If you are still on the fence about whether you want to use writing articles as a tool in your online marketing efforts take a look at these top 5 benefits of article marketing. These benefits may show you just how lucrative it can be to start writing articles and publishing them in quality article directories.

Expand Your Market Reach

Once you have written a quality article and publish it in an article directory, others can come and republish your article. Of course, they must keep your author's box, including your links intact.

Once someone chooses your article, they may publish it on a website, or in a newsletter or ezine. This opens you and your links up to a whole new audience you never would have otherwise been able to get in front of. It only takes 1 big ezine to publish one of your articles to seriously increase your traffic.

Advertise Your Site for Free

In your author's box at the bottom of every article you get to include at minimum 2 links. These links can go to your website, squidoo lens, hubpage, and even a sales letter (although some directories do not allow you to link directly to a sales page). If you have written a good article the reader will already trust you, they will be more likely to click on your link. Since you have already built some relationship with them through your article they are more likely to listen to what you have to say on your site, and follow your recommendations. All of this you get to do for free, just by submitting your articles to directories.

Improve Your Search Engine Rankings

Each of those links we mentioned above also helps you to improve the search engine placement for your site. That is if you are using related keywords as your anchor text in your link.

For each of your links you want to have the words that people click be keywords for your site. This will increase where your site comes up in the search engine for that term. Please don't link to your site with "click here". No one will be looking for your site by putting "click here" in the search engine. Make sure you hot link your keywords in your author's box.

Build Your Reputation

Most people who are out looking for information do not know much about article marketing, or internet marketing for that matter. They see an article published online and figure the person who wrote it is an expert on that subject, especially if they find it on the first page of Google. This gives you instant credibility to those who find you. You can also build your reputation if you keep publishing quality articles on your niche. People will see you have all these articles about this topic and will assume ~ and it will probably be true ~ that you really know what you are talking about.

Builds Your Brand and Credibility

This is similar to the one above. This has more to do with the circles you travel in though. If you are in the "dog" niche, and you write and write about dogs, others who are in the dog niche, or coming into the dog niche will see you as an expert in that field. This can lead to JV requests, or links to your site as a trusted resource.

As you can see one simple article can do a lot for your business. When you take writing one article to writing lots of articles you will see these benefits multiplied, and your business will be growing.