Article Marketing. Every single day, I'm more and more impressed with how effective it is. In the past, I always used to see article marketing just as a way of bringing in referral traffic. Then I began to see the power of the backlinks coming back to my site from the article directories as well.

And I would have been extremely happy with article marketing if that was all it was... but there's more!

I logged into Google Webmaster Tools the other day to check up on a site that I submitted articles for a long time ago. To my surprise there were literally thousands of backlinks coming back to my site, which puzzled me because I didn't have any notable content on site. Where did those links come from?!

I did a bit of searching, and I found out that those sites had picked up my articles for reprint, and obviously had to list my resource box there. And then a big light bulb switched on in my brain:

Article marketing is a great way to generate backlinks not just from the article directories but from other relevant sites with good PR/link juice as well!

Brilliant for people like me who love to write content, but hate going around hunting for places to manually build backlinks. Here's my strategy in a nutshell:

Submit articles, 1 link to main page and 1 link to relevant blog post (for deep linking purposes).

Get short term "referral" traffic from Article Directory.

Get 2 links from Article Directory with keyword phrase anchor text.

Articles get picked up by relevant niche sites over time, generating occasional traffic and more importantly multiple backlinks back to my site (link diversity and PR/link juice, woohoo!)

My site rises in PR, SERPS and popularity.

Good times.

Thad