Article marketing is a common traffic strategy most blogger used. Basically, it's about writing an article and submit it to article directories. When people read your article and click on the link to your blog, you get traffic! However, this traffic strategy looks like a lot of work needed. Some bloggers need hours to write an article and submit to the article directories.

So, is it worth the effort and time?

Yes, it does. Article marketing are not just another traffic strategy for bloggers. It provides the following bonus benefits to blogger:

1.Contents for blog. After writing an article, you can rewrite it in a conversational style for your blog. Contents are very valuable. Instead of creating content for traffic, edit a bit and you'll provide values to your blog readers as well.

2.Search engine optimization (SEO). Most of you might already know that blogs have extra advantages when it comes to ranking in the search engines. Google love blogs because it provides lots of fresh content to its users. With article marketing, you can easily create lots of high quality one-way backlinks too. SEO is a good source for automated traffic.

3.Passive traffic 'streams'. Most bloggers don't know that article marketing could be used to get passive traffic over a long time. When you submit your articles to popular article directories, your article will not viewed by others only on the day it is published. Even your articles are few months old, people could search your articles from the search engines. If you have submitted 100 articles, you might be getting traffic everyday on autopilot.

And the best thing to know is that you don't need hours to come out with an article. It might probably take you 30 minutes. And I know there're some professional article marketers who are only spending 7 minutes per article. Let's start with getting it done in 30 minutes first.

1. Understanding

The first step is to understand who are the visitors and what they want to read first. "What kind of visitors would you want to have at your blog?", "What are they interested to know and read?" These are very important information before you start writing. With these information, you could easily attract the visitors you want. You could also create compelling titles and pull out content easily.

2. Writing

After knowing what your targeted visitors want to read, pick one of it. Create a compelling title with words such as "How to", "Secrets" or "Tips". Type "Opening", "Point 1", "Point 2" until "Point X" and "Closing" at different paragraphs in your writing software. Lastly, write the an opening that is a summary of the whole article without the points. Write the points and explain it with more sentences or with examples. Remember to finish your closing by calling them into action.

3. Submitting

Submit it to the top article directories which is EzineArticles.com. You might heard of article auto submission services and software and you heard that it can submit to hundreds of article directories. If you are interested in getting traffic for long term, I believe it is enough for just one of it. If you are just interested in to build hundreds of backlinks for SEO, using those service is a good option.

If you use this method and continue improving your skill for months, you'll be getting lots of traffic for your blog and able to create more articles in a shorter period of time. To improve your traffic from articles, always track how much traffic you are getting from each articles. EzineArticles.com do provide you such information for each of their authors. Remember, never forget to read more about writing better articles.