For centuries people have used the written word to persuade, communicate and influence others to take action. Techniques have been perfected over the years in the offline market. Direct marketers have mailed long sales letters to convert lookers to buyers. Today Internet marketers have the same advantage used by offline concerns to produce a strong stream of visitors to their websites.

Article marketing continues to provide a robust method of driving interested customers to your site and at the same time provide you with specific advantages over your competitors. Although writing and posting articles routinely can be tedious the results are well worth the effort.

There are several ways to use articles and several more benefits that you will experience. Increased revenue, increased opt-in lists and lead generation are just the tip of the iceberg.

Placing your articles within directories that have a high page rank gives you both exposure to publishers as well as a back link from a search engine respected website. The higher the number of articles you submit increases the rank your site holds and then increases the position in an organic search.

Articles also build your reputation. People are looking for information from an authority on the subject. You build your reputation and credibility by providing accurate, high-quality content. Your article resource box is the place to shine and send the readers back to your website where you have even more content and an opt-in box for your ezine. Now you can stay in contact with your potential customer and reel them in!

Viral marketing is all about building a buzz about a topic, person, event or product. You can build your own buzz by marketing through articles. Make a plan to write two articles a week for your site that are optimized for keywords. As your site grows larger it will perform better in search engine rankings and it will be positioned higher in the organic searches. Research is showing that the majority of people searching the Internet are looking first at the organic searches. If your product or service ranks well you will develop a steady stream of traffic.

Think about the websites that you find interesting and visit often. Most likely they are sites that have content rich articles and information you find important in your life. Your customers are not different. They are looking for high-quality content about their interest. Give it to them!

Marketing on the Internet can be cumbersome and potentially expensive. Placing ads in other ezines, purchasing software for viral marketing or placing pay per click ads requires a source of funding. Article marketing is cheap! You can pen your own articles, use a ghost writer or a private label rights site to provide accurate content. Your costs are very minimal if you do it yourself and then only pay a small hosting fee for your site.

There are several guru marketers who make a consistent living on the Internet using articles as their major traffic generating method. Although it takes consistency and practice it is also rewarding and cheap.