Most people refer to article directories when discussing article marketing.
However, directories are just a small part of the bigger picture.
The ultimate result you are looking for with article marketing is a boost in traffic through the syndication of your articles.
In other words, you want your articles to be published all over the net.
This can be done in several ways besides article directories.
In fact, you can easily create a blog and syndicate your articles through an RSS feed.
This is actually becoming much more popular than pulling articles from directories.
However, this will only work if you have a large readership, your blog is very visible on the search engines, and you get a lot of traffic from other bloggers.
One way to syndicate across blogs is through blogging networks.
These are groups of bloggers that share content and post on each others blogs.
You can also use blogging networks to syndicate or publish your articles without having your own blog at all.
By posting to a network as a guest, you can arrange many opportunities to appear as a guest writer on blogs other than your own.
Another way you can use articles in internet marketing is by placing them in public forums.
You can often make posts of around 200 words to message boards and have great results.
You can also use your articles on your own website and arrange for an RSS feed directly from your website or ezine.
This is not allowed by all web hosting services, so check availability before planning on this method.