While I was conducting my yearly planning for 2010, I listed the five marketing tactics that I intend to carry out. Foremost on that list?Article marketing. I create and submit an article no less than one time a week.

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

Here are a number of results I have personally experienced from article marketing:

Free Traffic To My Site…

High authority article directories, like Ezine Articles, enjoy loads of traffic (we are talking millions of eyeballs each and every month). A lot of people who read my articles regularly click on the links in my author resource box and end up going to my website. This is free targeted traffic that I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to draw in to my site!

In fact, targeted traffic from article directories compose a significant portion of my website users. So much so that, once, my site fell from its Google’s rankings and I hardly realized it. I kept getting a great deal of site visits, more often than not coming from the articles I’ve written and published in article directories – some of them a couple of years old.

Better Rankings in Google and other search engines…

Search engine optimization (SEO) specialists say that on the list of most important ways to get high Google rankings for your targeted keywords is to get backlinks to your site. The hot button is the anchor text of those links ought to be the keywords you would like to rank high for.

This technique works so well that an online marketing expert once succeeded in having his web page rank number one in Google for the keywords “coolest guy on earth” or something like that! – just by having all his cronies link to his site with that anchor text. That’s how powerful linking is.

These are exactly the same backlinks you obtain through the typically high-authority article directories all linking back to your web site from your author resource box.

Affiliate Sales…

A few article directories let you link, not just to your site, but to an affiliate product’s sales page with your affiliate links. Which means your article gets blasted all over the World-Wide-Web, consequently increasing the possibilities of someone clicking on your affiliate links and purchasing the product. The outcome? Additional affiliate commissions for you.

This idea is the essence of the so-called “bum marketing” or lazy marketing, which doesn’t even require you to own a web site. All you need to do is craft and forward beneficial articles to article directories and you make affiliate commissions from your articles for as long as they are on the web. We’re talking years at this juncture.

One more advantage of article marketing is that you grow to be a published writer and, as a result, an authority on the subject. In fact, an acquaintance of mine got interviewed on public TV because the reporter read one of her articles online. That is media exposure that might have cost hundreds or even thousands of bucks! Unfortunately, I have not had that kind of media opportunity – yet!