Title: How One Simple Article Got Floods Of Visitors & Tonnes Of Sales – And How You Can Do The Same Word Count: 964 Summary: When I broke into the internet marketing & niche site business I made a boatload of mistakes. I spent money on software that was just plain rubbish. I tried buying traffic. I joined safelists that no-one was reading and got hoodwinked by people selling useless, repackaged leads. I suffered. But for every ten things that I tried that would blow up spectacularly in my face, there was one gem that I would use time and time again, over the years to generate tonnes of traffi... Keywords: article submit,article marketing,free traffic,article directory,submit articles,internet marketing Article Body: When I broke into the internet marketing & niche site business I made a boatload of mistakes. I spent money on software that was just plain rubbish. I tried buying traffic. I joined safelists that no-one was reading and got hoodwinked by people selling useless, repackaged leads. I suffered. But for every ten things that I tried that would blow up spectacularly in my face, there was one gem that I would use time and time again, over the years to generate tonnes of traffic, suck in genuine subscribers to my newsletter and make more than a few sales. It more than made up for all the duffers. Article marketing was that one gem – and I want you to understand the importance of writing & submitting articles as a long term internet marketing strategy. I also want to warn you of the common mistakes that budding article marketers make (and it costs them dear). Want an example of the pure POWER of article marketing? How’s this - just one of my articles, posted a few years back has generated over $2,500 in sales, gets tonnes of visitors to my website and is building my opt-in list automatically even as we speak. And do you know what? It’ll keep doing it for years down the line. It was an article about property auctions in the UK and it pointed to a simple $19 eBook on how to buy real estate at auctions (one of my first ever projects online). It was a good article and it got picked up by a couple of publishers. Before I knew it… - I had a long term traffic stream coming in from the websites of these highly ranked real estate websites. They were sending me some major targeted traffic – people who found my article subject interesting and wanted to know more about article marketing. - A lot of the people who were coming in via my free article were better qualified prospects than just about ANY other source of traffic. Because of that, it meant more people signing up to my newsletter and a bunch of sales. And it wasn’t just that – my own website benefited from the backlinks it enjoyed to high ranking article directories and the real estate sites that published my stuff. Now don’t get me wrong – the traffic doesn’t come in GUSHES but it comes REGULARLY and continues over the period of weeks, months and years. This constant, desirable traffic converts into the very things that we all desperately want and need - more people signing on to our newsletters and more people buying our products. The best part? It’s 100% FREE. Now, do you understand why the most successful internet marketing experts such as Willie Crawford have a solid system in place for marketing their products through submitting articles? The question is, how do you get your articles to the hundreds and even thousands of potential directories, newsgroups, publishers and portals? How do you keep track of the many new portals that are appearing daily (some high traffic)? How do you KNOW which sites are worth spending your time submitting to? If you read the sales page of some of the plethora of article marketing courses & software products available you would be forgiven for thinking that it’s a breeze. Not so. Let’s now look at some of the REAL PROBLEMS that you’ll experience when marketing with articles: Software? Useful but not the “Click & Forget” solutions the developers would love to have you believe. In the past, I’ve used article submission software myself (in fact I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on this type of software over the years). It can cut some of the workload compared to manual submission but don’t let the energetic sales pages of these software types fool you. It’s not about clicking a big blue button and then popping off for a round of golf while the software gets your article into hundreds of directories. Software programs have some serious limitations – a lot of the directories they list get out of date and you’ll miss out on a lot of additional places to submit to if you use this technique of submission. - Whether you’re submitting manually or via software, you’ll need to compile a list of high traffic sources to submit your articles. The best way is to use the Alexa traffic toolbar to rank the best-ranked traffic sites and ignore the ones that are not drawing in much traffic. The problem is that there are almost a countless number of potential places to submit your articles. This type of research can take many days in itself. - TIME is the biggest problem. You’re not going to like this but to get even one article out to a fairly high number of directories/newsgroups/portals can take several hours (you could work full time for a day and only submit to a couple of hundred places). If you want the best results, you really need to submit your article to a HUGE amount of places. The fact is most people just do not have that kind of time available and so miss out on one of the best sources of free long term traffic in the world. What a terrible shame. I’m sorry if this has disheartened you but it really shouldn’t. You’ve discovered a surefire way of generating a lot of long term traffic, subscribers and profits and all of this for free. Remember, just ONE article submitted to all the right places can give you results that not even a thousand bucks worth of leads, gimmicky software and programs can ever provide. Article marketing is a real strategy for real businesses. Isn’t it time you got involved?