You've seen the promises, you've visited the blogs and message boards and forums. There is always somebody willing to give you the ultimate answer to building Internet traffic. More often than not you'll find that someone who is suggesting something easy and radical will have an affiliate link in his/her signature.

Let me give you an example of this misdirected guidance. Recently I've been looking for ways to broaden my base of advertising on my web sites, it isn't that I'm unhappy with my current advertisers, but as many people are, I'm always looking to improve my click-through-rate and payment per click. I found a thread on just such a subject on a well respected SEO forum. Almost every poster was gushing about a new ad agency, promising better ads, higher payouts, etc. I bought right into the hype , signed up (earning the person who's link I signed up through a $25 referral fee) and over the first 3 days made a whopping 34 cents.

A little disappointed, I went back to the forum and looked at that thread again. 95% of the posters who were touting this service as the second coming also had links to the referral program in their signature. They say there is a sucker born every minute, on that day I was the sucker. I've been doing this for two years now and for the most part think I'm getting things figured out, but for every good piece of advice there are twenty people trying to sell you a dream.

So, what have I found that works for building Internet traffic. I'll give you a hint, it's something you've heard about before, but something that is tried and true and works. Article Marketing is one of the very few techniques that truly builds traffic and it does it the right way, slowly, consistently and over the long term. I know you are looking for that quick and dirty solution. I know you are thinking maybe if you throw some money at it things will happen. I know you think you're smarter than all the other web masters and your "trick" will work. In the end, you'll likely end up spending a bunch of time and money on something worthless, or worse yet, do something against Google's TOS and end up indexed at page 500.

Get into the right frame of mind and write and article. Make sure your article is easy to read, make sure it is targeted. Realize that your final goal is not just to get your article submitted to the article directories, but to have web masters put your article on their web site. Quality is important, focus is important. Use relevant keywords and please, please check your spelling. A good quality article will pay dividends in two ways, first by the article directory itself and then again when publishers pick up your article and put it on one of their pages.

Let me give you an example of the second link kickback. Last year I wrote a Christmas article about sleigh rides. Okay, honesty time here, my wife wrote the article about sleigh rides. Anyway, I submitted the article to a few article sites and then didn't think about it again. What I did notice was that about two months later I had a big increase in traffic and wondered why. I did a search in Google on my domain name and found that my article was on the front page of a page rank 5 blog. Do you have any idea what a link from a high profile blog like that is worth in traffic? Of course you do, if you didn't you wouldn't be here reading this article.

I don't need to tell you that article marketing is a solid, proven technique for driving traffic to your web site and building up a wealth of quality back links to your site, you already know that. What I do need to do is tell you that it takes time, hard work and patience, but it will pay dividends. Sometimes it takes 4 or 5 months for an article you've written to start paying those dividends, but it will. I see you need another example.

I started an account on a popular article site more than a year ago and started submitting articles. I was recently doing a search and one of my articles on that site came up in the research results and I decided to take a peek, for old times sake. To my surprise the page that my article was on was a page rank 2 page. So page rank 2 isn't a big deal, but the face that I got three links in my article from a page rank 2 site and didn't pay a cent for it is a big deal. So I looked at the rest of my articles on that site, all of the older ones had a similar page rank. Then I looked at some other, older articles. Some of them had a page rank even higher! So, even if your article doesn't get picked up, it's value appreciates over time on the article site, the high page rank that the site enjoys is passed along to the hard working article authors pages.

Start writing articles today. I am being honest with you here, the article you write today will not generate huge traffic for you in 24 hours, but six months from now that article will be generating traffic and improving your search engine rankings. The good news is that the longer your article is out there in the web-sphere, the more it is worth to your web site. As the links pointing back to your site get older, your importance in Google's ranking algorithm gets higher. Article marketing is the one true, proven way to increase traffic to your web site.