Josh makes many practical suggestions, but perhaps the most important are:

1. Don’t get hung up on writing primarily for link building purposes. Write for your human readers so you will get clicks on the links in your resource box. Drive traffic by writing quality content and drawing readers to your embedded links.

2. If you are using an article distribution service such as isnare.com or articlemarketers.com you are probably not maximizing your article marketing efforts.

These are what I call “old style” article distribution services, and I too stopped using these services about two years ago. Why? Because they distribute the exact same article to hundreds of relatively low quality article sites – resulting in what is essentially article spam.

They may also miss the most important article sites such as ezinearticles, articledashboard and ideamarketers.com (along with several others). These are the sites that get the most traffic, are considered most important in the eyes of the search engines, and are usually the most picky in terms of article quality. Because of these things they will drive the most traffic to your sites.

Josh suggests you should focus primarily on the five or six most important sites – make sure your articles get into those directories – especially ezinearticles.com. He also makes some very useful suggestions about dominating your niche(s) in ezinearticles.com and getting even more readership and links back to your articles.

I highly recommend “Article Marketing Domination” by Josh Spaulding.

In its most simple form article marketing just involves writing something with links back to one of your websites, and then posting it on a few (or many) article sites. Here are some things worth remembering:

1. Write quality material. You are not just after links, but presumably people in your target niche will actually read your articles, come to recognize you name and judge the quality of your opinion and knowledge based on what they read in your articles.

2. Be sure to give your articles an effective title. For your human readers the title should be interesting and catchy – something to entice them to read it. For the search engines it should contain your target keyword phrase. It is usually the title that determines the SEO value of an article.

3. Be sure to distribute your articles to the most effective article directories. There are hundreds of article sites out there, but some are more influential than others. The most influential from the SEO point of view, and the ones that generally get the most traffic are the ones with the highest page rank. You might want to do a search for a variety of search terms and see which article sites come up the most.

Chances are you’ll see ezinearticles.com coming up a lot. After that some of the best are:
ideamarketers.com
articledashboard.com
buzzle.com
articlebiz.com
articlecity.com

All of these are included in the distribution list of Content Spooling – an article writing and distribution service which I highly recommend.

Here are some more articles about article marketing.