Ok, you might be like me, and got the article marketing or bum marketing bug a year or two ago. You know, where you identify a product you can promote, and you write lots of articles to gain traffic and build backlinks and eventually make some money with adsense or an affiliate product. It sounds simple, takes a bit of time, and eventually some real and actual money does come your way. - at least that was my experience.

I have been plugging away at this business model for about 2 years, occasionally distracted by PPC, or CPA, or EPN or Web 2.0 or the latest and greatest, but I always come back to this simple model: write interesting content, point the article to your money site, build some backlinks, and you will eventually be rewarded.

For years the prime article directory to use, the article directory of choice, has been ezinearticles.com. We all know it, most of us do some writing over there, and we have seen some results. But I am getting more and more frustrated with the pedantic rules that besets this mob, and I am pleased to be over here at HubPages so I can express myself without that eternal feeling of Big Brother looking over my shoulder.

I am constantly amazed at how quickly single hubs gain a decent PageRank score. I guess it is the legacy of the power of the PR of hubpages.com and the consistently good and interesting content that is added daily. If it was crap content, then Google wouldnt look kindly at it. And the links are "do follow", if you have a good hubscore. This helps the authority of the site yu are linking to.

And the higher your PR, the more competitive your site will be in the Search Engine Rankings when someone searches for your keyword.

The traffic generation is also very good. Better than ezinearticles. My hubs are getting amazing traffic, one getting over 100 views a week. My articles over there do not seem to be generating as many views when I compare them to the hubs. That being said, I know a lot more about keywords now than when i wrote my first few ezine articles about 2 years ago. I would probably use different titles for my articles these days.

The big advantages of hubs are

• easy to write and construct articles or websites, lots of fun
  
• visually pleasing with video, rss feeds, pictures, interactive modules
• large supportive community
• huge SEO advantages, Google loves HP, rise up the SE rankings
  

The big advantages of Ezinearticles are

• longstanding authority site that everyone turns to for content
• webmasters love it for content
  
• RSS feeds, greater opportunity for your content to be syndicated around the web
  

A couple of years ago, Ezinearticles was the best place to publish. These days we have Squidoo, Wetpaint, Wordpress, even Blogspot and of course HubPages. Of course there is GoArticles and Articlesbase as other article directories to give it a shake as well.There are hundreds of others to go to as well.

So the options are numerous. Hubpages is my number one now. Ezinearticles will still get some of my stuff, but it is not the cherished place in my heart that it once was.