Article Marketing is definitely a cornerstone of Internet Marketing model. Many experienced internet/affiliate marketer were using their articles to establish themselves as experts in their particular subject matter! Article marketing is a effective strategy that should be used in conjunction with other strategies as a part of your overall marketing mix. Because the articles weren't actually paid ads, people were reading them from top to bottom and then going to the Author's Resource Box to click on the link to the Author's web site. Once they reached the Author's web site they invariably found something for sale!
Since the person reading the article was already convinced of the Author's expertise in the particular subject, the chances were better that a sale would take place!
But making sales this way was just one of the benefits of distributing free articles. There were others as well! The more article directories that a particular article was posted to, the more "back links" there were to the Author's main web site. Since Google sees back links as an indication of an "important" site, the Author's Google ranking was benefiting.
The more people who read the Author's article and clicked back the the main web site, the more traffic the site received. Alexa ranks sites based upon traffic, so the Author benefited that way as well.
And finally, many of the authors had Google Adsense displayed on their main site, so they were earning revenue whenever a visitor from one of the article sites came and clicked.
In conclusion, article marketing really does work. If the article does provide value to its readers, I can guarantee that it will get syndicated across the web in various forums, blogs, websites and opt-in newsletters; and it will create a viral market effect that will yield great results.
