All professional online marketers knows that Article Marketing is one sure fire way of generating web traffic. With properly written quality content optimized for your keywords will guarantee to attract huge search engine traffic.

Why Article Marketing Is Powerful ?

Submitting these same articles to well-known article directories like EzineArticles.com or GoArticles.com has even more benefits, such as getting traffic from other webmasters who publish your content on their sites, getting back links to help with your SEO efforts and getting click-through in both cases from targeted traffic.

The keyword you have to note here is targeted traffic. Getting traffic is all well and good but only targeted traffic can give you customers. This is why Article Marketing is so powerful.

People who are reading your articles are already interested in you have to say and more importantly are statistically pre-disposed to purchase from you if and when they click through the resource box to your main website.

As such, there are two things you need to keep in mind: your article should be optimized for the search engines whenever possible, and it should be sufficiently engaging to not only capture your target market’s attention, but get them to click over to your site.

What Makes a Good Article…

A Good Headline

A good article starts with a good headline – after all, if the headline doesn’t attract attention, then no one will read the rest of your article. Anything that creates a bit of intrigue or arouses interest can usually pull people in.

If intrigue or creating interest doesn’t work, promising a benefit will help get people to read your article. Needless to say, something that both promises a benefit and arouses curiosity makes for a strong headline. For example, “Get Your Dog to Stop Barking Excessively in Less Than One Week”.

A Good Body of the Article

The body of your article should make good on whatever you promised in the headline. However, be careful – you don’t want to completely solve the reader’s problem in your article, or else she won’t have a reason to click through. Instead, you need to give her enough good, solid information so she trusts you – and then give her a reason to click through to your site.

A Good Resource Box or Author Byline

That reason should be stated in your resource box or author byline. Don’t waste this space talking about you, because the reader doesn’t care. She cares about herself, her problems, and what you can do to solve her problems. That’s it. So use your resource box to place a short advertisement that promises her a big benefit if she clicks through to your site.

For example, perhaps you offer a free related report on your web page. Or perhaps you note that the article is “Part 1” in a series, and that the reader can read “Part 2” by visiting your site. If so, say this …and hammer in the benefits the reader receives if she click through (for example, will the article on your site make her thinner, smarter, more attractive, happier, wealthier, etc?).

Now submit your articles to article directories, especially those that are directly related to your site. If writing isn’t something you can do or enjoy, then outsource this task – it’s well worth the effort, because it’s a marketing strategy that will pay out over and over …sometimes for years!

Author:
David Husnian
The Shameless (but Ethical) Marketer
http://www.FromTheDeskOfDavid.com
David, the creator of the "3 Pillar of (Guaranteed) Success", is a successful marketer who provides a unique perspective on marketing, Web traffic and copywriting topics.
You can get more great information, free products and a free online Web traffic course from http://www.StreetGuideToWebTraffic.com