In times of panic, reliable is better than risky, ordinary is more comfortable than extraordinary. This is therefore an ideal moment for those of us who espouse article marketing as an online marketers dream to reiterate again why we take this view. First, what is article marketing? Nothing more than writing articles concerning any subject under the sun, and submitting them for publication, exactly as I have done with this piece. Why do those of us who believe in article marketing hold such a view? Many reasons spring to mind, some commercial, some not so. The simplest commercial benefit is that it is generally free to get your article published, and then, from the article, you can the ask someone to view your website. This in turn could be a further commercial benefit, depending on what your website is designed to do (i.e. is it selling something, or not?). Second, you can build content websites, which the search engines absolutely love, by using articles. Furthermore, it's a fact that the algorithms that the search engines use are constantly shifting and changing, and recent testing seems to indicate that having a published article linking back to your site is becoming an ever more effective method of getting your site visited by the search engine spider. This, of course, means that your site should get listed in the search engine rankings much more quickly than was previously possible. This seems to be true without any reference to what particular ?kind? of site it might be. For example, testing my free blog site at http://article--marketing.blogspot.com and my non-blog Asia Travel site at http://webbiz99.com/asiatravel seemed to indicate little difference in the results generated. How about the non-commercial benefits? Well, it's a great big boost to the ego to see your name listed as a published writer, no doubt. This then leads to the same phenomenon occurring with the search engines ? my wife has looked my name up quite a few times recently with Google and found me listed fairly high in the rankings (to her considerable amusement, which is not necessarily good for the ego!). So, article marketing works, it's free and effective. The only problem is, of course that to conduct a successful article marketing campaign, you need to have articles to submit. Where to find these articles, how to create them and exactly what to do with them are subjects that I will come back to in my next article.