Does article marketing really bring traffic to a website? The answer is a resounding yes, but there are a few things you need to consider before you start pumping out a million articles and get disappointed by the results.

Article marketing can be an very effective way to create a lot of traffic to your business quickly and over a long period of time as well. Some of the most successful sites online use article marketing to promote their businesses, because article marketing is one of the more cost effective promotion techniques available to you.

In case you're not familiar with the term, article marketing is publishing content provided by you to other sites. Some of these sites may be similar to your own, but others may be article directories. You might be thinking if you provide material for your competitors sites, how does this help you? It does. Every article you write will include a backlink to your own site. Backlinks are important because they are treasured by the search engines! You will get a better rank for your own site when you have a {lot|massive number) of backlinks to it. The search engines regard backlinks as recommendations to your own site from independant sources. It doesn't matter that you are the creator!

To put it another way, if you provide an article on another site, you include a backlink to your own site. Some of the people reading your article will click through to your site and the search engines will give your site another tick for having a link from another site. That's win-win.

A really well written article may also be published from an article directory onto other people's sites. Another win-win! That's why you must take the time to write good quality articles on specific topics. If you don't want or can't write the articles yourself, consider using a ghostwriter or freelance writer to write for you.

Article Marketing - Article Creation and Submission

To start, you must have a clear idea of what you want to write. Keep your key words and key phrases in mind as you write. Don't forger, people want information, so create a good quality, well written, relevant article for them. If you do this regularly, you will also gain the benefit of being seen as an expert in your field.

After you've written and reviewed your article, spend time writing your headline. This is what is going to get people to continue to read your article. A good headline will draw readers into your article.

The final step in article writing is to, make sure you write a compelling reason for someone to click the link in your resource box. Keep it fairly short and make sure you create a commanding link back to your site or the site you want to promote.

Once all that is done, you can submit your article. You can find tons of article submitters out there that can help you, or you can choose to do it manually. I recommend you at least use EzineArticles, GoArticles and ArticleBase to start your article submissions. Each site screens your articles, so make sure they're up to scratch.

Article Marketing - Follow Up

Your article may take hours or weeks to be approved and published. Use a backlink checker to find out how well your article is doing. You can find one on Google and other search engines. Just enter your website address and hit go.

Article marketing is a very effective way to bring you traffic to your website. It will also increase your popularity and page rank {and|plus it_ can get you into a top position on a search engine for a particular keyword or phrase if you have spent the time researching your keywords. The downside to article marketing is that it is a fairly slow way to build your traffic, but every time you submit a new article, you improve your article marketing efforts which will boost your sales efforts over time.