One of the most powerful yet simple methods to grab targeted traffic to your web site is definitely article marketing.

Article marketing can be divided into 2 sections, namely article writing and article submission.

Simply put, all it takes is your time and effort to create the article, proof read it and then submit it to the relevant article directories.

Let’s first kick thing off with article writing. If you love to write, then writing articles should be a fun and relaxing way to promote your online business.

Articles like the one you are reading has many benefits and serves many purposes as well.

(1) Articles help build trust & credibility between your online business and potential customers.

If you ask me, I am a strong believer of the saying “If they don’t know you, they will not buy from you”.

Article writing increases the awareness of the written topic and establishes you as an “Expert” on the subject.

By doing so, you are actually promoting yourself or your online business, something which I commonly refer to as self-branding.

(2) Articles help build one way links leading back to your website.

Normally, webmasters from other websites can syndicate your articles and use it as content on their own websites, more commonly known as RSS (Really Simple Syndication).

In return for allowing these webmasters for publishing your article, the article must include the original author’s bio box containing a link back to your own website.

Anyway, as you create more articles and more websites keep publishing them online, gradually the total number of back links to your own website will subsequently increase.

Remember, search engines place high importance on incoming links to your website. This is their way of determining how relevant your website is and the more relevant your website becomes, the higher rankings it will get in the search engine results.

Unfortunately, some unscrupulous webmasters do rip off your article without leaving the author’s link intact,  and if you are one of them, you should be ashamed of yourself.

(3) Articles can act as a warm lead / sales generator.

Beside checking emails, most people go online to look for information. Chances are, there are many people actually looking for the information you are writing about and the allowable link within the author resources box or bio box is often intimately related to the content of the written article.

By doing so, most folks who have read the article are more likely to buy whatever you are promoting after they are “warmed up” to the idea. This is commonly referred to as “pre-selling”.

Pre selling tends to increase the probability of your potential customers making that vital sale once they visit your website.

Unfortunately, there’s 2 sides of a coin to article marketing, and with article writing out of the way, here comes the boring part, namely article submission.

Like they say, it takes 2 hands to clap, although article submission is boring and tedious, it is still an essential part of article marketing.

So how do we go about it then?

Well, if you are a full time internet marketer or have heaps of free time on your hands, what i recommend is to first churn out at least 90 articles, perhaps 3 articles a day, then submitting it to at the top 3 article directories of your niche everyday for a month.

Let me assure you that this is a very powerful method of getting sales conversions.

You must be wondering now, which are the popular article directories to submit to then? There must be hundreds, even thousands of directories out there!

For starters, you can take down the address of this article directory. Hey I submitted my article here so it must have worked right!

If you do not have time to manually submit your articles to the various article directories, there are many software out there that can instantly submit your articles to hundreds of directory saving you the hassle of doing it yourself if you find it too tedious but do take note of the different guidelines for submission.

Otherwise, simply just submit your articles to the major article directories and these include the following :

(1) Ezine Articles

(5) Article Dashboard

In my book, article marketing is often regarded to be a form of viral marketing, meaning that the popularity of your article has the potential to grow as more and more people become aware of it.

It is a great and free way to get high quality traffic back to your online business or website.

However, when using article marketing, you must understand that the propagation of the article takes time and the pay off might not be immediate.

But if the article written is well written and received, rest assured that it will result in an increase in website traffic and subsequently increased sales opportunities.