Article directories is a very powerful tool to use for power to your site or blog, it is a very common method among website owners to promote there site trough articles and gain visitors that way, the article directory’s also have high page rank witch makes them excellent to gain back links from. But thus who is interested in affiliate marketing who don’t have there own website can use article directories for promotion. write articles or reviews on products and promote there affiliate links trough there resource box on the article site. This is called bum marketing in many cases and I guess you see why. This is how it works. You search affiliate programs for profitable and popular products. If you are new to affiliate marketing, visit home based business startup idea for a list of the best affiliate programs to sign up with, if you use clickbank for this, witch is very good because of the high payouts. I would suggest that you go for products with a gravity under 80 if you plan to gain visitors from articles by the name of the product as keyword (witch is very targeted traffic bringing and converse wary well) if you find a product with a gravity over 80 I would suggest that you go for a keywords related to the product in terms of a solution or a beginners en guidance way. Once you have got your self a product and keyword, you write an article or review on the product. 250-500 words is recommended. (visit SEO-Training for keyword videos) Once you’ve done that its time to submit it to an article directory. There are 100s of article directors out there but only a hand full of them is worth wring to. Because google have favorites and you want to use googles favorite directors to rank well in google. The absolute best one is ezinearticles and I would suggest that you send your articles to ezinearticles before you use the other ones. Goarticles, articledashboard, article alley are good to. If you have a website you like to build back links to I suggest that you alternate in between this directors but to do that you need to write more articles, if you send the same article to each of the directors you will be punished by google for duplicate content. But if you do bum marketing I suggest that you send mainly to ezinearticles because you will get the most visitors from that directory and it is easier to rank for good keywords with ezinearticles because it is so powerful. The problem is that ezinearticles doesn’t accept affiliate links so you need to set up a place where you can send your visitors trough the article, if you don’t want to host an account I would suggest that you use blogger.com or squidoo.com for free sites. If you are new to keyword research I strongly advice you to read aaron walls seobook, it Is in my opinion the most useful book you can have as you work online because the seo is the most important part of all.