Writing ezine articles and submitting them to article directories is without doubt one of the most effective free methods of getting traffic to your website. Writing your own articles also means you can easily add content to your website so as to entertain human visitors and to attract the search engine robots. If your human visitors enjoy what they read, they are quite likely to make return visits. If the search engine bots find interesting content, they will award you a place in the organic search results.

There is a further way in which posting your articles on your website can help increase your profits: your article pages can be used as additional sales pages, but I see many new webmasters missing out on this opportunity to earn some extra cash. They put in the effort to write original ezine articles, they submit the articles to directories, they offer the articles to webmasters of high ranking websites and they post the articles on their own websites. All that is fine except that what may of them do is just post the article on a blank page, and this is where they are missing out on a money making opportunity.

Novice webmasters tend to think of their website in terms of a magazine where the home page is the index and the article pages are, well, article pages. They assume that their visitors will all land on their index page and that some of them will venture further to read articles if they see something of interest listed in the index. Although visitors often do follow that path, many visitors will land directly on an article page through finding it in a search result.

If a visitor's first experience of your website comes via an article page, what do they see? If your answer to that is "just an article", it's time to rethink your article marketing strategy. This is where webmasters can learn from magazine publishers. What do magazines have on their pages in addition to articles? One word answer: advertisements. Having successfully attracted visitors to your website, you should be giving them more to do than just reading an interesting article.

Some visitors will arrive at your article page by accident when they are intent on making a purchase rather than reading up on a topic. You need to give these visitors some options otherwise they will leave your website immediately. Have some advertisements to help them towards finding what they really want. If you write an article about the newest gadget on the market, have your affiliate link prominently displayed in text and/or banner form as well as embedding it in the article text. In short, do everything you can think of to make it easy for your visitors to indulge their desire to make a purchase without them leaving your website.

I have visited websites by entering through an article page where there is no clue as to what products the website might be promoting and no obvious way of finding the home page. That is fine for any visitor who just wants to read an article but it does nothing to help the webmaster's sales.

If you are handed a magazine folded open to an article, it is an easy matter to flip to the front page, but it's not that easy when a search engine hands you a website open to an internal page. Make sure every page on your website has a virtual welcome mat for visitors and some help to find their way around.