Article marketing, also often called bum marketing, is one of the greatest ways to drive free traffic to your site. It is as well a good source of quality backlinks, which are very important for search engine optimization.

Many people who are new to the whole internet marketing stuff often get overwhelmed when it comes to creating and managing their articles. Moreover, some of them believe that simply submitting a random article to an article directory will do them good. But in order to make your articles profitable, you need to do some particular things. In my opinion, article marketing is the best way to market online, and if you wish to make it full-time, besides being consistent, you need to follow several principles.

First of all, before writing an article, do the research on your keywords. What keywords do you want your article to be ranked for? For starters, you can use a free Google Keyword Tool to find the main keyword or keyword phrase for your promoted site. Optimize your article for that keyword but don't use it more than 2% of the time, e.i. if your article is 400 words long, your keyword or keyword phrase should appear 5-7 times.

Next, make sure that your article resource box is filled out correctly. In most cases this is the only way that you get people click through to your money site. When creating your resource box, you will want to include both a text version and an HTML version of your link. In a text version, you can simply type your link just as it looks. When creating your HTML version, you will need anchor text. This is the text that kind of hides and describes your link. Be sure to include your keyword or keyword phrase into your anchor text. Keep in mind that most article directories will only accept up to three links in your resource box, and your HTML resource box can only be up to 500 characters. Choose the information you include in your resource box wisely.

And, last but not least, do not submit your articles to directories that don't have some sort of Google juice or it will be a waste of your time. Directories like EzineArticles and GoArticles are excellent places to start. As for other article directories, I would not bother to submit my articles to sites with a page rank less than 3.

In case you are not a very good writer or it takes you over an hour to write an article, you may want to consider outsourcing your article marketing campaigns to speed up the process and to make your articles sound professional.