Article marketing can be the best way for affiliates – especially beginners – to hedge the risks of affiliate marketing. Here’s 10 reasons why…

#1. Free Traffic - Traffic from articles is essentially free. While writing and submitting them takes time, once your articles are published, clicks on your resource box links don’t cost you a dime. So even if your article traffic is high and your conversions are low, no harm done, since you’re not paying for any of those visitors.

#2. Low Cost – Article marketing allows you to play in niches where you couldn’t afford the high cost of PPC ads. Even if you outsource articles, a $15-$20 article can generate many thousands of visitors in a very short time. Compare that to the cost of just 100 clicks on a high-ticket PPC ad.

#3. Low Risk – It costs you $50 worth of your time to write and submit two articles. You get 1000 visitors but no sales. How much money have you lost? Really none! You actually “bought” targeted traffic at only 5 cents a visitor ($50 divided by 1000 visitors). Where else can you get niche traffic for just 5 cents a visitor? Just work on your resource box and landing page to get some conversions.

#4. Test Any Product or Niche – Testing an off-the-beaten-path niche or a brand new product is easy with article marketing. It’s also quick – you’ll usually know whether you’ve got a winner in a week or less.

#5. “Forever” Traffic – Once an article gets published online, it will send you traffic for months and years to come. That’s why it’s especially important to write titles that are not just keyworded, but grab the attention of webmasters and readers. The more attractive your article – and the more clickable your resource box – the steadier the flow of lifetime traffic.

#6. No Slaps – You don’t need to worry about waking up one morning to find that clicks on your articles are costing you 10 times more money – heck, they don’t cost you any money! You can also send visitors to a website designed in whatever way you choose, instead of being penalized for including a squeeze page or other marketing device that does not meet a “quality standard.”

#7. SEO Benefits – Articles submitted to the top directories and syndicated on authority sites can have long term SEO benefits. They’ll get indexed quickly, and they provide backlinks to your websites.

#8. Market-Driven – Provided you learn how to really research article marketing niches, the readership in that niche will tell you what to write about and which types of products to promote.

#9. Easy Outsourcing and Automation – Article marketing has been around for so long, it’s not difficult to find good freelance writers who know article marketing and can help you multiply your efforts. This is especially true if you master some outsourcing tricks for getting quality articles at lower cost. And you’ll find that today’s article submission services, such as Article Marketer, can save you hundreds of hours over the course of a year.

#10. Recycle Content – You can reuse your articles – either as-is or lightly rewritten – in a blog, social network site, newsletter, ebook, or special report.