First let me explain article marketing for those that do not know what it is. Lets say your website is about widgets. You write an article on interesting ways people can use widgets.

In the footer of your article there is an author bio section. In the author bio section you place links to your website about widgets.

You submit that article to as many article directories as possible.
Once you submit to all of those directories, remember the link in the author bio section, each of those directories is now a one-way inbound link.

Now none of those links is related to widgets, so they are not relative links, but they do still count for link popularity, just not as much as relative links do.

But the second reason that article directories exist is to provide free content to website owners. These website owners can take your article and use it as content for their website as long as they leave the links in the author bio section active and intact.

Article Marketing Doesn't Work. That is exactly what some old-time experienced SEO people are still saying. Yet, one of the clients I wrote articles for went from a link popularity of 1 to a link popularity of 457 in 8 days.

I received an email today from a client I wrote an article for on "Free Credit Repair" 3 days ago. He did a search in Google today for "Free Credit Repair" and the article was in the top 100. Tough category, but it was written 3 days ago and appears in Google for his search term with links to his website.

I can continue to provide dozens of examples where article marketing works and works fast. Once those articles are picked up by other websites besides the article directories, the real benefit comes.

Those websites that pick up and use the widget articles as content for their websites would not use the article if it were not related to their own topic, which means related to widgets in this case. That means relative one-way inbound links for your website.

If you have no use for quick link popularity and relative one-way inbound links to your website, then article marketing is not for you.