You must submit articles to make the best use of article marketing. Writing articles is an essential part of article marketing, and by writing and submitting articles to article directories, you can make money by driving a targeted audience to your website or blog. There are things you can learn that will enable you to make the best use of article writing to achieve that, much of it in the way that you design your resource.

More on that later: first I want to summarize the importance of website traffic and how article submissions and marketing can be used to get that.

If you know how to get traffic to a website, you are a large part of the way to towards making a success of internet marketing. Article marketing is a very large part of this, and if you combine article submission with good search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, then you should not find it difficult to make money online.

Let's break down a typical online business into its component parts. Various businesses are based upon different models, but they all have several components in common.

1. A Product.

The product might be your own or an affiliate product. It doesn't matter. It might be a physical product that has to be replaced when sold, or electronically deliverable such as software or an ebook. While the latter is easier to deliver than a physical product, again it doesn't matter since it still has to be promoted and you still need customers.

2. A Platform for Promotion

This might be a website (yours or somebody else's), a blog or simply an online advert. For best results you should use either a website or a blog. The website could be a traditional website, with several pages, a Squidoo lens or a social networking site such as Facebook or YouTube that you are using to promote your product. Each of these can be promoted through article submission.

3. Advertising

There are many methods of advertising online. Article marketing is the one I prefer best, and article submission is by far the best way to use them. If you submit articles to article directories and ezines you are not only exposing your product to a very wide audience, but to one that is interested in what you have to offer. Were they not, then they would not read your article.

Used properly, article directories can be the source of a massive amount of traffic to your site. Once you get your readers there, you have to use them properly and persuade them that your product can solve their problems. The quality of your article is very important, and while I could show how to write a good quality article, I will focus on the 'author's resource' because that is what ultimately gets the click to your web page.

The Ideal Resource

So what is the ideal resource to write in order that you maximize the clicks to your site? In spite of what some self-proclaimed 'experts' will tell you, and try to charge you for, there is none. There is no ideal resource, because each will vary according to your product and to your readership. However, there are some aspects of a good resource that can allow you to submit articles with a good expectation of your article writing offering you some positive return for your efforts.

First, use your resource as an advert. Most people will tell you to not to, but they are wrong. Once somebody has read your article, they want to know how to take advantage of what you have written. If they think you have a product, they want to see what it is. If your article is offering a solution to a problem, they want to know what that solution is. So balls to not advertising: that is what your readers want. They want an answer.

They don't have to purchase your product, but they might consider it if you give them a link to it. If you don't then they won't see it, so what's the point of your article? If it is just to give free information, I can do that better from my website. I can offer my readers a course in SEO or article marketing, article writing or whatever they want, in addition to a free gift that that will offer a lot more free information than they will learn from one article.

So if you submit articles to promote your product, make sure that you write well and that you advertise yourself in your resource. The way to do that is how I do it - in my resource below! (Or above, wherever the directory places it after I submit my article!). Article marketing works if you know what your customers want.