

Or maybe you want to review the Road Map to Web Success with Article Marketing. This will show you the major steps in building and promoting your Web site, and how FreeLanceSubmit.com can help you along the way.