Lots of people have heard about article marketing but do not really understand what it is. There are different ways article marketing can be used to help you.

Writing an informative article about something that is related to your website content, service, or product, then mass submitting it to article submission or free content websites.

Because of the links in your author bio section or footer of the article, every article directory you submit to is linking back to you. While this creates a lot of one-way inbound links, you have to remember that those websites are not likely to be related to your product, service or website content.

In addition to that, those article directories also link to thousands of websites. Even on the page where your article appears in their site, it's likely that many other links accompany your links on the same page, further diminishing the value of those links.

It is worth the effort. Those inbound links will definitely not hurt you and will help some, but the goal of submitting your article to all of those article directories is so that other Webmasters and Bloggers can find your articles.

Whenever a webmaster or Blogger uses your article in a website or Blog that is related to your content, product or service, then you are accomplishing a lot. Those are valuable one-way inbound links and will carry weight with search engines like Google.

Writing exclusive articles for high-traffic websites.

This is another way you can use article marketing to enhance your search engine rankings and link popularity as well as get traffic directly from those who read your article.

For this, you really need to polish your writing style. You need to write an informative article that is grammatically correct first of all. It needs to be 500 - 700 words.

You need to provide references for your facts and acknowledged quotes to support your theories or opinions. It will also help you illustrate that the information is correct. These types of articles require more research because they need to be accurate.

Once you have your article written, offer it as an exclusive article to just one high-traffic website where their topic is related to your content, products, or services. This article will be seen by many if it is accepted and you will see a direct result in the amount of traffic you get from just one article submitted to just one website.

I will offer one last way to use article marketing effectively. Writing the article as you would an exclusive article as mentioned above for another website and putting it into your own website.

Once you have the article written and posted into your website, take the link directly to the article page and start posting in forums and commenting on blogs that are related to the topic of your article. Use the link to that article page in your sig. line or as a reference if you find people discussing exactly what your article explains.

By using the article to help others, you will find they will want to see what else you have at your website. By linking it in your sig. line, you also increase link popularity for that page and for your website. Make sure that the rest of your website is linked from the page you put the article into and it can even help your website get crawled by the search engine spiders.