IntroductionArticle marketing is the practice of providing well-written content for distribution to websites and epublishers in exchange for a blurb about the author’s business and contact information. Articles are a great way to establish credibility and let people know that you are operating a legitimate online home business. It is one of the most effective forms of online marketing out there. Article marketing is about uniqueness, having your own ideas for a given topic. It has been shown to be one of the best ways to advertise your business online. Article Marketing is powerful and under used by most, myself included. MarketingMarketing is more than just selling your products and services. Advertising your business through internet articles is no longer a luxury; it is a complete necessity to succeed in online business. Marketing articles are not for providing knowledge; they are for giving information. Where should article marketing fit into your overall marketing strategy. When it comes to displaying articles we seek to get as much value as possible. If you have someone in-house that is already creating content, marketing materials or managing the blog, you’re in business. ArticlesArticles serve as that cold call that sells a prospective buyer on your product, service or expertise before they get to your website which will make them more amendable to buying what you are offering. Articles are a great way to faithfully drive traffic to your website. Articles are written to target particular keyword niches and distributed to content publishers that cater to those markets. They are the free way to advertise your web site. Articles are viral in nature and if done right, they can provide you with the benefits for a long time to come. Articles are sticky; once an article is accepted on an e-zine website, it can stay listed for months or years. Articles are also a great tool for promotion whether it’s self promotion or promotion of a product or a business. TrafficThink about the actual value of the placement as far as potential traffic, branding and reach. Over a period of time and after several article submissions you will notice a good improvement in your search engine rankings and more traffic. The important thing to remember is that articles also mean traffic. This in turn will affect your rankings in the search results and the subsequent traffic it generates. New methods of getting traffic to your site are being devised constantly but article marketing is still the best way to drive visitors without having to pay anything out. Popular sites are the best because it should give your article a great deal of exposure; it shouldn’t be too long before your site starts to receive traffic from this. Article marketing is one of the best ways to generate free traffic to your site and boost sales for your work at home business. If you want to make money at home and have found a legitimate home business, article marketing can serve as a great way to generate targeted traffic to your sites. WritingWriting articles for use in article marketing can be a lot of fun. Writing and submitting your own articles is equivalent to FREE ADVERTISING on the Web. Writing articles for which you do not know much about may give a poor impression to the readers.Article writing that peeks a readers interest and provide quality, helpful information is a great way to build your online business and personal reputation. Writing the perfect article, however, won’t do you any good if you don’t know how to submit it effectively. DirectoriesSubmit your articles to the top article directories and make sure you submit under the category which is the closest match to the main topic or theme of your article. In an ideal world you should not publish any articles to article directories if they already exists as content on your hub or web page. Alternatively post the full article on your website or hub page as above, but only submit about 50% of it to your article directories. This will the allow you to submit the changed version to the article directories while keeping the original on your hub or web page. To try and deal with this situation you should use one or more of these tactics: Make sure that you post your new article on your web or hub page first, and then wait for it to be indexed in the search engines before you actually submit it to any of the article directories. Potentially thousands of webmasters could download copies of your article from these directories and publish them on their own websites. Submitting just a part of your article, assuming what you are left with is not too short, is fine, but as mentioned above the easiest way (ie less work for you) to avoid any duplicate content issues is to let the original article on your site be indexed first before submitting to the article directories. ConclusionArticle marketing is one of the best strategies you can do when engaging in an online advertising/website building campaign. It is easy and a convenient way to advertise your products. Writing articles is one of the most effective forms of online marketing out there. Articles are a fantastic way to build your business. They are a form of advertisement to your website. Article Marketing is one of the best ways to advertise your business online.