Making money by using article marketing can be a little tricky, but under the right circumstances, it can also be very profitable. Before you jump into article marketing, take a minute and think about what you’re marketing, and what you want to get out of article marketing. Do you have a website of your own? Do you sell products of your own? Are you relying on affiliate programs to generate income?

If you’re starting with a clean slate, the very first thing you should do is set up a website. If you produce a product of any sort, an site dedicated to that product will do just fine. If not, consider launching a blog, or other informative site that you can post affiliate links on. Whatever you decide to do with your website, make sure it has the potential to generate income. After all, what’s the point of marketing your site if it can’t bring in any profit?

Now that you know what you’re marketing, it’s time to start writing some articles. Sites like Ezine Articles let you post articles on a variety of different topics. Each article you post can be an indirect advertisement for you, your website, and any products or services you might offer. It’s important to keep that in mind as you write your articles. Each article should contain a link to your site. That’s pretty obvious. What might not be so obvious, is that each article should also be SEO friendly. Your article (and by proxy, your site) will get some attention from regular visitors to the article directory you submitted your work to, but a good portion of your traffic is going to come from search engines. Remember to use keywords in the title of the article whenever possible, and the body of the article should be keyword rich.

Having an SEO friendly article on an article directory like Ezine Articles can help you in a few different ways. If the article itself is SEO friendly, more people will find it, and some of  those people will click through to your site. Sites like Ezine Articles have bene around for a while, and as such, they have a fairly high volume of traffic, and they also tend to come up high in search all on their own. By having a site like that linking to your site, you’re increasing your own search rank.

By writing SEO friendly articles on article directories, and linking them back to your own site, you can bring in some traffic, and boost your search rank all in one shot. At the end of the day, more traffic leads to more revenue, and that’s never a bad thing.

EzineArticles.com is one of the leading article directories online today and has been established for a very long time in the marketing and article space.

Ezine Articles essentially lets your post your articles (rewritten for Ezine or as you posted on your own blog) to their database of articles with millions of visits each month. What that does, is it brings you visitors and backlinks to your website creating a lot of value for your business.

Some people make a living by posting to Ezine and linking out to affiliate products or their own products and selling people from their articles on the products and websites.

Ezine is a very powerful tool that should be in every internet marketers business plan.

There are two differing camps when it comes to article publishing on article directories. Some people believe that all the content must be unique that you post on your blog, therefore you should never post vanilla posts from your blog onto article directories. Then, there are other internet marketers who have claimed they have had no ill effects from publishing the same article from their blog a few days later on the most popular article directories. Personally, I have no problem posting my articles from my own blog onto article directories, but I usually wait at least a week before I do so, that way I have time for my own articles to be indexed and to appear as the original article source.

Once you are ready to start publishing, it is a good idea to go through and read some of the Ezine Articles to see what style are most popular and which topics seem to be as well.

You are not allowed to use affiliate links directly in your Ezine articles, so instead you need to set up a sub directory with 301 redirect to your affiliate link, if that is the way you are going to go.

Linking is also very closely monitored, you can not have links in the first 2/3rd’s of the article, so be conscience of that so that you can save yourself some frustration, there is also a limit on the number of links that are allowed.

Ezine Articles can be a very powerful tool to incorporate into your business, learning the ropes first and taking it slowly (so you don’t get banned) is important so that you can create unique content that will garner you some great responses to your links, in turn making you some money.