The Benefits Of Article Marketing
Submitting articles is a marketing strategy that cannot be underestimated!
I am not going to try and say that submitting a single article to one of the directories is the answer to all our prayers and we’ll all get rich over night! That would be daft.
What I am getting at here, is that for a ‘long term online marketing strategy’, writing articles and submitting them to the article directories is a free resource that will benefit you in several great ways:
1. Writing an article actually makes you feel good! I know this doesn’t directly translate to anything tangible in a financial business sense, but, feeling good about yourself is pretty important when it comes to being successful in business. A great deal of satisfaction can be derived from writing a good article.
2. Authoring an article positions you as an expert. We all need to ‘brand’ ourselves here on the Internet and becoming an authority in your niche is important. We tend to believe what we read in ‘black and white’ and the author is generally seen as an authority in that field. The benefits of being seen as an expert in your arena are endless, it attracts people to you and enables you to deliver information to your colleagues and prospects with relative ease.
3. Link Popularity. When you submit an article to a directory, there is usually a ‘resource box’. The resource box is a field where the author of the article can write a ‘mini bio’ and include a couple of links to websites. A condition of someone using your article in their blog, ezine, website, newsletter etc is that they should include the ‘resource box’ in the post. This creates back links to your websites which will improve the page rank or importance of your website in the great scheme of things.
4. Visitors! Similar in principle to the above point, but that resource box will encourage more visitors to your websites. A good article will leave the reader wanting to know more about you and your business. The traffic you generate using this technique is free and of high quality. That is to say the visitor already has an interest in your subject and is likely to be already warmed up to your promotions.
5. SEO. I’m sure you know this acronym means Search Engine Optimization, if you already have your website key phrases figured out, embedding them in the title and body of your article will yield search engine results and readers of your articles. Another great free traffic source.
So there we have it, some brilliant reasons to use Article Marketing in your online strategy.
One of the best article directories I have discovered, (there are literally hundreds of them!) is ezine articles. You can check out my profile here if you like: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ian_T_Taylor
All the best, get writing! 
Cheers!
Ian
