Article marketing has become very popular of late, especially with the explosion of a couple major article sites and publishing of some serious tools and resources that will better help marketers to use article marketing in their repertoire. For myself, I use article marketing exclusively to drive traffic to my website and to generate business.

Because of its sudden popularity, some misconceptions exist about the reasons why someone would engage in article marketing. (To be sure, article marketing has always been popular and in use, but only of late has it really hit the mainstream.)

For example, you have read that the most important reason you should incorporate article marketing into your marketing arsenal is because, in article marketing, you have the potential to generate hundreds, if not thousands, of backlinks to your site. As you know, solid backlinks are what drive many of the search engine spiders. That is, if your website links appears contextually (i.e., not in a "link farm") on someone else's site, you are often rewarded for that in terms of search positioning.

Thus, the more articles you submit to article sites, and the more your articles are reprinted from an articles site onto another site, the more backlinks you get. Certain article submission software programs even allow a provision for you to alter your resource box so search engines don't consider your articles to be link spamming.

But this is not the real reason you should be marketing with articles. There is a far more important reason: To establish yourself as an expert. Everyone's business service a niche, even internet marketers (that, in itself, is the niche). While the backlinks are great for your site, what's more important is that a reader of your article, whether they found the article through a search, at an articles site, or in someone else's ezine (who reprinted your article), reads your opinion and your understanding of your business topic/niche.

Think about it: In the "real world," when you need a service, who do you want to buy from? The service provider who looks like an expert and has been around for a long time, or the one working out of his garage with used and dirty equipment? If you need a how-to book on building a deck, do you buy one by an author just out of high school with no credibility, or do you buy one by an author who has his own deck-building TV show and has published three other books on the subject? In both cases, you probably buy from the expert.

This is the real reason you should be marketing with articles. Backlinks are great, but it is more important that you establish yourself as an expert, as the go-to person in your area of business.

Jeremy M. Hoover is an online freelance writer who specializes in writing 300-500 word content articles for your website or ezine, or for article marketing. Order articles from Jeremy at his website, http://www.jhooverwebcopy.com. Read more of his marketing articles at his blog, http://www.jhooverwebcopy.blogspot.com.