What you need to take advantage of the opportunities in article marketing is either some basic writing skills or the resources to hire someone who has those skills. Then what you need to do is write useful articles related to your websites niche. As an example, if you have a website that deals with antique automobiles you might want to write articles on the topic of auto restoration. Generally you will want to keep your articles in the range of 400 to 600 words.

Prior to writing your articles you should determine the keywords you are targeting and use those in the article itself. That way the search engines can pick up on them and their relevance to your website. Try to place those important keywords within the first and last paragraphs of the article you are writing. By writing in this manner you will gain the interest of surfers interested in your niche and that of publishers and webmasters also.

The part of the article that allows you to gain a backlinks to your website is known as the resource box. This is an area at the end of the article that allows you to tell a little about yourself or your website with a link. You generally want to keep this to a three to five line blurb with one line about yourself and one or two about your website. That should cover it and get them interested enough to click through the link.

You might be wondering how this will assist you in getting traffic to your site. One way is by allowing other websites to use this content for republishing on their sites with resource box and all. Whenever someone uses that article to build content on their own site it will give you one more link and free online exposure which is how article marketing works.

To really leverage your article marketing efforts you should submit your article to the major article directories such as Ezine. These larger article directories get traffic from webmasters looking for content to use on their sites and will allow your article maximum exposure. Whenever someone uses an article from one of these article directories part of the terms of use is keeping the resource box intact. As your article is used in the future it will continue to build backlinks to your website for years to come

If you are thinking of using article marketing in a more specialized niche you can offer exclusive articles to a few websites for publication while including a link back to your website. Make sure to mention that the offer is unique and you will probably get a high acceptance rate.

By using these article marketing techniques in conjunction with web directory submissions you can gain additional exposure and traffic to your website.