Without a strong list, any online business will be unstable. That's because all online businesses rely on traffic. Traffic from the search engines, traffic from forums, blogs, and so on. But what is a heavily depended upon traffic source dries up? The business will be left dead in the water. The early pioneers of Internet marketers are well aware of this danger. So they started building email lists. They offered something free, say a free newsletter or ezine, and encourage the website visitors to subscribe.

And they did, thinking that anything free must be worth subscribing to. They were right. These weekly or monthly newsletters provided tons and tons of valuable information for free. But how can anyone give away stuff for free without earning anything? Of course, the online business owners don't just give away free stuff forever. They do this consistently to establish a few things.

They allow their website visitors to get to know them. They let them have a sneak preview of what they have to share and since the information is free, there's no risk. And they use their email list to communicate with the visitors, eventually converting them from prospects to buyers. At the end of the day, they'd been able to build trust with the members on the list. Note that everything mentioned here cannot be accomplished without the email list. Recognizing that the email list is the most important component at the center of all Internet business models, these experts now share their knowledge with the rest of the world.

So now, everybody wants to build a strong list. But they face difficulty. As more and more people jump on the band wagon and started building online businesses, there is more competition. Certainly, traffic has grown overall, but the competition has driven the cost of clicks upwards. Keywords that used to cost just five cents a click are now costing as much as thirty cents and up. As the competition continues to grow, so must the businesses. Otherwise, the unthinkable will happen - death of the online businesses who refuse to grow.

Growth means constantly coming up with useful, higher margins products and alternative traffic sources. The more products, and the more traffic sources, the more stable the business. Many Internet marketers have already started looking into article marketing as a reliable traffic source. This traffic generation method allows them to send their marketing messages to their target audiences very quickly on established sites that have been around for years.

As the number of articles submitted grows, so does the number of links, and inevitably, traffic grows as well. Article marketing is a one time effort, and when done correctly, can lead to direct traffic coming from the sites, or indirect traffic coming from the increased search engine rankings. With traffic, it's now possible to build a strong list without having to worry about increasing click costs.