Writing and submitting articles to article banks has been proven to be one of the most effective of all traffic generating techniques. You may not actually generate any real traffic for your website in the next few days by learning to write and submit articles but this technique will serve you very well and it is worth the effort to learn how to do it and use it to your fullest advantage. You may think that you have no writing ability at all but you are probably wrong. You might not be ready to write the Great American Novel but you can write articles about the topic of your website and about the products that you are selling. You just need to know the rules for making them effective. The first and most important few words of your article are in the title or the headline. The title MUST contain the key words that relate to the topic of your website and to the products that you sell. This is the first thing that other website owners or E-zine publishers will look at when they are deciding whether to reproduce your article on their websites or in the publications because they know that the key words are what search engines use to determine the results of searches.

* Note: Search engines are used by people looking for information or products on the internet. They type "key words" in the search box and click submit. An example might be "planting tomatoes" or "growing tomatoes". What the search engine returns is based on whatever key words were entered into the search box.

Your article title or headline MUST grab the reader's attention. Simply using a title of "Making Money" probably won't do. The title must grab the reader by the throat and not let him go. It must make the reader want to keep reading. "Making Money Online"... well, not very good either. How about "Making Money Online in Your Houseshoes" or "Making a Bundle Online Before Breakfast". Something to capture the reader's attention if they are interested in making money on the internet.

The next most important words are in the first line of the first paragraph of your articls. People surfing the internet today have terribly short attention span and mostly skim for information unless it is information that they think is going to solve a problem, make life better for them or serve a need. As you can see, the title and first line are bait and hook used to encourage a reader to continue on and read to the end of the article. Again, the first line must contain the key words and grab attention. "The women were hanging all over my car looking at all the neat gadgets I had". If you were looking for attention from women, you would keep reading.

The article banks want short articles. Brief, in fact! The longest an article should be is 400 words but closer to 300 is better. You can get carried away and end up with an article that is 1000 words or more when discussing a subject in which you are interested and know a lot about. If you wind up with a long wordy article just break it down into three or four short articles.

Use short sentences and short paragraphs. Remember that short attention span that we talked about? Dont use big words and dont use run-on sentences. Make your article easy to read.

Go easy on the exclamation points, as well. One exclamation point indicates importance or excitement... a half a dozen are just rude.

Your resource box at the end of the article is the part that is most important to you. Other website owners or E-zine publishers who download and reproduce your article are required to include your resource box. This box needs to contain your full name, your contact information and, most importantly, a link to your website. That link is the little thing that is going to help increase traffic for you.

Warning! Do NOT word-wrap this link! Type it out in full, http://www.whatever.com. All email programs that E-zine editors use to send out their newsletters and E-zines do not support word-wrapped links so you can defeat your own purpose by word-wrapping the link to your website.

Submitting Articles: Once you have found article banks and article repositories on the Internet by simple doing a search using your favorite search engine it is time to submit your articles. Every site has their own guidelines for accepting articles which you must follow or risk rejection.

Software is available for use in automatically submitting articles to the article repositories and banks. The problem here is that most of the larger, more effective repositories and banks will not publish automated submissions. So even though this software can save time when submitting to smaller sites, this doesn't help much with the bigger more well known sites.

Yes, submitting articles is time consuming and tedious (not to mention boring) work but it is work that can provide your site with a lot of targeted traffic. Each person who reads an article that you have written will also be exposed to the link to your site. If the article is good and if it provides good information, these people will visit your site. They may buy what you are selling or they may opt-in to your mailing list... or maybe they will do both. By the way, there are services that will do article submissions for you. Of course this is a paid service.

One solution I use is Unique Article Wizard. UAW can submit unique articles to hundreds of article banks at the click of a mouse. Spend one to two hours setting up your article, click Submit and sit back and watch the traffic build to your site.