Writing original articles is the perfect way to provide unique content that adds value for your site visitors, creates additional entry points to your website, and helps to boost your search engine ranking. Writing useful and informative articles can be hard work, but it literally costs you nothing but your time. And it's definitely time well spent, since you're creating a promotional tool that you can use in many different ways. Articles let you leverage your time and effort -write it once, use it again and again.

There are many good reasons why you should start using articles to promote your business if you don't already. Writing articles is the ideal way to:

• Add value for your site visitors by providing relevant and useful information and advice
• Make your website "stickier" by giving readers a reason to explore your site, bookmark it, and return often
• Improve the effectiveness of your sales copy
• Demonstrate your expertise and build your reputation
• Build a better relationship with your customers
• Get other webmasters and ezine publishers to promote your website for you, at no cost to you, by letting them publish your articles
• Add fresh new content to your website on a regular basis
• Attract search engines with your high quality content
• Differentiate yourself from the competition by offering unique content not available from any other source

Readers are much more receptive to articles than to ads and sales letters, and more motivated to read them and pass them on. Unlike a marketing email that might be read and deleted (if it's even read at all), an article is more likely to be saved, bookmarked, or recommended to a friend. If other webmasters decide to publish your articles in their own ezines and Web pages, they'll be promoting your business to a targeted market and it won't cost you a cent!

Articles not only add valuable and relevant content, they also help your site's search engine ranking. If you give each article its own Web page, these pages may be listed in their own right by search engines, and that creates more "doorways" to your website. Relevant articles can enhance your website's "theme" and human-edited directories will look more favorably on your website because of the quality content. Also, when other webmasters who link to your articles from their own websites they'll boost your "link popularity", which improves your rankings in many of the major search engines.

What should you do with the articles you write? You should try to get them in front of interested readers any way you can:

• Use them as content for your ezine
• Add them to your website
• Offer them to other webmasters to use on their website or in their ezine
• Include them in e-books (both your own and others')
• Encourage readers to forward them to friends and colleagues
• Offer reprint rights
• Post a current article on your website and include a link to the Web page from your email signature file
• Create an article archive on your website
• Link from each article to other articles you've written on related topics
• Use them in an email marketing campaign

By having your articles published in different places over several months, you can get a lot of marketing mileage out of each article you write. If other webmasters publish them as well, you can reach a large audience in a short amount of time. Readers who find the article interesting and informative will pass it on to their friends and colleagues - an original article is the perfect viral marketing tool.