Business owners from every industry are discovering the power of article marketing. Not only does it help these savvy business people save money, it also helps companies reach thousands of hungry consumers. And it's a great way to get your business noticed in your target market.

The concept is simple: write an article that speaks to your target market. If you're a tax preparer, write an article on how to save money on next year's taxes. If you're a builder, talk about trends in new homes. Then, write your bio, or About The Author box, which includes a link back to your website.

Submit these articles to content directories and publishers, choosing your categories to get your message in front of your audience of choice. When your article is picked up and reprinted, you'll get links back to your site, which drives traffic and builds your business.

And those links stick around, so every article you send out builds on your previous efforts. The search engines will recognize you as being relevant in your field, and it will be easier for potential customers to find you online.

Anyone who's tried to to take article marketing head-on and go it alone oftentimes encounter frustrations and set backs from the beginning. For this reason, article distribution services were created to serve as the middlemen between business owners and content sites.

By partnering with these services, business owners make a small up-front investment. It's worth it...the time and energy you'll save, combined with the huge exposure this can get you, is well worth the cost. The best part is that it takes very little time and effort to figure out how these services work.

Article distribution services, such as Article Marketer, Isnare and others, distribute articles in specific categories chosen by the authors. For instance, if an article is about dog grooming it will be sent to publishers with readers interested in dogs. This guarantees ahead of time that the people who read your article will already have shown some interest in dogs. You are simply giving them the information they are already searching for!

These article distribution services have made thousands of contacts with interested publishers, giving them the ability to reach a much greater number of sites than would be possible by a business owner working to reach them one by one.

Perhaps most advantageous is an article distribution service's ability to uphold a cycle of constant and never-ending article distribution. With the article distribution services receiving a continual barrage of requests by content sites for new articles, as well as making contact with new publishers on a daily basis, there is no shortage of demand for articles.

This helps to maintain the shelf life of the articles by keeping them in constant circulation. Automated distribution also insures that the articles will be sent to new content sites that pop up on the Web.

Business owners are reaping the benefits of article marketing by offering a bit of know-how free of charge through article writing. They are discovering that even one single article has the potential of attracting new customers for years to come, thanks to automated distribution and its ability to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.