Why should you pay to post articles for marketing purposes when you can put them up for free in a hundred different places? One simple word: control. When you put up your free articles, the corporation running the free article site can bend, twist, shake, and post whatever they want next to your article. This, far from helping your marketing campaign, may well prove detrimental to it, sending traffic to your competitors and ensuring that your work is wasted. A pay-to-post article marketing site, however, allows you much more control over your work and your marketing campaign. How much more?

1. With a pay to post article, you have control over the ads published next to your work. Go out and look at some of the free articles you've posted at other sites. You'll see that many are not actually free - the article marketers are letting someone else pay for your bandwidth, in the form of advertisements, and often these advertisements are from people directly competing with you. If you read your terms of service carefully, even submission services that don't do this right now leave open the option of advertising on your article in the future, and you won't control that.

2. With control over the ads posted next to your work, you can send readers to multiple sites, not just the one or two you list in your resource box. Think about it: your several parallel sites look like different competing sites owned by different people, but they all ultimately go to you. This is an advertising trick becoming more common online, and there's no reason you should not take advantage of it as well.

3. You don't have to keep the advertisements all to yourself - instead, you have the option of selling the ad space on your article yourself, bringing in a regular revenue forever. This can be a significant amount of money. Your advertisers are your customers, and you are free - within regular terms of service restrictions - to display and charge what you like.

4. You may also be able to take advantage of powerful affiliate marketing deals, using your articles to soft-sell products to a larger audience than you can draw yourself. That's three lifelong revenue streams - advertising, affiliate sales, and traffic to your site - with a single low payment on a single article.

5. You can seed your online community using pay to post articles. Each pay to post article allows powerful Web 2.0 capability for readers in the form of comment capability, just as in any standard social blogging format you've seen. A smart marketer can take these seedlings and redirect posters on these to larger discussions back on their own site, where they will have the option of joining the community more permanently.

6. You have an established web marketing expert working every day to identify new profitable revenue streams for your current and future articles. Ten years ago,it was no big deal to identify your own revenue sources, but the web grows more complicated every day, and today it's a full-time-plus job to track these down yourself. By allowing an expert to do it for you, you'll free yourself up to build your valuable online content

These advantages are only a few you'll find in pay-to-post article marketing.