There are numerous ways to promote your website, some bad, some good.

You have the free search engines, the holy grail of marketing to say the least. Followed up by PPC search engine marketing, then e-mail marketing through your own auto-responder, ezine marketing, classified ad sites, both online and off line, FFA pages, traffic exchanges, banner advertising, opt-in and double opt-in email advertising, viral marketing, and writing articles.

All of these methods have been tried by me and a number of them were a total waste of time, energy, and money. Of the methods I have listed, the ones I feel are the best, and I list these in no particular order, are the free search engines, e-mail advertising through your own list that your auto-responder helped you build, writing articles and submitting them to the article directories, and finally, the PPC programs. Of all these methods, and they all work, I strongly feel that article promotion gives you the best results for the time, effort, and money invested. Making a profit through promoting your website through article promotion will be the focus of this article.

I had heard of writing articles for promotional purposes for quite awhile after I started my internet business, but I never put much thought into it. I just didn't see how writing an article would help me out. Boy, was I ever wrong! After trying various ways to promote my websites without any luck, I started to do some serious research into what makes the free search engines work. I read everything about search engine optimization that I could get my hands on and knew I was getting close to the secrets of free traffic.

Then one day, I came across an article on article directories and how submitting your articles to them could help you out. I had read similar articles before on this subject, but this article really stood out and filled in the missing gaps for me.

So, I decided to try it out. I started to write. After a couple of days of proofing and editing, I had what I thought was a very well thought out article on acne.

So I did an internet search on article directories and found a few to submit them to. It wasn't long before I had a reply back from them stating that they had accepted my article. WOW! I was now a free lance writer, I joked to myself. So I waited. Every day I would log into the member's area of each site to see how well my article was performing. I was very disappointed with the results. My article had received only around 10 views. After a week, it was around 15. I just didn't see how this was going to help, so I asked a friend of mine for some advice. What he told me really opened up my eyes.

He basically said that my results were typical, and that I was actually doing quite well. How, I asked, can so few exposures to my article result in increased traffic? What he told me changed my attitude completely.

Basically, he told me to do an internet search on my article with the title in quotation marks as the search term. Even though my article had only been viewed around 20 times by now, I had around 200 results for that search term. A week later, it was around 1000 search engine results. A few months later resulted in a staggering 108,000 results. Even though only a few people had originally downloaded my article from each of the directories, it had somehow spread throughout the internet like a virus.

What I didn't realize was that by submitting my article, it would get picked up by publishers of websites that were under construction and they needed some fresh content. It was also distributed through syndicated feeds and picked up there. My article was on other people’s websites, ezines, classified ads, and internet blogs in staggering numbers and all I did was submit to a handful of article directories.

I was very impressed with the results, so I purchased some article submission software so I could get even more increased exposure.

The end result was that particular website shot up in the page rankings like a bullet. After just a few weeks, it was on page 1 and 2 for dozens of my keywords. This method of advertising had been staring me in the face for 2 years, and I was just now getting around to it. Shame on me!

Not every one of my articles achieves these kinds of results as that particular article was extraordinary. However, all of my articles have done well and have done what they were supposed to do, that is, establish myself as an "expert" on the subject matter that I was writing about, produce valuable back links to my websites from the various places they got distributed to, thus increasing my link popularity. That is probably the most important factor other than content, that the search engine robots use to index and rank your website when they spider it.

This is a time tested, proven formula for internet success, and it works for me time after time, never failing me. In fact, I had one website that shot up to number 1 six days after I uploaded it to my server and wrote an article about it. In fact, the more you write about a subject, the more valuable your website becomes to the search engines.

When you write articles and start submitting them, never mention your website in the body of the article. The only place that the article directories allow you to promote yourself and your website is in the author's resource box. Be sure to write your URL using HTML tags so that it becomes a live, clickable link.

Another thing that is very important to mention, is to be sure that the website that you are promoting is yours, and is not an affiliate website. The reason for that is simple; affiliate websites are mirrored websites, in other words duplicates of the original, the only thing being different is the affiliate URL. The search engines will not index these websites, so why write an article about them. However, if affiliate marketing is what you are involved with, then the best way around this problem is to create your very own landing page with a re-direct to the affiliate product of your choice. One popular tactic is to make an affiliate product review site, comparing your product with several others, so as to be informative in nature and beneficial to the consumer. The search engines love this idea also.

Whatever you do in your marketing efforts, be sure that you include writing articles and submitting them for review to as many directories as you can. Make it your first priority. The more back-links that you can create to quality sites, the higher your website will rank, it's just that simple. For long term lasting success, you can't beat article writing. Ignore it at your own peril.