A little more than one year ago, I was desperate to find a way to make some residual income to augment our family finances. One day I was surfing the net, when I came across an ad about how to start a business using my computer at home. Although I thought it was a bogus claim I decided that $49.95 was not too much to gamble and lose, so I went ahead, gave it a shot and signed up. Before 30 days was up, I exercised my money back guarantee and to my surprise the company refunded my 50 bucks plus the extra $70 I paid for website hosting. However, there was a bonus CD included in the offer about something called bummarketing put together by a guy named Travis from Arkansas.

In this CD, this guy named Travis put together a video which showed how an ordinary person like me could write articles on my favorite subjects and have them published online for no charge. And not only that by linking the articles to the right keywords, I could have those articles featured on the first page of the major search engines (such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing). Of course I did not believe him, but I like to write and share my opinions so I thought why not I would give it my best half-hearted college try.

As Travis suggested, I began my article writing journey putting together some things for an odd sounding site called Squidoo; eventually after putting together a couple websites, I dropped Squidoo and began posting articles on Ezinearticles. Through three minor spurts of writing, I posted over 100 articles on Ezinearticles on a variety of subjects and drew over 20,000 page views. However, Ezinearticles does not offer residuals on the Google Adsense ads linked to my articles so I decided to check out other places like HubPages and Suite101.com.

Now just over one year of writing articles on a very part-time basis, (while I cannot say I've made any money to speak of) I can say that Travis was right in one important regard, I have many articles on the front pages of google and other search engines and you can too. Hear are some of the lessons I've learned in my first year of content article writing for the web.

The first thing I learned about article marketing is to find someone who knows how to do it right and follow their advice. Most of the article publishing sites like Hubpages, Squidoo, Ezinearticles and the like have excellent tutorials about how to write an article that others will want to read. They also have active forums within which one can gain all kinds of important tips to increase writing quality and increase traffic. The first person to turn me on to article writing was the guy named Travis of Bummarketing; he is a member of a group called Wealthy Affiliates which is a membership with monthly dues but offers tremendous resources for learning how to write effective articles that will increase your income. I have barely scratched the surface on article marketing but there is no way I would gotten even as far as I have without the guidance of experts.

The second thing I learned about article writing and marketing is that it is possible to have your articles come up on the first page of google, yahoo or bing (microsoft live search). I have had at least half of my articles pop up on the first page of google sometime or another. By following the right techniques your articles can move to the head of the master lists on all of the search engines.

 Quality is important but many people surfing the net have short attention spans; they want your articles to get to the point and hammer out an easy to follow list of tips or how tos. My highest traffic articles are those that delineated the tips or steps upfront and then explained them one by one after that.

The fourth key to bummarketing and article writing is to post your articles with the larger article writing platforms like Hubpages, Ezinearticles, or Goarticles. They are highly developed platforms that know how to do SEO (search engine optimization) and are loved by the larger search engines because the articles written on these platforms drive huge amounts of traffic to the search engine advertisements. You can set up your own website or blog and never be recognized or sign up with Hubpages and gain large blocks of readers and maybe even some extra cash.

Finally just like everything else worthwhile successful article marketing takes concentrated effort. It takes hard work. It is by no means a get rich quick scheme or endeavor. The other day Suite101 announced that one of its writers cleared $5000 in one month. However, it took at least 100,000 page views in that month to make it happen. That's either one irresistable article or 100 articles that were viewed 1,000 times each. That is the perpetual 30 day 100 article challenge ad infinitum.