You hear everywhere about two major priorities for your business - building your list and using articles to promote your site. Obviously, if you can combine the two efforts, so much the better.

The best way to make your articles help you build your business is to provide great information. You want your leads to be impressed enough to sign up for your newsletter so that you have many opportunities to sell to them.

To increase the effectiveness of your articles in building your list, you need to ask for the subscription in your resource box (most sites won’t let you put a lot of links in the article or blatently promote your site in the article body). You can either include the email address for subscriptions or link to your subscription page.

The advantage articles have is that they can closely target the kind of people you want to subscribe to your newsletter. Write about a topic you know they are interested in.

Does it really work? That depends on a lot of factors. Is the article of high quality? Is your subscription form easy to use? Is it a topic that people are going to want to get a newsletter about?

There are no promises in business - some things will work, some things won’t. Keep trying and find out what tactics work for you and you are comfortable in using.