Free article marketing is a type of business promotion that relies on the creation and distribution of informative content related to the nature of the company, product/service or activity domain. Free article marketing is not specific to web activities only. It is widely practiced by many companies that want to advertise and target a local market. Therefore, they will provide free articles for publication to local or regional newspapers. The advertising as such is indirect, but the topic tackled with in the material touches on the activity of the business in question.

This advertising pattern of free article marketing has been taken over by web investors who have seen it as an opportunity to increase business exposure with minimum costs. Online free article marketing differs from the paper-printed variant by search engine optimization and keyword density. Thus, the articles written for Internet distribution focus on a main keyword that is considered the topic of the material. This is why the first stage of article marketing consists in the identification of the most relevant keywords and phrases for a product/service or domain of activity.

Free article marketing is practiced by lots of companies both small and large. The submission of the materials is made on specialized article directories from where other publishers take over content and distribute it together with the links to your website. Articles published around the world wide web generate backlinks, which represent the way in which other websites refer to your page creating chances for more visitors to access you website. Backlinks are the treasure of free article marketing and the basis of your virtual real estate empire.

Besides the keywords used to write the articles, incorporated links play an important role for free article marketing too. Some article directories accept a maximum of three links included in the content while others accept one or two links in the author info box at the end of the article. It is important to check the rules of the article directory before submitting content. Failure to comply with the rules brings about the rejection of content, and your work will be in vain.

Make sure not to duplicate content. A common mistake some marketers make is to consider that they can upload the same articles on their web page and then submit the same content to article directories. There are softwares that check for duplicate content, and you won’t be able to use the same articles twice. The only solution here is to re-write versions of your original materials and then submit them.