Article marketing the simple act of writing one 400 word article and submitting it to various sites is the surprise online marketing medium of the past year. For a couple years, new marketers have been advised to promote their businesses by writing and distributing articles.

This worked so well that recently article marketing has hit the mainstream. Sites like EzineArticles.com have helped to create perfect conditions for article marketing. Far from being an underground or little noticed way of marketing, article marketing has come into its own as a premier form of marketing.

What's best about this marketing form is that by and large it's free to use. Simply write an article, do a little research to discover a premium list of article sites and email groups, submit your articles, and you're done!

But what exactly does article marketing do?

1. Article marketing establishes you as an expert. Your goal as an article marketer is to write several articles per week (usually 3-5) about the niche target your business serves. At this rate, over the course of a year you will have written between 150-250 articles. By the time you have written this many articles, you will know your subject or niche inside-out, and it will show! Any person who reads one of your articles and finds their way to your other articles or your business site will feel comfortable with you as an expert because of your knowledge.

2. Article marketing helps you rank well with the search engines. Because you are posting each article on your own website and on numerous other websites, you are providing search engines with a number of paths back to your business site. When the search engines find your main site, they will keep returning. When you continue to update your site, your articles will be indexed, and as more and more searchers find your site via the search engines, your ranking will go up. All these factors help you to place better in the search engines.

3. Article marketing gives you a lot of exposure. One of the best features of article marketing you want to tap in to comes from the article sites themselves. They exist to allow publishers and webmasters with information for their sites. When a publisher finds your article on such a site, she can reprint your article on her site or in her ezine. This clearly benefits you the more times your article is reprinted, the more exposure you get.

If you only do one thing to market your business the rest of this year, make sure it is article marketing!