How to Use Articles to Make Money Online

There are several ways to use articles to make money online, some more obvious than others. Articles can be used to promote virtually any kind of website, and also to gain you Google PageRank points, while there is also the possibility of other people using your articles as content for their website. In order to understand how to use articles to make money online, you also have to understand the rudiments of article marketing.

You won't make money online unless you are able to persuade people to visit your website, or that of the product you are promoting. It is not essential to have your own website, but it certainly helps, and the vast majority of people that have found online success have their own site. The secret is to get traffic, whether it is to your website or any other.

Regarding the latter, some people make money using what is referred to as affiliate marketing, whereby they receive a commission for selling products belonging to others. They are, in essence, working as salespersons who receive a commission for each sale made. In the case of affiliate marketing, these products are normally electronically deliverable with no replacement cost, such as software or ebooks. These can be sold time and time again at 100% profit, and the commission on these is normally 50% of the selling price but can be much higher.

When selling such products, it is possible to write articles, either reviewing the product or describing how such a product can be of use to the reader, and then include a link to the merchant's sales page at the end of the article, or in the author's resource. This is a section of the article in which the author is permitted to provide some personal information and a clickable URL.

This URL can be a merchant's sales page or a page on your own website, although preferably the latter, where you can provide a review of the product you are promoting and improve your chances of a sale.
You can see now how to use articles to make money online. Design a product of your own or simply sell an affiliate product, throw up a website from which to promote and sell it, and write a few articles every now and again to send traffic to your website. Since the URL in the author's resource can direct readers to any page on your site you want, you can have several different pages, each offering a different product, and write articles on each of them.

Not only can you use articles to attract readers to your website, but you also get a link back to your web page from each directory that publishes your article. Since there are hundreds of article directories out there, you can get a link from each. Such links help your Google listings through what Google term their PageRank index. This is a numerical figure calculated from the popularity of your web pages to others, and the more links you get to your site from other websites, the higher your PageRank is liable to be. Article directories are other websites, and so too are websites that copy your articles for their own use - they must retain your author's resource with the link back to your web page when they do so.

So, articles can be used to make money online both by driving traffic to your site and helping you get a higher search engine listing, and so the possibility of more free traffic. There is another way in which you use articles to make money, and that is by writing them. If you are a good writer, many webmasters will pay you to write articles for them. Article marketing is such an important technique in internet marketing, that people will pay others to write for them.

It doesn't stop there. Article directories are big business these days, and you can start up your own article directory. Free software is available online to enable you to set up your own article directory, and by charging a nominal fee such as two or three dollars for accelerated listings in your directory, you can make a lot of money - and many do!

Finally, going back to the more traditional use of articles to make money online, you should consider placing products such as ringtones and the like on your website, and then writing articles that send people to your relevant web pages. Others go for dating sites or some other form of social service: basically placing adverts for these services online and then using articles to get visitors who will click on the links to join these sites free, and you get paid for every click. You could use Adsense in the same way, but be careful not to get your Adsense account suspended.

Basically, articles are a means of attracting people to your website, or any other website that will pay you for traffic that eventually makes a click or a purchase. Articles do the same job as PPC (pay per click) adverts such as Google Adwords, only the articles are free. You don't have to pay anything up front to get that traffic, and any technique that provides you with free traffic is worth trying.

That is how to use articles to make money online. Basically you write articles and provide a link in the resource to the websites that you want your readers to visit. Furthermore, Google will give you improved PageRank and the potential for a higher search engine listing