Every business owner with a web presence and good sense wants to drive traffic to their website. After all, more traffic will mean more sales, and more sales means more profits. There are many ways to drive traffic to your site. Some are better than others, and some are great, but are just too expensive. As well, not all traffic is of equal value. Just because you get hundreds of visitors to your site, doesn't mean that they will necessarily be converted to customers.

The most important traffic to your site is targeted traffic. These are the people who are actively searching the web for information relating to your product or service. There are various ways to attract this traffic. Optimizing your website for keywords that your target market is searching for is one way. But it can take months for the search engines to pick you up, and it's often difficult to get good rankings for popular keywords. Another method to get targeted traffic is using pay-per-click campaigns. If you know how to use pay-per-click properly, you can gain traffic almost immediately. The downside is, it could be costly. So how do you gain the type of traffic that wants what you have to sell, without having to compete for search engine rankings or spend money? The answer is article marketing.

When you use articles as a means to market your business, you are positioning yourself as an expert in your field. The individuals who read your article are people who have either searched for one of your article keywords, or are looking for articles to publish in their ezine or newsletter that may go out to a large number of people in your target market. After reading your expert advice, these individuals will decide whether they want to hear more, and if they do, they will likely click on the link in your resource box leading to your website. This is not just targeted traffic; it's highly targeted traffic. If an individual has clicked on your link, they have found value in what you had to say in your article, and want to learn more. This type of traffic is much more likely to buy from you than the less targeted kind.

Your business is your area of expertise. Share some of that expertise and permit your target market to see that you are knowledgeable in your field. Be sure to spell check your work and watch for words that are frequently misused that won't be picked up by your spell checker, i.e. "than" versus "then", "their" versus "there" etc. Have someone proofread your article. When you proofread your own writing, often the mistakes get overlooked because the material is not fresh to you. Get a trusted friend or colleague to check for errors and ask them for feedback on the article. This will only make it better. Next, perform a search for "free article submissions". Select both the most popular sites and the ones that your target audience is most likely to frequent. As they say, "practice makes perfect"; the more articles you write, the better you will get and the more easily the words will flow.

If writing really isn't your cup of tea, or, if you simply don't have the time to write articles, you might want to consider outsourcing this task. The highly targeted traffic that results from a well-written article containing fresh, useful information is too valuable for you to pass up. Contracting this work to a professional Ghostwriter, or a Virtual Assistant that offers this service, shouldn't cost you as much as running a pay-per-click campaign. The articles will look like they came from you, because your name will appear in the resource box, and you own the rights to the article because it was paid for by you, so you can use it, and reuse it as you see fit.

The benefits of article marketing are too great too ignore. If you are not article marketing, you are missing out on one of the most effective and inexpensive ways to drive highly targeted traffic to your website.