Using Article Marketing To Drive Traffic
by Dana Willhoit

Any successful website owner will tell you that getting their website up and running was only the first step to online success.

The second - and absolutely vital - step is to get a steady stream of traffic to that website. If nobody's visiting your website, it doesn't matter if you have the most attractively designed website and the best product in the world, because nobody knows about it.

Fortunately there are a number of ways to drive traffic to your website, and most of them are free.

Today we're going to talk about using article marketing to get traffic.

Article marketing involves writing an article on a subject that is related to your business or product, and submitting it to an article directory.

Article directories let you include a "bio box" or "resource box" and in there, you can include a link to your website.

There are thousands of article directories these days. They work like this: people write articles and submit them to the directory, and then publishers of ezines and blogs go to those directories and pick out articles that they use in their ezines for free.

How does this work?

It actually benefits everybody. The publishers of the ezines and blogs get free content to use. And the authors of the articles get free backlinks and traffics.

The more sites that you have linking to your website, the higher you will raise in the search engine rankings.

So when your article is published by an article directory, the link that you have included to your site benefits you. When ezine publishers and blog owners use the article and include the link to your site, that also benefits you.

You also will get a lot of traffic from people who read the article and click on your link.

What should you write articles about? You want to give some useful information but you don't want to completely solve the reader's problem - otherwise they have no reason to buy the product that you have created or promoting.

Let's say you wrote an article about aggressive dogs, because you are promoting an ebook about dog training. You can write an article about "five common causes of dog aggressiveness" and in your resource box you would say something like "(Your name here) writes frequently about dog training and dog behavior issues. For more information about common dog behavior problems, and tips on solving those problems, go to (your website name here)."

If you were writing an article about weight loss, because you are promoting a weight loss ebook, you could write an article such as "Five Foods That Actually Burn Calories" or "Which Exercises Burn the Most Calories? Read On to Find Out" or "Sneaky Diet Wreckers - These "Diet" Foods are Making You Fat!"

And your resource box could say something like "(Your name here) writes frequently about nutrition and diet. For more calorie burning tips and some delicious diet recipes, visit (Your website here).

If you have any expertise you definitely want to mention that. If you are dog trainer or dog breeder and are writing about dog training, or if you are a certified dietician or personal trainer and you are writing about weight loss, you would include that in your bio box. However as you can see from the examples above, you don't need to be an expert with a degree or certification to be able to write articles for article directories; most of their writers, in fact, are not experts, just business owners promoting a website.