Perhaps one of the greatest ways to get free publicity for your blog or website is writing articles and submitting them for publication in ezines, or electronic magazines. If you have been participating in the online marketing race for quite a while, then you are likely familiar with these articles – but what exactly are they and how can they help promote your website?

Online marketers or webmasters who fail to see the power of the viral spread of ezine articles are definitely missing a lot. Writing articles and having them published in these electronic magazines and websites is actually one of the most effective and cost effective promotional resources that one can ever find in the internet.

Buy say for example you already have articles ready for submission, how can it "promote" your site?

Well, when you submit your articles (or offer them for publishing, so to speak), a "resource box" is included at the bottom of each article. The resource box is simply a section maintaining a few sentences about the author – a brief biographical information or a reference to the author's field of expertise or interest and most importantly, a link to the author's main page or website.

The main goal of writing articles for ezines is to reach the widest possible circulation for your articles and to do that, you can try submitting your articles to website owners running sites or blogs with similar content to the subject of your article. This process however can be time consuming, and the same results can be achieved faster if you just submit your articles straight to article directories.

If you know of some extremely popular websites where you really want to place your article, you can email the webmasters of that site directly and express your motives. But then again, excellent results can be attained by submitting to article directories and letting them do the publishing.

Submitting your articles to online directories work like magic – each one will automatically be available for anyone who wants to republish the article, given that they will not change anything in the article and that they will include your resource box as well as the link to your website. By just submitting one article to an article directory that gives you a guaranteed one-way link back to your website, how much more if you publish several articles a day in a number of article directories!

Free one-way links are the bread and butter of most webmasters, and are usually the secret behind very popular websites that are dominating the upper ranks in the search engines. Submitting your articles to ezines is the best way to promote a certain product or service – it's effective, viral, and is absolutely free!