All online business owners want to attract as many targeted visitors to their websites as possible. Their favourite kind of visitors are the free ones and the best source of free targeted website traffic is article marketing. The concept is simple: you write an article, it gets distributed in ezines and posted on other people's websites where potential customers will read it and click through on a link to visit your website.

The articles you write will also be used as additional content for your own website, and this is valuable for SEO purposes as well as for attracting visitors. Your articles are more than just reading matter for visitors, though; you could think of article pages as mini-sales pages.

When you are adding content to your website, look at each page you complete as if you are a visitor entering the site for the first time via that page. Is there an obvious way for the visitor to find the home page, site map, contact details etc? You might think it is easy enough to scroll to the bottom of the page and squint a bit to see the small text hiding against a camouflaging background, but then you knew it was there all along, your visitors won't see it because they won't go looking for it.

It is a big mistake to expect visitors to hunt around for links; they won't bother to work that hard when it is easy to hit their "back" button and find a more easily navigable website. Make sure your links are placed where visitors can see them easily. It is best to make the links obvious by having a contrasting background to make them easy to read. You can have all kinds of fancy roll-over effects for links but these are not essential. The best way to deal with links is to have them underlined because everybody is accustomed to underlining indicating a link.

At the very least, you should have a link to the home page but you can also induce visitors to explore by having a link to your site map or a "you might also be interested in..." menu and facilitate return visits by providing an automatic bookmark button.

Your article pages will earn you some additional income if you include some text advertisements such as Adsense and a search box at the end of the page.

Another great way to make money from your online article pages is to embed your affiliate links into the body of the article. This maximises the sales page aspect of your article page but means some extra time and effort to set up and maintain. Links embedded in articles offer a natural-looking way to introduce your long term affiliate programs to visitors. To avoid having dead links (which will create a bad impression with visitors) it is safest to use this sort of contextual linking only for affiliate products that won't need continual updating.

The system provided by Amazon offers an easy way to get contextual advertising links into your articles. All this requires is for you to copy and paste a small script into the foot of your web page. The system is designed to pick out keywords or key phrases and make links to relevant products.

Your website visitors will reach your website by way of any page, so make sure they can find their way around your website or make a purchase from any page.