Article marketing is the first most powerful marketing strategy online; article marketing will easily define the success or failure of any online business or any other web presence.

The power of article marketing is unlimited and it's time line is infinite. Having that power and potential on your side is vital to your marketing. No matter what are your goals and reasons of your online presence, article marketing is the only way you can introduce your self properly, it has the power to show your readers your knowledge and expertise.

A well-written article can give you the appearance of being an expert in a field; no matter how much do you know about the subject. They key is to write well and correctly market your articles.

Chances are that you have experienced how effective and engaging articles can be, how a well written article with as little as one small piece of information can build an interest in you to know more about the author and read more of his contents; as well as some examples of truly horrible writing which will make you stop at the first paragraph. Your taste of telling the difference is the first step toward developing your own successful writing style.

Identifying the purposes of your article marketing is essential, why are you writing? Why do you want others to read your contents? Answering these questions will make it easier for you to write and market your articles effectively.

Here are the common purposes of article marketing:

1. The obvious use of article marketing online is to draw traffic to your website. Using articles for that purpose is much better than many other marketing methods, simply due to the ease of creation, the fast on marketing and the low if any budget needed. Particularly good articles can go "viral" and have a dramatic effect on your website's traffic. Articles can easily be posted on highly traffic article directories (http://www.niche-affiliate-marketing.net/Article-marketing) and social websites as Digg, FaceBook, or Del.icio.us.

Do not discount the benefit of cross-promoting with social sites like these. There are millions of consumers on each, sharing information and helping to increase the reputation of websites around the world. Harnessing the power of article writing can help you harness social websites and effortlessly (and cheaply!) increase your recognition.

2. Articles can be written for simple informational benefit. You have something to tell, good advice, tip or trick; you share it with others via article marketing. Here you are being helpful, readers will love you for that, trust you and be thankful. It is the same as forum marketing.

3. In addition, article marketing can be used for SEO purposes (http://www.arabian-affiliate.com/Online-SEO-Training-Program.htm). Each and every webmaster knows that web-presence is depend on appearing in the search engines first result pages, and for that you need search engines optimization both on-page and off-page. Submitting articles in your website means content and content still the king of on-page SEO, as for off-page SEO, it is the amount and quality of inbound links you can build with article marketing for your website.

That doesn't mean that the quality of the content has to suffer for the sake of keyword insertion and links.

4. Some webmasters are using article marketing for directly making some money from the internet, using ads when posting to social sites, and share of Ad-Sense from article directories.

The power of article marketing had opened a wide market of tools, information products and software. The need to successfully obtain the benefits of article marketing makes some webmaster (mostly beginners) easily losing money buying useless products. Do it your self manually will give you better idea of its power and identifying your needs. It hurt me knowing that webmasters spend countless hours searching for software to automatic the marketing process when they can spend less doing it manually