As a webmaster, we need to actively promote our site. There are lots of ways to do that, both ethical and unethical. We don't have to resolve to unethical ways of marketing our site such as spamming, reciprocal link farms, page generation software and the like. The search engine algorithm will eventually catch up with that. That still leaves us with plenty of ways to market our site and content. However, the most important thing to have is to create quality content on your website.

What is quality content? Quality content is information that your viewers can benefit from. Once you create content, you want everyone to know that your content does exists. You need to distribute it the right way. Telling some strangers on the street corner about "The New Guide of Stock Picking" will help, but not effective. Time is precious. You do not want to reach the most viewers. You would want to reach the most interested viewers on your field. The reason is simple. You work less to get the attention of the most interested viewers.

Therefore, submitting your online content to ezines and article directories are absolutely critical. You will get the maximum number of interested viewers there. The deal is simple. You, as authors, are to submit your articles to these directories. In exchange, you can promote your website at the resource box provided. Viewers looking for a specific topic will browse through certain categories. If they see your writing and like it, they will become your customers. And what is the cost of this? For most places, article submission is free. Where else can you promote your business reaching thousands or more people free of charge?

Some of these article directories are general and some are niche. General article directories let writers publish everything from weight loss help to building your own business. These are good but you can certainly do better. The reason is while these kind of sites garner a lot of visitors, you will find less visitors interested in your field. Niche directories, on the other hand, focus on specific field and attract less visitors. However, these visitors are very interested in your field. If an article directory has a niche in finance, why would a person seeking information about weight loss visit the site? Therefore, only visitors interested in finance will visit this niche directory.

As always, the decision is up to you, as a webmaster. My suggestion is to first submit your content to niche directory and then when you have time, you can still submit your article to other general directories.