"You can have brilliant ideas, but if you cannot get them across, your ideas will not get you anywhere."

-Lee Lacocca

It is a well-known fact that businesses need marketing to survive. No matter how good is your product or how excellent is your services or ideas, you need to reach out to masses in order to generate sales, otherwise you will get to nowhere. The importance of marketing was also highlighted by the CEO of Nike, Phil Night who once said that,

"The most important thing we do is market the product. We have come around to saying that Nike is a marketing-oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing tool".

-Phil Knight, CEO Nike

As we all know that, products and services changes with demand and so does the marketing techniques. Previously print media, radio and television were considered to be the sources of marketing but now with the advent of internet, online marketing is flourishing day by day and is becoming the fastest and the inexpensive source of sharing information almost everywhere around the world. As internet is evolving as a social web site with interactive communication, internet marketing has gained popularity. Various statistics reveal that online advertising has grown to be worth tens of billions of dollars annually, in just a few years. According to a report published by Price Water House Coopers (PWC), that in the year 2006, 16.5 billion US dollars was expected to be spent on online marketing in the United States. Also in UK, the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) reported that, internet marketing has flourished in recent years becoming a multi-million pound industry.( Source: www.iabuk.net).According to a study by the IAB and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) , spending on online advertising in the UK might reach to 1 billion pounds for the first time, fuelled by increased use of broadband.

These figures advocate the growing importance of internet marketing as also reaffirmed by David Silverman, Partner, Entertainment and Media Practice, PricewaterhouseCoopers, who said that:

"The latest results reaffirm the internet's growing importance for marketers to integrate online advertising into their overall media plans."

This is the reason why companies are constantly engaging in adopting various successful internet marketing strategies in order to reach out to their target markets and Article Marketing is one of the most effective of all. This book is dedicated to impart you with an in depth information about Article Marketing. If you want to become a successful online marketer and want to stand out of your competitors through incorporating effective article marketing tactics than this book is essentially worth reading for you and will help you explore what is article marketing, its importance, its scope, its benefits, how to create an effective article strategy and employ valuable article marketing tactics and much more. But before getting into much depth, first let's have an introduction about article marketing and how it is associated with viral marketing another online marketing phenomenon.

What is Article Marketing?

Article marketing is a form of online marketing that companies incorporate to advertise products and services to the potential market. The term article marketing is not novel to us, although its form has been changed prominently. Traditionally article marketing was done through print media as it was the only medium of mass communication. Companies or businesses in an effort to increase their customer base used to supply useful content in the form of an article to leading newspapers free of charge. Newspapers in turn publish these articles and in return prints the companies contact information with the article. For example visa consultants may submit an article on the latest visa regulations and newspaper might publish this article with the name and contact information of the visa consultants. Hence it is a win-win situation for both the players.

Today with the internet revolution, article marketing has taken the form of internet article marketing. Companies today in order to market their services and products to the customers and to create brand awareness are engaging in article marketing activities via various online article directories like ezine and many others. By posting their articles in various article directories and linking articles with pages of their own websites companies can generate leads for their businesses in order to flourish. Some online marketers often in order to maximize their online article marketing campaign results try to submit their articles to multiple article directories.

Importance of Article marketing

As we have mentioned earlier that internet is becoming a wider source of communication. This fact is in itself sufficient to manifest the growing importance of online article marketing. Companies today are widely launching article marketing campaigns to develop more and more leads for their business.

Before exploring more about article marketing, it is essential to mention that, the success of article marketing hugely depends on the strategies used by a marketer to develop and run an online article marketing campaign and as internet is becoming more and more of a social medium, Viral Marketing is becoming essential for any type of online marketing campaign including article marketing. Marketers who want to market their products and service via creating and publishing articles online should implement effective viral marketing campaign to enhance the affectivity of their article marketing efforts.