Okay, here's the skinny ? Article marketing just plain, flat-out works if you're looking to drive traffic to your site. Although, I suggest if you're looking to win the hearts of those publishing and reading your articles ? you better know what you're talking about in your article. Don't go off all half-cocked about something because you want to promote your product, or a hot affiliate product!

By all means promote your product on your site if that's what your site is about, but give people some objective advice, educate them, make them feel warm-and-fuzzy inside about YOU ? not your product. If they like you, and your product fills their need, want or desire, they'll buy it. How do you do this? Earn their trust. Build a relationship with your prospect by simply providing some great information for webmaster content and reader eyes.

Have you used your product? If so, include your experience in the article, and even give one or two other choices, maybe those of a lesser commission or quality. Don't lie ? tell'em like it is! Okay, to avoid this article becoming all about affiliate marketing, I'll change gears here. Let's talk about article marketing results.

Here's your quick job-aid to determine whether or not article marketing is working for you. Don't judge your article marketing results by your sales, or newsletter sign-ups, etc. Judge it by your hit counter. Why? Because, you may have a lousy product, or an unattractive website, maybe your price point is all wrong, maybe your product isn't in demand. Those are other great discussion topics as well. Maybe I'll submit some more on those later.

But, for the mean time, simply, look at your website stats, as well as view your trends for the last couple to three months. Note what you see, then submit your articles to several online article directories. Why? Because, of link popularity. You want to build your link popularity over as many relevant and targeted sites as you possibly can. These are incoming money? I mean links!

Don't rule out the new directories either ? If you find them, submit to them! With new software and scripts being developed and released everyday, those new directories will become huge-old directories in the very near future. So, submit to as many directories as possible. After you submit your articles, you can expect some huge results in the next few days. Unlike the search engines, it only takes a few days; because, some sites have to review your article(s) before posting them. After waiting for a few days ? check your website stats again. See any change? Yeah, I thought so! And ? that's The Article Marketing Truth!