Article marketing is a way to promote your website with original, high-quality articles related to your site's topic.
After writing (or outsourcing the writing of) articles for your site, you can edit them a bit to make them “unique content”, and submit them to various article directories / libraries around the Web so other publications can pick them up and use them.
At the end of each of these articles is your “resource box” or “bio box”, containing a link to your site (to either the home page or a deep link to specific content), and a teaser blurb about you or your site content.
Well-written content articles released for free distribution can often help you build your status as an authority in your niche, as well as bring you new readers.
See Be a Guest Blogger or Guest Columnist for details on this great way to establish yourself as an authority to a large, targeted audience on a regular basis.
Search for blogs in your niche (and closely related to your niche). Blog publishers are often thrilled to get high-quality new content from guest bloggers.
Go to Google Blog Search and MyBlogLog, and search for each of your main keywords, and investigate the blogs that turn up. Do they appear to use guest blogger content? Are they high quality - the type of publication you wouldn't mind being associated with?
If any of the resulting blogs appeal to you, bookmark them so you can contact the publishers and inquire whether they'd be interested in regular guest-blogger articles from you.
Many of the publishers who pick up your article marketing content are honest and use your content the way it's intended.
But unfortunately there are also a lot of unscrupulous publishers out there who are happy to pirate your content.
These unfair publishers use your article without linking back to you (and sometimes without even acknowledging you as the author, either). They don't make your article's backlink to your site a live link, or they remove your resource box altogether.
You can spend a lot of time trying to chase down these unscrupulous publishers, or you can simply ignore them. Their sites don't tend to last very long since their strategy is usually to pump a lot of content into a “splog” (spam blog) and try to monetize it with AdSense ads. Search engines aren't fond of these splogs, and neither are human visitors - so they usually fall by wayside.
(See Jack's blog post, Why Are Some People So Stupid?.)
Here's a little different approach to article marketing. It involves doing a bit of research, and then submitting your content yourself to various publishers in your niche.
Head over to Google to search for sites in your niche (and closely related to your niche) that accept article submissions. In the Google search box, type in one of your site's main keywords, along with “submit article”.
For example, if your site is about Caribbean cruises, try these searches:
cruise + “submit article”
Caribbean + “submit article”
island + “submit article”
travel + “submit article”
If there are any sites in these niches that accept article submissions, this type of searching should help you locate them.
Bookmark all of these niche article submission pages you can locate in a new folder in your bookmarks - titled something like “Submit Cruise Articles to”.
Submit one high-quality article at a time to these sites. Don't submit more than one article per week to these so you won't be perceived as a spammer. Once or twice per month may be better.
Keep track of the traffic results you get from these sites, and keep submitting high-quality content no more often than once a week to the ones that work well for you.
Consider asking the best ones if they would be interested in receiving a monthly column from you.
There are several services and software programs designed to submit your articles to hundreds of sites and ezines for you.
Here are a few examples: