The goal of marketing is to create interest and desire in your products or services. You likely have at least one competitor that makes the same product or performs the same service as your company. How do you differentiate yourself from your competition? How do you position yourself as the market leader in your industry?

The best way is to have as many positive articles published about your company, and your products or services. The more you publish the better. You can't publish too much.

The most effective article marketing is done in trade magazines. The trades are targeted at professionals in your specific industry, and top decision makers do read the trades. They read them to learn about the latest news, and the latest products and services related to their industry. These are the people you want to reach.

You could place a full-page ad in the trades. But, will it be noticed? More importantly, is an ad more credible than a 2-3 page article that goes into depth about the problems you solve, and how you solve them? No way. Not to mention the cost of that ad vs. writing and submitting an article. You could pay $5,000 - $7,000 to place the ad that might never even get noticed.

Not only that, advertisements are not published on the trade magazine's web site, and crawled by the major search engines. The article may get archived over time on the trade magazine web site, but once Google, Yahoo, etc have indexed the article it will be available as a search result as long as the trade magazine keeps the archived article online. In most cases, they will keep it online for years. That's pretty powerful.

The next step is to write and publish articles to distribute on industry web sites. Again, you cannot publish too much. Your credibility is increased with every article, so it stands to reason you want to publish as many as possible.

When the people who decide to buy the kind of products and services you offer see you popping up again and again in trade magazines, and on the internet you are branding your name in the back of their minds. You are establishing yourself as the market leader. You are successfully setting yourself apart, in a positive way, from your competition. You are differentiating yourself, and stacking the odds you'll get the sale significantly in your favor.

As a marketing tool, you will not find a more effective method of building credibility for such a low cost. Article marketing works.