Writing articles is one of the best means of advertising your online work at home business, and is an essential part of any online business that relies on a website or other online presence for the bulk of its marketing effort.

Without wasting any time on fluff, here is why writing articles is so important to your online business. You can use your articles in two principal ways: by submitting them to directories and placing them as authoritative contenton your own web pages or any other online platform. Let us have a look at each of these and they work:

A. You will benefit in four principal ways through your articles being published on article directories:

1. They will be read by visitors to the directories. Many suggest that users of aryicle directories do not read the articles they contain. They are completely wrong because I get hundreds of reads of my articles from directory visitors. Some will click through to your website using the link you provide in your resource.

2. The directory will provide you with one-way links back to your website: that linke must be lead readers to a page on your website that relates closely to the content of your article. These back-links give Google an indication of your site's popularity, and they will reward you for it with Page Rank and listing position.

3. Others will copy your article to their own websites. Anybody copying your article also has to leave your 'author's resource' intact together with the link within it. Some people delete the resource, but there is software available with which you can detect these people and warn them - it generally works. This offers you a) a valuable one-way back-link to a web page of your choice from the web page on which your article has been published, and b) the likelihood of visitors to that web page clicking throuhg to your website.

4. The article directory page on which your article is published can itself be listed in search engine results pages and give you loads of free traffic. It is possible to have the same article listed several times on Page #1 of Google from a number of article directories. It seems to be the case that Google does not pursue the duplicate content penalty as vigorously with article directories as with regular websites.

These are the four ways. However, it need not only be regular websites to which you direct readers of the article and links from it. You can also use a Squidoo lens, your blog, your Facebook or MySpace page or any of a 101 other types of page available on the internet.

B. You can benefit is two major ways by writing articles as web page content to promote your work at home business:

1. You know your own business better than anybody else, and that will come out if you write honestly and naturally. It is very important that you persuade visitors to your website that you are an expert in your subject, and content rich articles published on your web pages is the best type of content you can offer people seeking information. Guess what? The vast majority are seeking information when they use a search engine such as Google, and if you can give them that information than they will be liable to purchase your product or use your service - at the very least they will return to your wesite later.

2. Search engine spiders will rank web pages according to their relevance to the keywords, and those that are rich in relevant content, and optimized for the keyword concerned, will have a marvelous chance of being listed high in the search engine results positions (SERPS)and so drive masses of free traffic to your page.

These reasons should be sufficient to persuade you that writing articles is a very important part of promoting your online work at home business, but there is one thing you must also keep in mind. You have to learn how to write articles that will attract readers, and then compel them to continue reading until they find your resource. You must then know how to write a resource that cannot be ignored, so that those reading it will feel that have to click on the link you have provided.

It doesn't matter how good you beleive yourself to be at writing articles, it is your ability optimize them for search negines and to write in a way that people will want to read them, thyat counts, and also how well you can choose the right keywords to get you that coveted #1 spot while your competitors are too busy fighting against themselves to notice you.

Writing articles involves more than just a school essay or project, but is a means of promoting your online work at home business both to people and to search engine algorithms, but most of all to potential visitors to your blog, website or Squidoo lens that want to learn more about what you have to say. You, yourself, have to learn how to do that properly, but if you succeed than you will have the best free advertising on the planet at your fingertips, and a dam of traffic just waiting to burst and flood your website or blog. Just for writing articles!

Sustainable Living Articles @ http://www.articlegarden.com