Found this video series that does a great job of explaining article marketing.

Today were going to talk about using article marketing to get that flow of targeted traffic going. Im not talking about articles that are actually part of the content of your website (although that is important as well). Article marketing involves writing an article on a subject that is related to your business or product, and submitting it to an article directory. Article directories let you include a bio box or resource box and in there, you can include a link to your website.

There are thousands of article directories these days. If youve ever googled to look up information on how to do something, or where to find a product and come up with an article that was hosted on ezines or associated content, those are both examples of content that was written by another person on your particular subject, but somewhere in the article or at the end was a link to their website or product.

Sneaky? No Smart? Yes.
Article marketing actually benefits everybody. The publishers of the ezines get free content to use. And the authors of the articles get free backlinks and traffic to their site.The more sites that you have linking to your website, the higher you will rate in the search engine rankings.