There are thousands of articles to be read on the World Wide Web, and many more are being added everyday. If you take the time to do more than skim them, you will find that many articles are about similar things. Why would you take the time out of your busy schedule to add one more? We all suffer from information overload- so why add to it?

Why should I bother?

Here are some good reasons to consider why it would be to your advantage to take up article writing:

1. Expert Status,

By writing articles in your niche area you begin to establish your credibility as an expert in that field. When writing your article it is important to include key words in the article that relate to your specific area. This will make it easier for the search engines to link your name to your area of expertise, and your reputation will grow into ‘expert status’

2. Your Articles Are Needed

Webmasters, ezine editors, and publishers are looking for fresh content to publish to their subscribers. It is to your advantage that they find you. Then your article will get reproduced all over the world, and that will increase your exposure and reputation.

3. To Use your Resource Box

The resource box at the end of your article is your space to “sell” and promote you and your services, products, and expertise. To reprint your article, publishers have to include the resource box. Here is your opportunity for FREE advertising and unashamed self promotion.

4. To Gain Traffic To Your Website

By including a live link back to your site in the resource box your will increase your web traffic to your website. This is a good marketing strategy, as search engines look for links into your site and it will improve your ranking and you will get even more traffic directed your way.

5. Content is King

Quality content is king on the internet. The more places your articles are found on the Internet, the better it is for you. This is because when a search for your subject, name or company is done the more hits will be found by the search engines, and you will place closer to the front of the listings. (of course there is a way for your article to come up as Number One, but that is a topic for another day)

How do You Get Your Article onto The Internet, and Get Noticed?

There are several ways to do this, here are four important ways:

1. Publish your article on your website. To get it noticed quickly , you can submit a sitemap to Google (it’s a free service)

2. Register and submit your article to free article submission sites such as .EzineArticles.com , .articlesbeyondbetter.com . There are lots out there- do a search for them. You can also sign up to several Yahoo groups that focus on article writing and submission.

3. Submit to a service that will submit to sites for you. Well known submission services include Isnare, Article Marketer, Submit Your Article and thePhantomwriters.com.

4. Buy software that will not only submit articles for you, but help with the formatting and make them search engine friendly as well. If you intend to write articles frequently this is a great time saver. I recommend Article Announcer

So What Next ?

Start writing and increase your expert status, web traffic, and promote your

business product or service for free.

You may have heard advice from Internet marketing gurus that ezine ads are one of the best forms of advertising. You may also have heard that Google AdWords and other pay per click search engines are one of the best advertising methods. But when it comes to marketing your web site, article submission trumps ezine ads and Google AdWords anytime.

The advantage of article submission is trust. Suppose you subscribe to an ezine in the form of an email newsletter. You’ve just sat down at your PC, coffee in hand, to read your email. There in your inbox is a copy of one of your favorite ezines, the one you read every time.

Clicking on the newsletter, you see that this edition starts with a sponsor ad and then has a couple of great sounding articles and a couple more ezine ads. Sipping your coffee, one of the articles catches your attention. You read the article, and you were right. It’s a great article.

At the bottom of the article, there is a link to the author’s web site and a short biography. You notice the author has a link to pick up a free report with more information about the article’s topic. Then you notice that right below that there’s a sponsor’s link in an ezine ad. The sponsor’s link is for a different web site, but it also offers a free report about the same topic.

Now you might click both links. But if you could only click one, which would you choose: the one by the author of the great article you just read or the one in the ezine ad?

If you would click on the one from the author of the article you just read, you’re not alone. Most people would, wouldn’t they?

Now suppose you’re surfing around on the web. You do a Google search on a topic you’re interested in, and you follow a link to a great article with some excellent advice on the topic. Again, there is a link to the author’s web site and a link to a free report with more information on the topic. Right beside it are five Google AdWords ads on the same topic. As luck would have it, they are also each offering a free report on the same topic.

You would still be most likely to click on the author’s link at the bottom of the article, though, wouldn’t you?

Article submission trumps ezine ads and Google AdWords because you establish a relationship and build trust with your reader. You are obviously the expert. After all, you wrote the article. And the webmaster or ezine publisher wouldn’t have published the article if they didn’t think you knew what you were talking about, right?

Years ago, I used to do direct sales in people’s homes. I learned that one of the first things you need to do is the “warm up.” You’ve just entered someone’s home, they don’t know who you are as a person, and they know you’re going to be trying to get money from them before you leave.

If you don’t establish rapport quickly, it’s difficult to overcome people’s natural sales resistance. In direct sales in the home, you do that by talking a little with people before you begin your sales presentation. They get to know you as a person, and their resistance is lowered.

Most people can’t do sales because they remain the “enemy,” the horrible sales person who wants to sell them something. Let’s face it, people hate sales people!

But imagine if you could warm up to people easily - and not just one or two people, but thousands of people. Imagine if instead of selling them something, you could educate them about something that will solve a problem and be of great benefit to them. That’s entirely different, isn’t it?

Article submission allows you to do exactly this, and on a massive scale. If you submit many articles to article submission sites and article directories, many will be published on web sites and in ezines around the Internet. People will read your articles and warm up to you. Solve their problems and they’ll want more.

It’s hard to accomplish that with Google AdWords. You only have three lines and a few words to build interest and trust and to get the click. It’s also hard to achieve that with ezine ads. Even with solo ezine ads, everyone knows they are advertisements.

Article submission is the secret. Writing and submitting articles is relatively easy. Just write very helpful articles on your topic and link to your web site. Through article submission you will build your reputation. Through article submission you will gain trust. And through article submission you will get visitors to your web site that already like you, value your advice, and want to know more about what you can do to help them.

That’s already an incredible benefit, but it gets even better. Article submission is usually free, or low cost if you use an article submission service. Ezine ads and Google AdWords can be very expensive, and it is unlikely you could ever get traffic coming to your site as open to listening to you and trusting you as they will be from an article submission.

This is why article submission trumps ezine ads and Google AdWords.

I admit that the internet is definitely for the “here and now.” Always changing, what may be popular one day may be irrelevant the next. A den of “fast track fads” is what the internet has become. Still, if you are an article writer, you know that the web content you provide for your customers today must have an extended shelf life with it, otherwise your customers lose out and your reputation sinks. You can write relevant and persuasive content that doesn’t lose its sheen with time; read on and I will show you how.

It is a given that if you write seasonal articles these very same articles will quickly lose their appeal once the season is over. Few people are interested in Valentine’s Day pitches outside of January and February, but you can keep their interest strong year round by not directly focusing on products, but on the history of the holiday. I have discovered that my seasonal articles are likely to get read “out of season” if they deal more with something beyond an overt sales pitch. Give readers something to digest other than talking about chocolates and flowers; you can discuss “love” a timeless subject with universal appeal!

In addition, stay away from explicit dates. If you mention something to the effect, “here in December 2005…” you will quickly age your article in no time. This can be difficult to do if you are mentioning something like current mortgage trends or recent world events. All of those hurricane articles you read just a few months ago seem distant and certain to be ignored by readers who are focusing on current events [however, they may become valuable again when the next hurricane season rolls around]. It is okay to write current event articles, but expect them to quickly fade into oblivion once the event has passed.

Typically, the subject of “shelf life” does not come up with my customers. If I am asked, I mention that each article should have at least one year’s appeal before an update might be necessary. This is reasonable length of time given the fast paced changes on the web. Naturally, if the customer wants me to do the update, they will be charged the same rate as a fresh article: in reality I provide to my customers a new article, not some cut and paste update.

Finally, I never give explicit guarantees for an article’s effectiveness because once it leaves my hands, I seldom know exactly what a customer will do with it [i.e., place it in a newsletter, turn around and sell it, put it on their web site, etc.]. My customers know that what I write for them can be effective, but its ultimate impact is only as good as what they choose to do with it.

Content is king. You have probably heard that a million times but it’s true. That is why writing articles is one of the most utilized Internet marketing media today. It’s also one of the most abused marketing methods.

The online advertising craze began picking up with the introduction of FFA (Free For ALL) sites. These sites allowed you to submit your link or ad, which slowly rotated off the page as new links were submitted. Once this method of advertising became known, scores of people rushed to FFA sites and began submitting their ads. Programmers invented ways to automate the process of submitting links to hundreds of sites within seconds, causing it to become an ineffective marketing option because of the scores of people who began using this system. Links would rotate off the page within seconds and this eventually led to the downfall and popularity of them.

Another marketing method, which quickly became useless, was banner advertising and exchanges. People covered their sites with banners, learned how to cheat exchanges and surfers began to train their eyes to ignore them completely. As a result, image advertising also became ineffective.

Automated page creation was also a problem as thousands of people began to create gateway pages as a means to draw in the search engines with multiple pages stuffed with keywords to increase their site’s page rank. Gateway page generators automated the process of building these pages and soon they sprang up all over the net. Eventually this fad also became useless due to abuse as well as the introduction of smarter search engine spiders.

The latest moneymaking craze is Google Adwords. Once pay-per-click advertising grew in popularity, webmasters discovered how easy it was to earn income by stuffing their sites with useless content in order to profit from textual advertising. The automation monster appeared again making it fairly easy to submit articles to hundreds of content sites by merely clicking a few buttons.

In steps PLR membership sites. PLR articles, also known as Private Label Rights articles or public domain articles, provide people who are too lazy to write their own content with a means to get links back to their site and hopefully sell some of their products in the process.

Search engines have begun penalizing web sites for duplicate content. In response, new programs are being created which randomize paragraphs and change words within an article to make them unique enough to bypass the duplicate content filters. So now we have automated article creation?

Publishers are beginning to recognize the different methods of article abuse and it’s becoming more difficult to get articles approved. As editors begin tiring of trying to keep up with the massive influx of articles that are obviously written for the sole purpose of gaining link popularity or to advertise affiliate links, we will see more article directories shut down.

Is automation really the monster here? I think not!

Automated article submission is a great tool for submitting articles to a large number of sites providing it is used properly. So what’s the problem?

Greed and laziness &ndash plain and simple.

Automation allows writers to submit their articles to many sites quickly and easily, freeing up more time to write original content. The problem comes from those who are always looking for a shortcut to making money, rather than to work for it.

Article marketing abuse will soon reach its peak just as FFA sites, banner advertising and gateway pages did. Eventually we will look at private label articles as another passing trend and online publishers will be able to provide their visitors with quality content once again. For now, we can only wait until those hoping to get rich quick find another marketing option to automate and abuse.

I have read several articles, blogs, and message board postings concerning the rise of article theft. Specifically, this is where your article is lifted from your site without your permission or pulled from a third party site.

In many ways I consider the internet to be the “Wild West” in terms of lawlessness. Ignoring established and set rules is common, meaning that us law abiding folks have our work cut out for us.

It may surprise you, but I don’t take action in many cases of known article theft. Why? Because, I just don’t have the time to police everything. I know of authors who check every link to their site, but that work is both tedious and time consuming.

A golden rule: If someone takes my article without my permission and the content and links are still in place, I don’t worry about it. If they take my article and change the content, paragraph headers, the title, or steal credit for themselves, then I will contact the offending party and demand that they make the appropriate corrections. Even for links that are broken, I generally let these types of mistakes slide.

When it comes to writing, time is money. I only respond to egregious violations while letting everything else slip by. I would rather spend my time making money instead of losing that time to chasing down violators. No, my policy or “golden rule” isn’t perfect, but it saves me from being bogged down in what I find to be a wasteful pursuit.

You may have heard advice from Internet marketing gurus that ezine ads are one of the best forms of advertising. You may also have heard that Google AdWords and other pay per click search engines are one of the best advertising methods. But when it comes to marketing your web site, article submission trumps ezine ads and Google AdWords anytime.

The advantage of article submission is trust. Suppose you subscribe to an ezine in the form of an email newsletter. You’ve just sat down at your PC, coffee in hand, to read your email. There in your inbox is a copy of one of your favorite ezines, the one you read every time.

Clicking on the newsletter, you see that this edition starts with a sponsor ad and then has a couple of great sounding articles and a couple more ezine ads. Sipping your coffee, one of the articles catches your attention. You read the article, and you were right. It’s a great article.

At the bottom of the article, there is a link to the author’s web site and a short biography. You notice the author has a link to pick up a free report with more information about the article’s topic. Then you notice that right below that there’s a sponsor’s link in an ezine ad. The sponsor’s link is for a different web site, but it also offers a free report about the same topic.

Now you might click both links. But if you could only click one, which would you choose: the one by the author of the great article you just read or the one in the ezine ad?

If you would click on the one from the author of the article you just read, you’re not alone. Most people would, wouldn’t they?

Now suppose you’re surfing around on the web. You do a Google search on a topic you’re interested in, and you follow a link to a great article with some excellent advice on the topic. Again, there is a link to the author’s web site and a link to a free report with more information on the topic. Right beside it are five Google AdWords ads on the same topic. As luck would have it, they are also each offering a free report on the same topic.

You would still be most likely to click on the author’s link at the bottom of the article, though, wouldn’t you?

Article submission trumps ezine ads and Google AdWords because you establish a relationship and build trust with your reader. You are obviously the expert. After all, you wrote the article. And the webmaster or ezine publisher wouldn’t have published the article if they didn’t think you knew what you were talking about, right?

Years ago, I used to do direct sales in people’s homes. I learned that one of the first things you need to do is the “warm up.” You’ve just entered someone’s home, they don’t know who you are as a person, and they know you’re going to be trying to get money from them before you leave.

If you don’t establish rapport quickly, it’s difficult to overcome people’s natural sales resistance. In direct sales in the home, you do that by talking a little with people before you begin your sales presentation. They get to know you as a person, and their resistance is lowered.

Most people can’t do sales because they remain the “enemy,” the horrible sales person who wants to sell them something. Let’s face it, people hate sales people!

But imagine if you could warm up to people easily - and not just one or two people, but thousands of people. Imagine if instead of selling them something, you could educate them about something that will solve a problem and be of great benefit to them. That’s entirely different, isn’t it?

Article submission allows you to do exactly this, and on a massive scale. If you submit many articles to article submission sites and article directories, many will be published on web sites and in ezines around the Internet. People will read your articles and warm up to you. Solve their problems and they’ll want more.

It’s hard to accomplish that with Google AdWords. You only have three lines and a few words to build interest and trust and to get the click. It’s also hard to achieve that with ezine ads. Even with solo ezine ads, everyone knows they are advertisements.

Article submission is the secret. Writing and submitting articles is relatively easy. Just write very helpful articles on your topic and link to your web site. Through article submission you will build your reputation. Through article submission you will gain trust. And through article submission you will get visitors to your web site that already like you, value your advice, and want to know more about what you can do to help them.

That’s already an incredible benefit, but it gets even better. Article submission is usually free, or low cost if you use an article submission service. Ezine ads and Google AdWords can be very expensive, and it is unlikely you could ever get traffic coming to your site as open to listening to you and trusting you as they will be from an article submission.

This is why article submission trumps ezine ads and Google AdWords.

I admit that the internet is definitely for the “here and now.” Always changing, what may be popular one day may be irrelevant the next. A den of “fast track fads” is what the internet has become. Still, if you are an article writer, you know that the web content you provide for your customers today must have an extended shelf life with it, otherwise your customers lose out and your reputation sinks. You can write relevant and persuasive content that doesn’t lose its sheen with time; read on and I will show you how.

It is a given that if you write seasonal articles these very same articles will quickly lose their appeal once the season is over. Few people are interested in Valentine’s Day pitches outside of January and February, but you can keep their interest strong year round by not directly focusing on products, but on the history of the holiday. I have discovered that my seasonal articles are likely to get read “out of season” if they deal more with something beyond an overt sales pitch. Give readers something to digest other than talking about chocolates and flowers; you can discuss “love” a timeless subject with universal appeal!

In addition, stay away from explicit dates. If you mention something to the effect, “here in December 2005…” you will quickly age your article in no time. This can be difficult to do if you are mentioning something like current mortgage trends or recent world events. All of those hurricane articles you read just a few months ago seem distant and certain to be ignored by readers who are focusing on current events [however, they may become valuable again when the next hurricane season rolls around]. It is okay to write current event articles, but expect them to quickly fade into oblivion once the event has passed.

Typically, the subject of “shelf life” does not come up with my customers. If I am asked, I mention that each article should have at least one year’s appeal before an update might be necessary. This is reasonable length of time given the fast paced changes on the web. Naturally, if the customer wants me to do the update, they will be charged the same rate as a fresh article: in reality I provide to my customers a new article, not some cut and paste update.

Finally, I never give explicit guarantees for an article’s effectiveness because once it leaves my hands, I seldom know exactly what a customer will do with it [i.e., place it in a newsletter, turn around and sell it, put it on their web site, etc.]. My customers know that what I write for them can be effective, but its ultimate impact is only as good as what they choose to do with it.

Content is king. You have probably heard that a million times but it’s true. That is why writing articles is one of the most utilized Internet marketing media today. It’s also one of the most abused marketing methods.

The online advertising craze began picking up with the introduction of FFA (Free For ALL) sites. These sites allowed you to submit your link or ad, which slowly rotated off the page as new links were submitted. Once this method of advertising became known, scores of people rushed to FFA sites and began submitting their ads. Programmers invented ways to automate the process of submitting links to hundreds of sites within seconds, causing it to become an ineffective marketing option because of the scores of people who began using this system. Links would rotate off the page within seconds and this eventually led to the downfall and popularity of them.

Another marketing method, which quickly became useless, was banner advertising and exchanges. People covered their sites with banners, learned how to cheat exchanges and surfers began to train their eyes to ignore them completely. As a result, image advertising also became ineffective.

Automated page creation was also a problem as thousands of people began to create gateway pages as a means to draw in the search engines with multiple pages stuffed with keywords to increase their site’s page rank. Gateway page generators automated the process of building these pages and soon they sprang up all over the net. Eventually this fad also became useless due to abuse as well as the introduction of smarter search engine spiders.

The latest moneymaking craze is Google Adwords. Once pay-per-click advertising grew in popularity, webmasters discovered how easy it was to earn income by stuffing their sites with useless content in order to profit from textual advertising. The automation monster appeared again making it fairly easy to submit articles to hundreds of content sites by merely clicking a few buttons.

In steps PLR membership sites. PLR articles, also known as Private Label Rights articles or public domain articles, provide people who are too lazy to write their own content with a means to get links back to their site and hopefully sell some of their products in the process.

Search engines have begun penalizing web sites for duplicate content. In response, new programs are being created which randomize paragraphs and change words within an article to make them unique enough to bypass the duplicate content filters. So now we have automated article creation?

Publishers are beginning to recognize the different methods of article abuse and it’s becoming more difficult to get articles approved. As editors begin tiring of trying to keep up with the massive influx of articles that are obviously written for the sole purpose of gaining link popularity or to advertise affiliate links, we will see more article directories shut down.

Is automation really the monster here? I think not!

Automated article submission is a great tool for submitting articles to a large number of sites providing it is used properly. So what’s the problem?

Greed and laziness &ndash plain and simple.

Automation allows writers to submit their articles to many sites quickly and easily, freeing up more time to write original content. The problem comes from those who are always looking for a shortcut to making money, rather than to work for it.

Article marketing abuse will soon reach its peak just as FFA sites, banner advertising and gateway pages did. Eventually we will look at private label articles as another passing trend and online publishers will be able to provide their visitors with quality content once again. For now, we can only wait until those hoping to get rich quick find another marketing option to automate and abuse.