There is no doubt, one of the best ways to market your business online is by writing articles and submitting them to quality article directories. Article marketing is every bit as powerful as other forms of Internet marketing including forum marketing, pay per click advertising, and e-mail marketing.

In this article, I want to talk briefly about the many benefits of developing an article marketing strategy to give you website visitors for many years to come.

You are probably familiar with the phrase content is king. This is true because search engines are constantly looking for fresh content to provide for their searchers. One way you can do that is to write an article around a specific keyword that is being searched.

You can find all kinds of free software to develop the keyword list to write about. Google has an excellent keyword development website for their pay per click advertising program called Google Adwords. You can go to Overture to find one that people have been using for years now to get keywords to write about.

Writing articles will give your website many benefits that your competition will not have. Here are 4 of them!

1. Writing articles does not cost you anything. Granted, it will cost you time to write the articles. But this is one free form of promotion that really does work. It's not as hard as it would sound either. Ezinearticles.com offers some excellent training on how to write articles. It in no time at all, if you can talk, you can write.

2. Article writing is a great way to get your website noticed very fast. Major article directories are spidered several times every day by various search engines. By writing and submitting a quality article to these directories you can get your website spidered too. You do this by including your website address in the bio box at the bottom of each of your articles.

3. Submitting a quality article to a well-known directory serves two purposes. Number one, you can get your traffic from the people that are reading your articles. Number two your articles can serve a search engine bait to get the search engines coming to your website.

If a search engine sees something they like on your site and you can begin to rank high for specific keywords that the article is written about. Doing this can bring you website visitors for years and years to come.

4. In marketing, we talk about the term branding. You can use article marketing to brand yourself as an expert on the theme of your website. As you begin to develop more and more in the marketplace your reputation will grow. This will give you more visitors, and ultimately create more sales.

In our opinion, the keys to the perfect article marketing strategy, is writing unique articles, and then submitting them to as many quality directories as possible.

If this is something you don't feel you can do you can hirer an article writer to do it for you. The key is that you get started using articles to build your business for long term free traffic as soon as possible.