If they expect to survive every business owner knows the importance of advertising. The Internet is somewhat mysterious off line business owners, but they are probably aware of article marketing. If you are wondering whether business article marketing really works let's address that thought in this article.Today article marketing includes a number of strategies. You certainly are going to be writing and submitting articles to article directories both for traffic as well as potential backlinks.However articles are used in other ways today and this is important if you expect to capture a larger segment of your market. For example every business owner should have a blog and be adding articles into it on a regular basis.Articles that might have been submitted strictly to article directories can be reworked into shorter blog posts to help you get more out of each one of these individually. Blog articles generally only need to be a couple hundred words to get the point across.Most article directories are looking for articles of 400 to 500 words. If you are writing a 400 word article for an article directory, you can turn that into two blog articles and double your impact.One advantage to article marketing for businesses is the cost. Most article directories are free to submit to. The only raw cost is the time it takes to write the article and submit it.Today it is popular to outsource article marketing to freelance writers. This will increase your cost, however this is relatively inexpensive compared to other forms of off-line advertising that may have done in the past.Articles are archived online and this is a real benefit of business article marketing. You will come across articles that have been online for several years as you are surfing around the Internet in any specific category.Once a search engine falls in love with an article they have a hard time replacing it. This is why you see articles targeting specific keyword phrases continue to rank high on a search engine year after year.Another sign that business article marketing works is the number of local businesses now promoting using articles. You see articles written around a specific theme that include a resource box targeting a specific region.This has been a natural progression for articles because people now use the Internet to search for things locally. Because your competitors are probably already doing this is why you want business article marketing to be a part of your overall advertising efforts.