Marketing with articles when working online can produce some terrific results provided your efforts are properly focused! Writing articles to generate traffic involves more than simply getting as many published articles as you can circulating online. You will want to 'channel' your efforts in a way that will best maximize the return you get with any of your published articles.

Here are 3 recommended steps every author should take when writing articles to generate traffic online.

Put Away the Shotgun

The shotgun approach advocated by many is a waste of your time. Writing articles and 'blindly' submitting them takes up quite a bit of time and ironically does not boost your results accordingly. Before submitting any content online it is always wise to first locate those sites that focus on the same theme or topic you have written about. You want to get your published articles in front of as much traffic as possible, therefore it only makes sense to submit your work to sites where people will search for such information! In this way you are putting away the shotgun, and pulling out the rifle!

Simply conduct a search for any content similar to what you have written about and make note of the sites that show up the most often in the results.

Optimize

Being a great writer is one thing but to have your content found online you need to correctly choose and use relevant keywords. Failure to do so will likely 'banish' your work forever to the dark recesses of the internet! Remember the simple search we conducted above to locate the best sites to submit our content to? Well those results where based upon reviewing ONLY the content that was properly optimized with keywords otherwise search engines will not identify or recognized it! If you intend to generate traffic with any content you have authored, they must be properly optimized to give you the best results!

Deliver the 'Goods'

Any content you submit online needs to be informative or useful in some way or people will not spend much time viewing what you wrote! You also want to avoid blatant promotions of either yourself or any products because people really do not care about anything other then how they can benefit. Deliver something worth reading and let your resource box generate traffic to your business site. Remember if your content is not up to snuff, most viewers will never even reach your resource box! In this case your article therefore serves little or no purpose to you or anyone else!

Marketing with articles is a great way to not only generate traffic but also develop a positive reputation and build credibility as well! To achieve these results when writing articles however there are a few 'measures' as discussed above you will want to take to increase the return on your efforts. Your objective should be to get as many published articles as you can in front of your 'intended' audience. Failure to follow the above suggestions will likely result in your growing frustrations with the anemic results your writing efforts will yield!