Unless you're completely brand new to doing business on the internet, you'll have heard about article marketing. Article marketing is how a regular person like you or me can gain a foothold into niche markets and target interested and motivated visitors and turn them into interested and motivated buyers.

Article marketing is without a doubt one of the most powerful ways to promote your website. If done properly it is a highly effective way to gain targeted traffic and build backlinks. Using short, informative articles to promote a site may seem a like a lot of effort, but the return on investment can be phenomenal. So how does article marketing work?

To start with, for little or no cost, you can write articles and submit them to various article directories and other websites. In turn, these directories and websites publish your articles on their sites. The cumulative affect of this is that your site's search engine rankings will naturally rise due to all the backlinks you've gained from other sites using your content.

Article marketing is extremely viral since a single article, if well-written and targeting good keywords, can generate dozens and dozens of links back to the author's site or other designated landing page. Article marketing also provides the added benefit allowing even a new website owner or author to develop a reputation as an authority in a niche. When a reader comes across your article through an article directory and is interested enough to click through your links and visit your site, you've been handed the opportunity to develop a relationship with that reader. It's up to you to cultivate that relationship by offering even more relevant content for your readers that addresses their questions, needs or wants.

At various times, you'll hear that article marketing is no longer effective or that submitting an article to hundreds of article directories does nothing more than create duplicate content and puts a site at risk of being de-indexed by the top search engines.

Putting aside any arguments for or against duplicate content for the moment, article marketing is every bit as effective as any traffic or promotional tactic touted these days. Various promotional strategies will come and go, but the strength of article marketing lies in the fact that the World Wide Web is built upon and needs fresh, relevant content continuously.

Millions of people come online everyday to search for information, products, answers to questions, interaction with online communities or any other number of reasons. By providing this content through means of article marketing, you are establishing your own stake in this enormous arena. Provide enough decent content and you'll be rewarded with a stream of traffic to your site. Put forth good content and the right offer in front of your site's visitors and you're likely to capture the sale.

Article marketing is the one free or nearly free strategy to promote a product or website that anyone can do. It is an excellent way to bring in targeted traffic if you are willing to work at it consistently and for the long-term.

By writing informative articles using well-researched keywords in whatever niche you select, you can gain more exposure and higher search engine rankings. But, just submitting the same article over and over to hundreds of article repositories and niche websites can dilute the effectiveness of your article marketing efforts.

The real key to article marketing success is to submit unique versions of your articles to the different directories and websites. Daunting as this may sound the results are truly extraordinary and well worth the effort. Gone are the risks of duplicate content and slippage of ranking. While the definition of what constitutes duplicate content continues to be the subject of hot debate, many experienced webmasters are comfortable with ranges above 30%.

Of course, the greater the difference between versions, the better, but keep in mind that the top search engines spiders review a webpage in its entirety and take other elements of the page into consideration. Even a seemingly small 30% change can be quite sufficient to avoid being "sandboxed".

Submitting unique versions of your articles is the smartest way to undertake article marketing. Not only are you gaining targeted traffic, but the boost in ranking tends to last longer from backlinks you build through marketing unique articles.