More and more people are beginning to realize the benefits of writing articles. It is most definitely one of the easiest ways to promote your online business fast and for "free". Although I say free, writing articles and then submitting to directories and webmasters can take a bit of time. However, with a bit of practice, you will soon be churning out articles in no time.

Article Marketing works like this:

You write an article or more on your niche, which should be related to the website that you are aiming to promote. You then submit your article to free article submission sites in return for a link back to your site. A massive benefit of doing this, and one that can accumulate over time, is the fact that there are many webmasters and ezine publishers that will be looking for fresh content to publish to their visitors and customers. This increases the exposure of your article and as a consequence the link to your site, and the number of links pointing to your website in the eyes of search engines.

As you will probably know, one of the major factors in search engines algorithms is the number of relevant links pointing to your website. The number of links that are possible to gain from article submissions should not be underestimated. In a short amount of time, it is not uncommon to achieve tens, hundreds, or even thousands of one-way links from just a few submitted articles. This will obviously vastly improve how important the major search engines will view your website, and in turn place it higher in their search results.

The consequence of this is obvious; more visitors, more sales, greater profit.

In my opinion, the old style of reciprocal linking is not as powerful as article marketing. Finding relevant sites to approach to exchange links with can be very difficult, depending on your niche. And even then, it can be argued that search engines are not placing as much relevance on these reciprocal links as they once did. Without good software, link exchanges could literally take hours for just a handful of links. In that time you could have written several articles, submitted them to your favorite article directories, and sat back to watch your incoming links and number of visitors stack up!

What is best about this sudden surge of website traffic, link popularity and interest in your products or services is the fact that you have obtained it all for free :-).

If you aren't already using articles as part of your marketing strategy you really are missing out. What better way to entice visitors to your site than to educate them on a subject, and show them how much you know about your niche, whilst providing a link for them to find out more at your site.