You’re dead in the water if you don’t have traffic coming to your web site. It’s as simple as that.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re trying to sell a product of your own, or whether you’re promoting a product as an affiliate — if you don’t have enough traffic you’re not going to make any sales.

While there are many ways to generate traffic, one of the easiest ways to do so is often overlooked. (Just a note: probably the easiest way to get traffic, PPC (pay-per-click), can also be one of the most expensive — we’re not going to talk about that in this article).

Article marketing has seen a resurgence lately but it’s not a “Johnny-come lately” — smart marketers have been using articles as a way to drive traffic since before there was an internet.

Yes, we may look at techniques such as using articles to get free traffic as an “internet idea” but it’s been in play for decades. What we in the electronic age gain is the ability to distribute our articles in a way the “marketing forefathers” couldn’t even imagine.

In a nutshell, article marketing is when you write (or have written) an article that includes a link back to your web site. That article is then typically distributed to article directories and  people who are looking for content for their web sites, ezines, blogs, etc., are allowed to use your article.

Of course, they’re not allowed to remove the link to your web site, so if someone with a large following publishes your article you could see a wave of new visitors!

And one of the coolest things about article marketing is that an article doesn’t just work one time — once you’ve made it available for publication, many different web sites and ezine can publish it — and that can happen over and over again, for months. A friend of mine recently related a story where he still gets traffic more than five years after writing an article.

One thing to know about article marketing is that newer articles will tend to bring more traffic to your web site, and there’s typically a short lag time between writing an article and gaining any traffic from it. (It can be almost immediate, but don’t count on that.)

Instead, look at article marketing as a long term strategy. Start writing at least one article per week on your specific niche or topic. Submit those articles but don’t wait for traffic to start coming in before writing the next one. Instead, always have new articles moving into the pipeline.

Once the traffic starts coming in you’ll have several more articles that will cause the traffic to swell, and with a steady supply of new articles you can keep the traffic coming in without worrying about it dying out.

Probably the biggest advantage to using article marketing (besides that fact that it gives you web traffic at no cost!) is that the traffic that comes to your site is ultra-targeted! The people just read an article about your topic and the reason they’re clicking through to your site is because they want MORE information!

If you haven’t tried article marketing in your business you’re missing out on one of the easiest (and cheapest) ways to get traffic to your web site — and more traffic means more signups and more sales for your internet marketing business!
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Jay Jennings is the author of Article Architect, software that helps you write, submit, and organize all of your article marketing efforts. To see how Article Architect can help you drive more traffic to your site, see the site at http://budurl.com/amarketing