A free article submission directory is your free pass to the stars. If you write or purchase articles for your own website only, then you will be losing out on what the whole world of article marketing can offer you. Article marketing is probably now the most widely used traffic generation strategy on the internet and if you are not using it you will likely fall behind your competitors.

Article marketing is a strategy involving the submission of articles to online article databases called Article Directories, and these too are growing by the day. However, not all article directories are equal: more on that later. For now, let's think on what gains are to be made by submitting your article to a directory. This might be a piece of work that has taken you days to compose, or you may even have paid for it. Why, then, should you submit to a directory so that everybody can read it for free.

What you have to consider is why you wrote it. Why did you write that article? Was it to sell and make money from it? Unlikely, since there are a lot of writers better than you are that fail to achieve that. Was it to provide content for your website, perhaps even devoting a specific page to it as I have done here? That is the main reason for people writing articles.

True, good writers write articles to submit to article directories, but that is not the major use for them. Statistics show that most articles are written as content for web pages. So why? Why only write for your own web page? Why NOT write for article directories, when you article will be published on a number of websites that article directories, in essence, are? In fact you article will be published on a lot more directories than you submit to due the relationship between various groups of directories that interchange articles.

Don't you realise that you get a one way back-link to a web page of your choice from every directory that accepts your article? Not only that, but if a reader likes what you wrote, they might copy your article to their website and provide you with another one-way link. If you know anything about Page Rank and link density, you will understand just how important and valuable a link to your site without any reciprocation is in internet marketing.

So far, we have discussed links and Page Rank: we haven't even thought of the benefits of the links to your page web pages that readers can physically click on to visit your page. The traffic that article submission can provide is immense.

Here is my Number One tip. Write an article, or purchase one from an article ghostwriter. Make a few changes to it, or even purchase two versions from the ghostwriter, one for submission and the other for your website. Then submit the article to as many article directories as possible, and create a web page for your own version of the same article (that should contain some extra information).

Direct readers to that web page, and not only make your offer on it, but provide an opt-in form so that visitors can register for your newsletter or whatever you are offering in exchange for their first name and email address. It might all sound simple, but it takes some work. Once done however, it can be effective.