Article marketing isn’t like PPC promotion where you set a bid, create an ad, and have traffic rolling in to your site. Article marketing is a time intensive operation that requires a lot of work over the long haul to pay out.

I have friends who claim to do article marketing, but most of them are not willing to invest the time to do it right. They put up a site and submit a couple articles to directories–and then hope and pray that those articles generate some traffic to their site. It will, but not much.

Now, I’m not talking about writing 2-3 articles to get some link juice to a pre-sell page for an affiliate product you are promoting–I am talking about writing many dozens, many hundreds, or yes–many thousands of articles related to the topic of your niche.

A single article submitted to GoTo Articles or eZineArticles may generate from a handful to many hundred reads in a year’s time. And only a small percent of those reads will result in an URL click in your resource box at the end.

Serious article marketers write a minimum of a dozen articles a day for months to generate traffic to one single site! My buddy, Sean Mize, has over 13,000 article to his name listed in eZineArticles. He has written the majority himself, but hires out the writing of a lot each month–because it works!

Article marketing isn’t a quick fix to your traffic dilemma. But if you are dedicated and persistent, over a few months time you can see a huge influx of traffic to your site from your articles.

My own articles generally run about 400 words. I use several different accounts and names for articles targeting specific sites I want to promote. Over the past year, my record has been 42 articles in one single day–that’s a lot and I can’t do that every day–but I can easily crank out a dozen a day in about an hour and a half.

Now, when promoting an affiliate product from a pre-sell page, I generally crank out about 6-8 articles to get some link juice to my page and a little free traffic. But when I have a new site coming out, I will try to get at least 50 articles working right off the bat and I have one site out there with over 400 articles pointing to it.

But here is one key point: If you are using eZIneArticles. People tend to think that their article itself is the key point–and the quality of your article is important–but there are other very important keys.

Be careful on selecting the category you submit your article to. A lot of bloggers search by category for content. After you have written a couple dozen articles, check the number of URL clicks and the categories they are in. Submit your articles to the categories that give you the most hits.

Your title is all important! Your title alone often determines whether someone will click on it or not. Make it provocative and eye catching. You also have the opportunity to write an intro to your article which will be displayed. Your intro can also determine whether someone opens the entire article as well.

One final thing. Rather than just providing a link in your resource box, use some anchor text that is descriptive. It is better to see a link that says “Grow Your Mailing List” rather than “http://www.mailinglistsecrets.com/page24.html”. Links like that look ugly. Anchor your link to keywords relevant to your niche.