Having written lots of articles to promote my sites, I'd have to say "Yes!". Articles help drive traffic to your site through direct referrals (through your resource box) and by improving your link popularity. The higher the quality of your article, the more direct traffic you can expect from people reading your article. Higher quality articles are also more likely to be picked up by more article directories and other web publishers, so quality is also important from an SEO standpoint.

I agree, syndication is key. What is a "resource box" or is that just a metaphor?

I dont't want to sound like a smarty pants, but this will only happen if you include the articles that you are submitting on your web site. Creating different articles for article submission, and then different ones for your web site may be a strategy that you want to consider.

Morty

If you do that, your first instinct might be to post good articles on your site and crappy articles on other people's sites. I mean, why spend the time giving THEM nice spiderable unique content? The thing is that if you do that, your name and reputation, and your website's reputation, become associated with the crappy articles all the same. So post good quality articles you don't mind having your name on everywhere, but do save the absolute best for yourself.

I agree 100%. I didn't mean to imply that you should just post any old thing. These articles should be good quality articles.

In regards to why do it, it really depends on each individual site. It makes complete sense in some situations and none in others. For example, a local retail store going online for the first time. Their strategy may be to provide their customers with valuable information in areas related to their product line. In this case they might want to use article syndication to establish some links on the net, plus make more of a "name" for themselves as providing expert information.

The article syndication can really be a no brainer if the store has published previous newsletters, phamplets for their customers. They can take this content and convert it into syndicated articles to get more visibility for their store, and then use the content from new newsletters on their web site.

One strategy that has worked very well for some of my clients is to do the following: Write 2 articles for a "topic area". The first should cover the basics and answer the question of "why should I care" about the topic area. Note, the first article needs to be interesting and provide value (not the typical "intro to blue widgets"). The second article should get into the nitty gritty of the topic and cover specifics (such results of using blue widgets, visual examples,etc)
The first article gets posted to syndication and links to your web site where the second article is posted. This provides a nice flow for people interested in your topic. Obviously the success of this depends on the topic and overall interest in the topic.

BTW, I could have sworn I posted this reply before, but for some reason it doesn't look like it took (probably my bad) so I apologize if this comes up as a duplicate post.

A resource box is a brief promotional message (aka "about the author") appended to the end of the article. It is equivalent to a signature on forum postings.

yea this is the best man go for it

I've had very good luck with articles. They generate a fair amount of traffic when they are first published, and often generate traffic when others look for them. Plus the money the site pays for the article is nice too.

Isn't it usually against the contract to submit your article to more than one? The contract I sign when the editor and I agree on a topic states that they own the article for a set amount of time usually.

I write about software development mostly. The sites I use for articles are devx.com, informit.com, developer.com, gamelan.com.

I use articles websites on a regular basis, and while this is a long-term strategy, it can be very successful.

I have many articles which I wrote months ago, which are still attracting views, and people ARE visiting my websites.

I think that the trick with these kind of sites is to make your article headlines stand out - be different, be adventurous.

Good luck.

MB

Another massive benefit of having articles written for your site is that you can submit them for review by sites such as digg.com and shoutwire.com These sites can send thousands of visitors to your site within a week and can be very lucrative for those with PPC advertising. We produce articles for many of our clients who spend most of their time just digging the articles we've produced for them. If you get lucky with digg and produce something interesting it's been known to send 30,000 unique visitors your way in 1 week.