Promoting online business through article marketing/blogs?

[Valencia]

I would stick with option number one. Putting articles as long as it's unique and catch up the reader attention can boost your site ranking in big.G as well as boost traffics directly into your websites. Platform like ezine, Squidoo, and Wordpress has million page view and subscribers, so there is plenty good reason why you should put your articles into these kind of platform.

If you are running an online based business, you could try another promotion methods beside article marketing. You could try web 2.0, directory listing on local directory business, email marketing, and the most important is social media marketing.

I would highly suggest Social Media as a platform to expand your marketing plans, social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, otherhand can be used as a place to interact directly with your customers and establish relationship and trust proven as a good methods to boost your sales/business.