The reason article marketing works so well is because it's so simple. Your articles do not need to be long and sophisticated like the articles you read in magazines and newspapers.

Actually, the opposite is true. Simpler and shorter articles are more likely to get you traffic and sell more of your products.

You don't need to write a detailed essay about your topic. Make your articles a summary of the key points. This way you can grab your readers' attention and get them to click on your hyperlink, and make sure they don't get bored.

Web surfers don't want to read a long article about whatever it is you're selling. Likely customers probably don't need much persuasion.

So it's essential that you keep it concise, which of course makes it easier for you to write an article without spending a lot of time doing research.

The other great thing about marketing with articles is that nowadays it's so easy to get your article published on the web. All you need is a blog. There's no longer any need to buy expensive and complicated web design software and spend days learning how to use it. You don't need to deal with the technical stuff, just typed words. Go to LiveJournal.com, Blogger.com, MSN or Yahoo and you can create a blog and publish your articles in a few minutes - although the best way is to get your own domain and install WordPress (or have it done for you). If you choose a web host with Fantastico, you can install WordPress in seconds.

If you just type "free blog" on Google you'll find dozens of places to get your blog hosted.

There are also hundreds of websites which will publish your articles on the Internet. The bigger content sites are spidered regularly by the search engines. The more unique content these sites publish, the higher their ranking in the search engine results - which increases their revenue. That makes them only too happy to publish your articles, which will be read by their readers and indexed on their site. The rapid spidering of your articles makes them appear in the search engine results, along with a hyperlink back to your site so that internet users from all around the world can find and buy your product.

What I'm talking about here involves writing high-quality articles, not grade-school level junk like most PLR articles. If you want to see what well-written articles look like, read a popular magazine. The standard is miles ahead of any of the spammy junk you'll find in most PLR articles. Remember that most content sites will review your submissions, and will quickly discard articles which are not original, or which are not at least reasonably well-written.