Article marketing, and sometimes called 'bum marketing' because even a bum with no money could use this strategy to generate traffic and maybe even sales, is one of those evergreen methods that have been generating free traffic for years and years.

Now the key to article marketing is not what some people claim, which is to blast your article to thousands of sites. The reason for this is because of the 'duplicate content' penalty which will basically discount most of the pages your article is on because there are so many other websites with the same content. Distribution to thousands of article directories is usually recommended by people with software to sell or services to sell.

We are looking to get free traffic from the article directories so this means that we should be targeting the directories with the highest amount of traffic, which narrows it down to four or five sites. All the other directories combined probably don't get 1% of the traffic the others get so it's fairly safe to discount them.

At the time of writing, the article directories to submit to are:

• Ezinearticles.com

• Articlecity.com

• Articledashboard.com

• Goarticles.com

These directories have a lot of traffic, from people doing research and from organic search engine traffic. They have a very high authority and hence very good search engine rankings for even some highly competitive keywords. You can use this to your advantage by writing 400 word articles tightly focused around a particular keyword.

Optimizing your article means you should be putting the target keyword in the title and using it throughout the content of the article, but try not to go overboard! Too many repetitions of the keyword could lead to your article being rejected.

At the bottom of your article you can include a little resource box which acts as the doorway to your website and is aimed at getting you free traffic. The other big advantage is that it has SEO benefits as well so you are killing two birds with one stone.

If you are using article marketing to generate free traffic then your resource box is very important and you should ensure that there is a very strong call to action in there (that means you make people want to click it). Simply typing "This article was written by Joe Bloggs who is a tropical fish expert" is not going to entice many visitors to click on your link, it's good for SEO, but not for driving free traffic. A more suitable sentence would be "Are you making these 5 mistakes and killing your tropical fish without knowing it?", no one wants to make mistakes, so the link is more likely to get clicked.

Article marketing is tried and tested and works as well today as it did 8 years ago, so it should definitely be forming part of your free traffic campaign.