The Internet has certainly opened up new ways for business people to market products and services. No longer do sellers of products and services only have to rely on print, radio, or TV advertising to get the word out about their companies. Today, widespread exposure to a diverse audience can happen quite fast via article marketing, blogs, websites, e-mail campaigns, and the like. Article marketing and blogs offer internet marketers' unique ways to promote their business, and they can work together.

Article marketing has the advantage of allowing you to get many links out into cyber space. When you use a quality article-distribution service, you guarantee yourself widespread distribution of your articles. A good article distribution service will offer you many publishers to send your article writing efforts to regularly. They will also offer you a broad range of categories and sub-categories of publishers. This way you can target your articles to a specific niche publisher who specializes on your topic.

Article marketing also allows you the opportunity to write a bunch of articles and then schedule their distribution. You can write up a batch of articles for your article promotion campaign, submit them to a service, schedule their distribution, and sit back. You can move on to other marketing efforts while your articles are out their working for you.

Article marketing is a great way to get many links out there. With continual article distribution, and consistent article writing efforts, you steadily build traffic to your website. Article marketing offers you the chance to reach a wide audience in a relatively short time. It also offers you all of this at a reasonable price. That's the efficient way to engage in Internet marketing.

If there's one disadvantage to article marketing it's aligning your efforts with a poor article distribution service. Make sure you choose an article distribution service that lets you submit an unlimited amount of articles for one fee. This could be a monthly, quarterly, six-month, or annual fee. Whatever it is, make sure the fee is fair and does not put a cap on how many articles you can submit in a time-period.

Blogs are a different animal. With blogs you are building your persona to your intended audience, or niche market. Blogs are more personal than articles. With a blog site you have the chance to be creative in a different way. You can let your personality shine through more in a blog. You can let your business's personality shine through in a unique way in a blog. Because they are more informal in tone and in writing style, blogs build relationships.

You can write a daily or weekly blog and add that "on a personal note' aspect to it. People like this, and it's a great way for potential customers to form an affinity with you. A blog helps your target market get to know you and your product better. When they feel comfortable with you they will tend to click a link on your blog back to your website. Because you have established a trusting relationship with them via your blog, you pre-sell them to your website. They will be more likely to click on your affiliate links because they feel comfortable with you.

What's great about blogs is that they are easy-to-update. In this way you can keep them fresh and current. As well, you can post blogs of short length whenever you choose. With article writing you need to make sure your articles are in the 500 to 750-word range at a minimum. Blogs allow for short information snippets multiple times in a day even. This keeps blogs vibrant and always brimming with timely information.

A disadvantage of blogs is that you have to make the time to update them frequently. You should update you blog at least once a week. However, three times a week is better. With article writing you can write a batch of articles, schedule them for distribution, and take a break from writing. You can schedule blog postings for future distribution as well, but if you want daily postings that talk of the day's events and news then you have to write daily. A blog is a commitment, where you must keep content fresh.

Article marketing and blogs can work together. You can use your article writing and article promotion efforts to drive traffic to your blog. On your blog you can offer more information. You can elaborate on your articles' content. With a blog you can let potential customers see a more personal side of you and your Internet business.

A blog is less structured and less formal than an article. However, use your article promotion efforts to get that traffic to your blog. From there use the blog to drive traffic to your website where your affiliate products are. You can also use blogs to link to your article content. It's a reverse situation where you use the informal environment of the blog to drive readers to your informative articles. This way you use your blog to point readers to those articles that establish you as an expert on your subject.

Use article marketing and blogs together, to promote your Internet and affiliate business. It's the 21st century way to market. Together, these two marketing initiatives will drive traffic to your website. You will have visitors who already view you as personable, knowledgeable, and trustworthy because of your article and blog content. Now you can proceed with the selling process on your website with these visitors now open to your product or service suggestions.