Lately I've been hearing a lot of rumblings around the internet marketing community that say ezine advertising is dead and gone.

I have to tell you that ezine advertising is alive and well -- and still one of the most effective and powerful forms of internet marketing available.

There are several reasons this is true but I'll simply concentrate on three main points.

Today's ezines and newsletters are permission-based which means subscribers want to receive these messages in their emailbox. Responsible publishers are proactive about giving subscribers total control over their subscription and working closely with their mailing service to ensure as close to 100 percent deliverability as possible. Ezines deliver because they have to do so or shut down.

The experts in internet marketing and search engine optimization offer wide ranging and diverse opinions about what the best marketing technique may be, but they all agree on one point -- content is king on the internet. Content is attractive to search engines and visitors alike. It is content that makes a site sticky and successful. And content is one area where ezines and newsletters reign supreme. In today's permission-driven environment they need to deliver quality information or they'll quickly be out of business. Imagine your ad placed in a prominent position beside high-quality information that your target audience wants. That is what ezine advertising can deliver.

If content is king then links are the lifeblood of the internet. Without links surfers could not navigate around the internet and without links search engines will not locate web sites and pages. Oneoften overlooked aspect of ezines and newsletters is the powerful text link benefits offered by ezine advertising. While most people are attracted by the immediate return of their message appearing before X number of subscribers, they do not realize that their ezine ad could work for them weeks, months and years after it was read via email. Almost all ezines and newsletters are archived on the web and because of the content they provide often those archives are crawled regularly and ranked high by search engines -- and provide you with valuable back links to help increase your search engine standing.

You can dismiss ezine advertising as dead and gone and concentrate on other forms of internet marketing. Yes, you can dismiss ezine advertising, and you can miss out on immediate results from a targeted audience and you can miss out on valuable back links working for you long into the future.