Promoting your website is difficult. That is why you are reading articles like this one. You are still looking for the answers. You are still seeking knowledge. You are trying to learn as much as possible so that you can determine which promotional methods are going to be the most beneficial while requiring the least amount of expense and effort on your part. Article marketing seems like a natural fit. But, is it really possible to generate enough publicity for your website using article marketing alone? That is the question I am going to answer in this article.

First, let’s discuss the ways in which article marketing actually works to promote your website. There are four ways that it works.

1. Articles generate direct traffic to your website from people who click the links you put in your article.

• These people might find this article in the search results on a search engine.

• These people might find this article because they are regular visitors of the website that this article is published on.

• These people might find this article because they clicked some other link on some other website that brought them here.

2. Articles generate organic traffic from people who search for your site because they read about it in your article somewhere.

3. Articles generate search engine ranking juice which helps your own website’s pages rank better in the search engines, thereby bringing you increased traffic directly to your site.

4. Articles generate brand awareness, domain name awareness and brand value where every time a person sees your domain name or your brand name they are a little bit more likely to visit your site and a little bit more trusting of your brand. (Remember the old advertising saying that a person needs to see your ad 9 times before they will act on it?)

Some of the ideas I just presented there are probably brand new to you. You may have never stopped to realize that much was actually happening with your articles. Maybe you think of articles as just being ways to generate a little trickle traffic at best.

If you are only publishing a handful of articles, then yes, those articles are probably going to provide some trickle traffic at best. But, if you use article marketing to its fullest extent, then you can generate a lot of traffic for your website and a lot of brand awareness and a lot of backlinks. You generate traffic, publicity and links for your website.

Your mindset kind of changes when you think about article marketing in terms of numbers. By scaling your marketing up, you can really start pushing results for your site.

One case that comes to mind is a situation where a guy only used one article marketing website to promote his website. That is not the strategy I would recommend these days, but it worked back when he tried it. The guy had published around fifty articles at EzineArticles.com. Most of those articles didn't bring him much traffic at all. There were a couple out of the fifty that brought in a ton of traffic though. They brought in so much traffic that the guy was getting around a hundred unique visitors a day.

One hundred unique visitors might not sound like much to some people. I can assure you that for this particular niche the guy was in, it was a nice amount. Those hundred daily visitors made his website exceptionally profitable.

That guy was getting all his traffic directly from those articles. He wasn't getting much search engine traffic. Had he published those fifty articles at a bunch of other websites instead of just one, then he probably would have gotten more search engine traffic. But, who am I to doubt the guy? His method worked. His method might work for you too. The key is to publish enough articles so that their combined power generates results. That guy had to publish fifty some articles before he got lucky enough with two of them to bring in a decent amount of traffic. If you are only publishing a handful or even ten, then you aren't likely to get lucky enough to see anywhere near the kinds of results you had hoped for.