Article marketing is something that is so close to my marketing strategy plans that I have implemented a good solid plan for article marketing alone as a stand alone marketing strategy that really has the potential to drive in lots of traffic for the long term as each article could link to your main website or blog or other web pages that you have control over, like here at hubpages or squidoo or somewhere else.

Content marketing is just a fantastically simple concept and one that many marketers use this method to the extreme by eventually hiring lots of ghost writers or freelance writers to write all the articles, whilst they just create a product or two and pull everything else together.

Article marketing all starts out from a knowledge that you may have about a particular subject and then from there it goes into a required research to make your knowledge more accurate for the reader, in effect you absorb information about a certain niche or area of expertise and you deliver it in the form of articles that solve peoples problems.

Article marketing is even easier now as there are many article directories out there that will accept submissions from relatively decent writers who can adhere to some strict but obviously needed policies, and so when you are starting out in the world of information marketing through the article writing marketing model you are going into an excellent way of bringing yourself as the expertise forward and credibility just seems to increase with every new article that you produce.

To start, you will need to identify great places to have article accounts and it's these places that are generally considered better when they are well respected in the search engines eyes.

Here is a list of the best article directories that are considered the best websites to submit your articles:

Ezinearticles.com - This is the best, in terms of traffic potential, stick to their policies and guidelines and you'll build up traffic from there soon enough, they are ranked quite well with the Alexa traffic ranking system and well liked by all the search engines for the quality articles that exist on the site.

Goarticles.com - This is another quality article directory, that if you research your keywords like for when you write most articles, your written efforts should pay off over time, like anything the more you write the better traffic you will recieve, on your profile page you can add some html too, which is good to promote something related to your own expertise.

Ehow.com - This is another writing site that will pay you to write through a revenue sharing payment method,(only in the US though... boo hoo!) but the articles that are written for the site are searchable, so it is like an article directory even though the official term would be a content site, I've not used the site, as it won't pay to non US members, but then I have only just added it into my article marketing plan, as it could prove useful for traffic.

Helium.com - Another paid to write site that has policies in place to boost the sites ranking by only allowing good quality content and this helps those who write the quality content in article form to prosper with a little extra cash, although you can't promote links directly in the articles, you can however put a few links in your helium user profile.

Articledashboard.com - A rather basic looking article directory, but it is easy to use and I quite like it, which reminds me I have a few articles to put on there quite soon, of course I think you'll find that articledashboard has it's own free article directory software that you can download to create your own article directory, but there is no good support for it and the forum is non existent and with this free software you will see other article directories that look similar like articlemall,articlecity and articlecube.

Searchwarp.com - More of a writers community, but you can submit articles of interest and it is a great site to write for.

For a list of the top 50 article directories according to page rank and traffic look here - Top 50 Article Directory Monsters!

By joining a handful of the article directories above, you are creating a base of operations for the article marketing to begin, you need to be thinking long term with this as the more you do, the better the benefits of article marketing is for your traffic and other goals you want to achieve for your website pages.

A good tip that the CEO of Ezinearticles Chris Knight says is to write your articles in sets, so that they all relate to each other and these should be easier to write as you can follow on from one to the next, so for example if you start to write an article on "How To Draw An Apple" the logical next step would be to do more of these types of articles in batches, to try and build up an archive of your own of unique and valuable article content.

Article sets can be anything from 2 to 10 or more articles, it's up to you how much you want to write, because it is better to write more than the amount at which people stop writing.

Many article writers use the same standard author resource box, but I like to write that different everytime to be different every time in the search engines, as I write hubpages and squidoo lenses I may add them links to the bottom of the articles, the more relevant the link is to the article, then the possibilities of the link getting clicked are even greater.

Of course you can promote your article links on other sites too, your blog, website and relevant forums are the best bet, if you have a good solution to someones question and your article link solves that problem or answers the question then try to work your links into all of these places.

If you have an email newsletter, then you can combine some of your best articles with that of other writers content and create a really good newsletter and also help other authors get some traffic too, who knows they may do the same or provide a link back to your site or article.