Whether you are marketing a product or a service, you need to get visitors to your website. Then you realize that the likelihood of making a sale is directly related to the number of visitors to your website. What should you do? Viral marketing applies to e-books which can be too lengthy to write. Link exchanging is helpful, but link farms are to be avoided. Google doesn't like your website for some strange reason. What is a website owner suppose to do?

Article marketing. I am going to tell you all about article marketing. It's the fastest way of exposing your website to more people and getting the type of targeted traffic that really matters.

Article marketing involves the submitting of an article to as many free article directory websites as possible. Search engines love free article directory websites. And best of all, you are allowed a resource box at the end of your article where you could prominently display your name as well as three links to your website. This would certainly generate some traffic to your website!

The trick is in writing an article that people would love to read and to subtly market yourself, product, or a service that you offer through the article. Do consider the following article writing tips in planning your article marketing campaign:

1. Write the article well. By this, I mean that you should write the article in a proven style that has been established in article marketing. Web readers are usually more impatient. In the article keep the paragraphs short, the tone conversational, and the style friendly. Avoid using jargons in the article that average people wouldn't recognize. But make sure that the article is grammatically sound, flows well, spelled right, and is factually correct.

2. Write the article with focus. Pinpoint a subject you want to discuss. The subject of the article should be moderately related to your product, service, or website, as the point here is to generate traffic to your website. Stick with that topic.

3. If you do not have the time to write the article, you could hire a ghostwriter to write the article for you. Fees for a 300-600 word article range from $5 to $50, but the money should not be a factor if you find a ghostwriter who is perfect for the article. Additionally, the very nature of a ghostwriting service is confidentiality, so choose one whom you could trust for the article.

4. The article should be informative. Article marketing should not be a direct sales pitch, or at the very least, a blatant one. Readers don't like ads posing as articles. The purpose of article marketing is to provide the readers with something useful, something that they would want to read.

5. Strategically place within the article keywords that are relevant to your website as well as the subject of the article. Search engines love article directory websites, and more often than not, each page is indexed separately. Making the article keyword-rich would invite those search engine spiders like crazy!

6. Format the article resource box. What is needed is a short introduction of yourself. One or two lines is perfect. Don't go into great detail. Make it relate to your website and the article contents. Add links to different pages on your website. Most article directory websites will allow up to three links to your website.

7. Invite your readers to distribute the article by allowing them to republish the article on their website, to e-mail it to their friends, or to use it in their newsletters, provided that the article and resource box are kept intact.

8. Assemble a list of all the free article directory websites that you can find to submit to. Know the editorial requirements for each website, and if the article will suit them. Submit the article to as many article directory websites as possible.

9. Now don't stop writing articles! Write or commission more articles and repeat the entire process. It's still a numbers game. The more articles you have distributed, the more chances you will have of being read by a lot of people, and the more unique links back to your website you will have.

10. Practice patience. Writing articles can be difficult, but once your article is posted on multiple websites, more visitors will come. Give it time. The viral nature of article marketing will soon prove itself!

So you see why article marketing is so important. It's one of the easiest and cheapest ways to get more visitors to your website. Article marketing also improves your website rankings with the search engines by having more unique links back to your website.