Ever wonder how to get a virtual flood of FREE traffic to your websites? Yeah, me too! Then I discovered article marketing.

• What is Article Marketing?

Article Marketing is the art of the writing and distributing articles to article directories and blogs.

There are two main purposes of article marketing.

1.) To gain valuable backlinks from high page rank sites to your website or affiliate page

2.) To drive traffic to your website or affiliate page

• So how do you write good articles?

To start off with, the number one rule for writing articles is to provide value to the reader! This can be done by explaining a topic (like this article does) or by solving a problem the potential reader has. Providing Value is very important because if you are trying to get people to your website or affiliate page, what is the chance they are going to click through at the bottom of the article if you do not write a good article? Probably, no chance at all.

The 2nd rule when writing articles for maximum effect is to include a byline or signature that seems to be a natural extension of the article itself. There are far to many individuals who are not aware of this rule. What do I mean by this?

Well instead of writing an author’s signature like this (99% of people do this): Chris Gustafson is a expert in the field of search engine optimization.

Write something like this:

As you can see topic XYZ is not that hard to understand once you have it explained to you in plain English.

When you write a signature like the 2nd one your click through rate on your articles will go from 5% to above 20%.

Yes, it’s that big of difference!!!!

So there are your two golden rules that if followed will put you ahead of 99% of the other people out there who are using article marketing as a strategy. The next thing you need to know how to do is distribute your article. To do this you really have two options:

1.) Manually submit your article to all the top article directories

2.) Pay an article submission service to do this for you:

Option #1 is time consuming and get’s old real fast

Option #2 will cost you some money but may be worth it if you are in this for the long haul. To find article submission services it is as simple as Googling that term! There will be a ton of results; all you have to do is pick one. Make sure to do your homework first though.

In closing, I hope you enjoyed this article. I hope you learned something and it leads you to great article marketing success!