Article marketing is a great method to drive traffic to your web site or blog. A good article can send hundreds or thousands of very targeted visitors to your site. But did you know that there are methods to supercharge your article marketing efforts so that you get the most out of each article that you write? I am about to reveal those methods to you, so that you will get many more readers for each article, with less effort.

Here's how you do it. When you sign up for an article marketing site, you will find that there are a number of categories for your articles, and each category has sub-categories. Each article marketing site will have its own specific list of categories. There are categories on women's issues on some sites, for instance, and under that category are many sub-categories on romance, dating, weddings, cooking, succeeding in business, crafts, parenting, beauty, fitness, health, sewing, friendship...the list goes on and on.

When you get ready to write your articles, you will need to figure out which category they will go in on this particular article marketing site. When you do that, you want to go look at other articles and check out what has been written about before. This has several benefits. One benefit is that it will give you ideas for your own articles.

Now, you are not stealing or plagiarizing; you are getting inspired. There are a limited number of subjects that you can write about for any niche; there is nothing wrong with seeing what other people are doing in your niche, as long as you write your own unique article about that topic. But even more importantly, you can see what articles are the most popular in your chosen niche.

There will be dozens or hundreds of articles in the category that you look at. What you want to do is look at which ones have the most page views. Most article directories will say how many times a particular article has been viewed in the last 90 days, or for all time. At the very least the article directory will tell you which articles are the most popular in their category.

You want to study the top 5 or 10 articles in your niche. What headline did they use? How did it pique reader's curiosity and make them want to read more? How could you write a similar headline without copying word for word? Then read the article. How long is it? What tone did the author take? What did the author say in their resource box that might have piqued the reader's curiosity and encouraged them to visit the writer's web site?

And it is not a bad idea to visit the author's web site and check it out. They are your competition; you need to see what they are doing and if you can improve on it, or offer different advice or additional services on your own web site. By checking out the competition you will get a good idea of ways to improve and supercharge your own article marketing efforts. It always pays to emulate success.