In some circles, the mere mention of the word "article" is rich with meaning. Listeners automatically know that the speaker is referring to electronic text, used on the internet, via web pages or email, to provide good quality content for websites and ezines. The benefits of having good quality content are obvious, and the benefits of providing it are, after about a half a second's thought, equally obvious.

In other circles, the word "ezine" draws a blank stare, and an "article" is something you might read in a printed newspaper or magazine. Articles have always been there in newspapers and magazines, and nobody ever stops to ask "why?" or "who benefits?", unless they work in marketing or print advertising sales.

Traditional print publishing has always had the concept of "quality content" as distinct from "advertising".

"Editorial" is quality content, written by professional journalists, and they are supposedly unbiased and objective. Because of their perceived objectivity, journalists are trusted more than marketers. The Holy Grail of marketers is to get editorial coverage of their product or service.

Here is an example of an editorial article.

Advertising is paid-for space in the publication. Everybody knows the space has been paid for, and everyone knows that the content of the advertising is written by the advertiser to serve their own interests. It is much less credible than editorial.

If you look at the top and bottom of this Hub, you will see paid advertising.

In this case, the advertiser only pays when someone clicks on their ad. That model developed because people were suspicious about the value of an ad that just sits there on a web page, and were no longer willing to pay for that.

Advertorial is paid-for space which is laid out and typeset to look the same as the editorial content of a print publication. The advertiser writes the words to go in the space. Over the years, there has been much controversy over advertorial, and many publications now mark those pages with the word "advertisement", to ensure that their readers don't mistake it for genuine editorial.

More respectable than advertorial is the guest columnist.

An expert may be invited to contribute a regular column to a publication, sharing their expertise. The publication benefits by getting good quality content for free, and the guest columnist benefits by getting free publicity and the chance to build their reputation as an expert in their field.

An expert columnist with Yahoo! News.

An ezine is a magazine or newsletter which is distributed in electronic form, via email or on a web page.

Ezines tend to rely heavily on the expert columnist model, primarily because they are usually circulated free of charge and can't afford to pay for a staff of journalists. They are a good way to provide quality information to a subscriber list, which makes the subscribers more likely to stick around. The bigger the list, the bigger the response when you email out a sales offer.

This is an example of an ezine - this one uses my articles quite regularly.

There are thousands of ezines being published. In fact, there are probably hundreds of thousands, or even millions by now.

All those ezine publishers are desperate for words to put in their ezines, and they usually don't have the time or the skills to write all their own content.

Enter the article directory.

An article directory is a website where people who are experts in something can put their articles, and ezine publishers can download them for use in their publication. The article is free, and can be reproduced forever, as long as it is not changed in any way, and the author's bio box (or resource box, as it is sometimes called) is included with the article.

This is a win for the ezine publisher, who now has a supply of good quality content, and a win for the authors, who get their name and links to their web site circulated far and wide with their articles. It's also a win for the article directories, because they put pay-per-click advertising on their sites.

• Free content
• Expert commentary in their niche
• Speeds the process of compiling the ezine

• Free publicity in the ezines
• Traffic from the links in the bio/resource box
• Search engine boost from the backlinks in all the web page ezines
• Articles in directories are indexed by search engines

You don't even have to write the articles yourself. You can hire people to do it for you!

There are hundreds of article directories.

The word from the people who write a LOT of articles is that only a few of them really matter. I have submitted articles to several dozen directories, and I have seen visitors coming to my site from maybe four or five of those directories.

The ones which are unanimously recommended are:

ezinearticles.com (sorry, this can't be a live link because the RSS feed is from this URL).

goarticles.com

And if you want to add a third:

articledashboard.com

I have recently joined Buzzle.com as an author, and my prediction is that they will become quite significant. You have to apply to be an author, and provide samples of your writing that have already been published. Their editorial guidelines are quite tough, so the articles there will be much better quality than those on some of the bigger article directories.