Article marketing is an inexpensive and effective way to build back links and to get your home based business globally recognized. Getting an article published on hundreds or thousands of directories will bring a surge of traffic to your site as well as setting it up for long term highly targeted traffic through the search engines. There are many different variables that come into play in making this method work effectively and efficiently for your home based business.



The first thing you need to ask yourself is if you feel comfortable enough and confident enough to write. If you are, good for you! Read through a couple of high quality articles to get a feel of what it takes and get started writing one yourself. After writing a couple you'll really start to pick up on speed and what it takes to make your articles successful.

On the other hand, if you have no previous writing experience or just don't feel comfortable writing articles, don't worry, you can have your articles outsourced for you. There are many people and/or services that you can buy bulk amounts of articles for a relatively low price. Although I would highly advise and recommend you to learn to write your own articles. In the long run it will be much more cost efficient and also more gratifying to be able to accomplish something by yourself. You may never know if you are good at something unless you try it.

Once you have an article written, you need to submit it to some directories. There has been some mixed feedback on how to do this. At first it was thought that the more directories you submit to, the better off you are because you have more back links. Back links are imperative in ranking high in the search engines.

However, recently it was discovered that the search engines will penalize you for submitting it everywhere because they see it as spam and we all know that the internet is flooded with spam. With this new found knowledge, it is thought that submitting to just a handful of only the best directories will give you the best chance for your articles to succeed in the search engines.

So which way is best?

Well, there are obviously varying opinions on this question. Let it be known from experience, that using a distribution service and getting your articles to as many directories as possible will bring you more immediate traffic than submitting to just a couple of directories manually. So in that regard I do believe that using an article distributor is your better choice. Of course you still have the problem of being penalized for spamming which will make it tough to receive any free long term traffic through the search engines. That being said, there is now a solution! A method called article leveraging that will solve this issue...well, for now.

Article leveraging is a process where you take your original article and change it up just a bit. You basically change your title a couple of times, tweak six or seven sentences throughout the article, and change your resource box one or two times. What you end up with is a 30-40% variance in your article. Now when you submit your article to the different directories, the search engines don't see it as one article but several different articles. Using this method, it is possible to have multiple articles (of the same original) showing up on page of Google at the same time!

If you are interested in starting article marketing, I suggest you learn how to write your own articles and find an article distribution service that allows you to leverage your articles. Once you learn the ropes and are a couple of months deep in the process, you will really begin to reap the rewards.