While I was doing my yearly planning for 2010, I listed the five marketing tactics that I plan to carry out. Number one on that list…Article marketing. I compose and submit an article at least one time a week.

Just in case you are not familiar with article marketing yet, it involves composing informative and helpful articles and distributing them to article directories – giving consent to anyone to republish your quality article as long as your author bio box is left intact.

Here are some results I have personally experienced from article marketing:

Free Traffic To My Site…

High authority article directories, like Ezine Articles, enjoy an awful lot of visitors (we’re talking millions of eyeballs every month). Many of people who read my articles invariably click on the links in my author bio box and end up visiting my website. This is no cost targeted traffic that I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to draw in to my website!

Actually, traffic from article directories make up a significant portion of my website users. So much so that, once, my website fell from its Google’s rankings and I hardly realized it. I kept getting a great deal of website visits, mostly coming from the articles I have written and published in article directories – a number of them a couple of years old.

Increased Rankings in Google and other search engines…

Search engine optimization (SEO) professionals state that among the most important ways to get very high Google rankings on your target keywords would be to get backlinks to your site. The secret is the anchor text of those links needs to be the keywords you want to rank high for.

This strategy performs so well that an Internet marketing guru once succeeded in having his site rank number one in Google for the keywords “coolest guy on earth” or something like that! – merely by having all his cronies link to his website with that anchor text. That’s how formidable linking is.

These are the same links you obtain from the typically high-authority article directories all linking back to your website from your author resource box.

Lucrative Affiliate Sales…

Some article directories permit you to link, not only to your site, but to an affiliate product’s sales page with your affiliate links. Which means your article gets blasted all around the World-Wide-Web, accordingly increasing the possibilities of someone clicking on your affiliate links and purchasing the product. The outcome? Many more affiliate commissions for you.

This idea would be the essence of the so-called “bum marketing” or lazy marketing, which doesn’t even require you to own a site. All you have to achieve is write and forward beneficial articles to article directories and you make money from your articles for so long as they are on the net. We’re talking years here.

Another advantage of article marketing is that you develop into a published writer and, as a result, an authority regarding the subject matter. Actually, a friend of mine got interviewed on nationwide TV because the reporter read one of her articles on the internet. That is media exposure that may have cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars! Regrettably, I have not had that type of media opportunity – yet!