Right Way to Do Article Marketing
Most people who do article marketing write a lot of articles and then submit them to as many directories as possible. These articles are boring and of low-quality, but since they do get links passed from the directories these webmasters feel like they have accomplished their goals of getting a few one-way links.
There is a better way to do article marketing. What I recommend you do is to start out writing an interesting article that is of a higher-quality. Find topics that speak to your audience and excite people.
Then post that article to only the top two or three directories, possibly more if you can find directories specific to your niche. Here is what you have to wrap your head around: the links from the actual directories do not matter as much.
The real goal here is for your content to get syndicated or republished by real websites that are interesting in posting the article, and your link, on their site. Not only do you get more links this way, but the links you get come from better sites, not just spam-filled robot sites or the article directories themselves.
Do not write articles that focus on your company or products or about the directories themselves. You need to be thinking about giving quality websites the decent content that they want. If you get a link from a respected website, it doesn't even matter if it's in the same niche, you are still going to get a lot of juice out of that link.
One of two things are going to happen next. Either sites are going to contact you directly asking you to write some content specifically for their site, or you are going to monitor your incoming links to see who is posting your content and you are going to get in touch with them. Offer these publishers more of your content and you'll see a snowball effect. Other sites in the niche might see you posting guest articles on these sites and then contact you to see if you are interested in writing for them as well.
By giving the sites that publish the content from the directories what they want, you'll build up a following of publishers who will be asking you for more content. These are the relationships that you want to be building as you will get far more out of the links from quality sites than you will by focusing solely on the article directories.