E-commerce plays at extremely high stakes; the profits with online businesses can be in hundreds of multiples of their physical offices. The reason for this lies in online businesses being more globalized and easier to operate (read less administration, less taxation, less bureaucracy) than physical offices.

But like any other business, online businesses also need marketing. And any simple kind of marketing won't do, since these businesses are generally sophisticated corporate businesses. Also the Internet has so many websites that gaining visibility for any one particular site becomes a major issue.

That is why website owners are doing their promotions through article marketing in such a major way that it has today become the number one (both in quantity and quality) form of advertisement in the world, all forms of media included.

As the name suggests, article marketing means writing articles for marketing, i.e. promotion. Website owners write special articles pertaining to their products and put them up on article directories, online publications or newsletters.

These articles are annotated with short biographical information of the author of the article, and a link to the author's website. This is the basic device used in article marketing, which is known as a marketing article.

Marketing articles are written with some specifications in mind. There is a conscious effort made at every step of the article writing process to bring the article as high in the search pages of Internet search engines as possible. This is done by a process known as Search Engine Optimization, simply known as SEO.

The simplest way of optimizing your article for the search engines is to use a particular set of popularly searched words frequently in the marketing article. This set of words is known as a keyword. There are many tools that can suggest which keyword is more frequently searched by Internet users.

The most popular software for this is Overture. Google is also developing a keyword search tool, known as the Google Suggest, which is already available in its beta version.

Then there are several other things to be kept in mind, and making the article interesting and compelling is one of the most important ones. Since a lot would depend on how the article is perceived, efforts are made by the article writer to write in a simple manner, which is at the same time quite informative. The basic intention is that the article should drive the reader to the author's website.

Article marketing has opened up a huge secondary industry, comprised of freelance writers. Every website owner does not have the time, inclination or talent to write for him or herself, and hence they get the articles ghostwritten.

These ghostwriters, also known as freelance writers are operating from all over the world through the Internet. People who need marketing articles place their projects on auction sites like Guru, Freelance Work Exchange, Scriptance,

Projet4Hire, eLance, etc. and people who are interesting in writing offer their bids. There is actually a very small percentage of website owners who write stuff for their own websites.

Article marketing helps to create awareness about the website and leads visitors to it. This could actually result in final sales and generate business for the website. This is an improvisation of what has already been happening ever since the newspaper and print media came into vogue.

It is with the revolution of the Internet that article marketing has become almost synonymous with Internet article marketing.