Articles are used by the knowledgeable online marketers, because they work in many different ways to increase your website traffic. Let's take a quick look at just 3 of those ways...

Firstly, when you submit your articles to article directories, there are particular ones that are popular with the search engines. This means a properly constructed article can get a page 1 ranking for a tightly defined keyword phrase, which puts you right in front of targeted traffic who are looking for what you offer!

The best article sites to use are those that manually approve their articles before they include them. Google loves this quality control, rewards the directory site for it, and you along with it! The 'big Daddy' of article sites is ezinearticles.com.

They will reject your article if it doesn't meet their standards, although I have had personal experience that if you ask them what is wrong, they quite happily tell you, and then approve it once you've made the corrections.

As I mentioned, Google loves this approach, and therefore the ezinearticles site is spidered regularly by Google.

Your article won't stay on the front page forever, but it gives you a great boost while it does! (Even a page 2 ranking is not to be sniffed at, because if someone goes beyond page 1, you know they really are looking for information on that subject!)

The second way that articles increase your traffic is without you even lifting a finger! The same article, at the same directory, will get picked up by other web publishers, and they have to include your resource box when they use it. The potential of this is huge, as you do not know who will use your article.

It may appear on a site with a big loyal following, or it may be sent in an newsletter to a huge list of target subscribers. Any number of these may click on your link and end up at your site. Also, people will click on your links just by reading the article on the directory site. This won't generate a huge amount of traffic by itself, but remember this is all added traffic that you are doing no extra work to get!

Another way that articles generate traffic for you is by enhancing your own reputation. The more articles you publish, the more your name will be established in that particular niche. If you can pick a tight enough niche, you will soon develop expert status, as your articles crop up over and over.

The more people see your name associated with the niche, they will make a connection, and sooner or later people will start Googling your name as well as the subject! A well designed site on your part will be ready to welcome these people in!

So you can see that the one time effort you put in to create articles can be repaid many times over, because they increase your website traffic seemingly by themselves once you set them off! It does help if you can track where the traffic comes from, it's something I'm guilty of not doing enough, but I certainly do know that articles work for traffic.