Article marketing is a slow and steady process to branding your website and your image. Internet marketing gurus always give full marks to article submission and consider it to be one of the best vehicles for promoting your products. Submitting articles is one of the key ways to drive traffic to your website thus indicating your presence on internet and reputation as an expert in your chosen niche areas.

According to Wikipedia , "Article marketing is a type of advertising in which businesses write short articles related to their respective industry. These articles are made available for distribution and publication in the marketplace. Each article contains a bio box and byline that include references and contact information for the author's business. Well-written content articles released for free distribution have the potential of increasing the authoring business' credibility within its market as well as attracting new clients."

Efficacy of Article Submission

Article marketing is as effective as traditional media and newspapers and sometimes more because internet has a better coverage to targeted masses. In other words, article marketing has far-reaching results and puts you on more people's radar screens! The main point to consider is that you provide valuable content which is not available elsewhere and is unique in providing informational content or a solution to existing problem. All of us are aware that writing quality content is only the first part of the picture, equally important is the fact that you have to get your articles easily accessible to your readers, the target audience. One way, of course, is to manually submit them to the hundreds of sites that accept free content. Another way is to use a service that automates "Article Submission" for you. Beware, however; some of the Article directories like Ezine are very particular about the uniqueness and reject duplicate articles and content.

Ezine - The Mother of Article Directories

EzineArticles.com is considered one of the most reputed sites for submitting the articles. Anyone who does online research for writing articles, knows that many times a search for a certain topic or keyword will yield articles from EzineArticles.com. Google trusts Ezine and Ezine is well ranked in the Google search engine . Alexa grants a higher position to Ezine considering the quality of the content . Both Alexa and google are aware that all articles are scrutinized and reviewed by real people. While the quality may vary, most are quite excellent and written by people who are well qualified and experts on their topic. By its own description, EzineArticles.com is an "article marketing, publicity generating, pre-qualified traffic building, and article exposure service designed to get your expert articles in front of our content-hungry ezine publisher audience."

With the advent of e-commerce and internet marketing, article marketing has made a mark on the online world . However unlike the off-line version, there are additional dimensions to article marketing online. Most important among the crucial factors that drive traffic is the use of articles for search engine optimization. Articles should be well written targeting appropriate keywords that are relevant to the niches and relevant to the content and the websites.