To begin with, aim for quantity.

Most people who begin article marketing try the “bum marketing” method. This is all well and good, but it can lead to disappointment early on in the game.

If you put a lot of effort into keyword research, building backlinks to the articles and so forth, it’s still going to take a fair amount of time before you begin to see results. It takes a while for the articles to rank, and you never know whether it will drive any traffic at all for that given keyword.

The big players in the game who rely on article marketing for traffic will almost always aim to submit 100 to 200 articles to begin with in one niche, *before* they concentrate on trying to rank them in the search engines for keyword phrases.

Note: Articles don’t have to be lengthy. In fact, due to the small attention span that people have when browsing, the shorter the article the better.

The quicker the visitor reads through your article, the better. The sooner they reach the end, the sooner they’ll see your resource box and (hopefully) click through to your site to learn more. The best article directories allow articles as small as 250 words.

Your article title can be the most important thing.

Many people overlook this with article marketing. A big portion of traffic to your articles come from the article directory itself – the actual people browsing the site.

To prove this, lets take the traffic for ezinearticles.com for example. Looking it up on compete.com shows that the site had over 12.5 million visitors in September 2010. That’s in one month!

This is why your article title is so important. Create the title to force people to want to click through and read your article. Think of it as a headline. Make it compelling, curious, promise benefits and secrets that can only be obtained by reading your article.

Leave unanswered questions.

Back to what was mentioned earlier about short articles. It’s also an idea to leave your content slightly unfinished. Then include in your resource box that the reader should click the link to continue. This urges the reader to want to investigate your site, and can increase click-through rates significantly.

Treat the resource box as an advert.

This is a mistake that many article writers make. The resource box will simply say “John Smith is an expert at ______, his website is _____.com”.

It’s good to remember that your resource box is an ad. The article directories let you write anything here – make your content as promotional as you want. No point in spending all that time on the article title and body, when the reader gets to the end and does nothing.

The resource box also has to be compelling. Put as much effort into it as the title. Make the reader *want* to click through to your site.

Remember that the article directory has hundreds of links on the same page competing to get the readers attention, links to different articles, AdSense ads, categories etc. You want to persuade the reader to click on your link in the resource box. Make it compelling.

In summary, those who have the will power to commit to writing and submitting 100 articles in one niche or category are the people that get the most success out of article marketing. Most others will give up after their 4th or 5th article submission, surprised that there isn’t masses of traffic flooding to their website.

Article marketing is more about consistency than anything else. Don’t be disappointed when your first submission only gets 25 views. In fact, don’t even look at statistics until you’ve submitted your first 100. Concentrating on individual statistics will only slow you down and disappoint you. The whole goal should be consistent submission of quality articles.

And be sure to remember to make the titles and resource boxes compelling. Treat it as a mini sales letter rather than an article. Get those clicks!

Do this, stay committed and consistent each day, and you’ll be on the road to success, big traffic, and high conversions with article marketing.