Hopefully I will be able to clear up some of the confusion here. To be successful with your article marketing you first need to understand that it is basically a numbers game. You must write enough articles to maximize the chance of getting some of them picked up by other websites and actually read by the end consumer.

The easiest way to do this is to write your articles as a series.
I am going to assume here that you have already chosen a topic or niche that you are targeting. However what I want you to do is break your topic down into as many sub-topics as possible. This is because we want to make each article we write in the series as narrowly focused as possible. After you have broken your broad topic down into sub-topics you should organize them from first to last. Each sub-topic is going to become one article. The reason you organize them from first to last is so that each article will build upon the last – kind of like articles in a book.

Okay, now you have all your article topics and have them organized into a logical order. The next step is to do some keyword research to find the best keywords to use in your articles. Although there are some excellent paid tools that really simplify keyword research, Google's keyword tool is good enough for most people: As much as possible look for keywords that have as little competition as possible, but still receive a decent amount of searches.

At this point we have all of our article topics, we have them organized into a logical order, and we have determined a good keyword to use for each article. Now it is time to start writing.

Good articles have one thing in common: They are highly focused. By dividing up the broad topic you want to talk about into sub-topics you have already began the process of making your articles highly focused. Highly focused articles perform better in the search engines, drive highly targeted traffic to your sites, and are more likely to be carried by content publishers.

To actually begin writing your articles you should make an outline for each one. The outline should follow this pattern:

Title (i.e. the article's topic)
Main Idea 1
>Sub-Idea 1, 2, 3
Main Idea 2
>Sub-Idea 1, 2, 3
Main Idea 3
>Sub-Idea 1, 2, 3
Final Thoughts (If necessary)

After you have outlined each article it is time to fill them out with actual writing. After taking the time to make these outlines you will find that actually writing the articles is the easy part. As far as length goes try to keep the length between 500 – 1000 words. Any shorter and a lot of article directories will not accept them, any longer and a lot of readers will not make it to the end of the article.