Many internet marketers believe that article marketing is the single best way to generate traffic, and therefore revenue, for your website. If you can write articles then you can make money online…period.

Articles allow you to put your “footprints” literally all over the internet. They are a great form of promotion and one of the best internet marketing tactics.

After you’ve done your market research, you should have a good idea of what you should be writing about to gain the interest of those within your niche.

Submitting an article to a directory allows people to pick up those free articles (complete with your name and website link) and use it on their website. This means more backlinks for you and hopefully more visitors once people follow your resource box to your website.

Almost all online marketing strategies involve using articles to generate traffic. Viral marketing also consists of distributing articles to websites within your niche. Most webmasters will be happy to use your articles as it means they are getting free content for their site. Just make sure they leave your resource box intact!

The best article directory to submit to is by far ezinearticles.com. It has grown to be the biggest and best directory and if you only submit to one, make it that one.

Writing articles is actually not as difficult as you may think. Once you have written a few you will get the hang of it. Failing that you can always outsource the articles to someone at Elance or Rentacoder.

Publishing articles is simply the most beneficial way to grow your business online.

Blogs are very easy to set up compared to a regular website. This is because a blog is basically a content management system which allows you to simply log in and publish your articles to your website. You can do all this without knowing the first thing about website coding or graphic design.

Some popular blogging platforms are:

WordPress

Typepad

Blogger.com

WordPress.com

The last two mentioned there are online services. That is, Google (Blogger) or WordPress host your blog for you and give you a subdomain on their domain. This is good if you want to test out a niche or drive traffic to one of your websites. This service is totally free.

WordPress is my blogging platform of choice. The personal version that is, not the hosted version. You can usually install WordPress through Fantastico in your web hosting account.

So once your blog is up and running, how do you make money from it? Here are a few methods:

Adsense

Sign up for a Google Adsense account and immediately have ads showing on your site. Google can match ads to your content and pay every time someone clicks on an ad.

List Building

You can insert some code on your site which captures the email addresses of people who want to subscribe to your mailing list. You need a list manager for this. I recommend Aweber.com.

What’s the point of this? Well, you can email your list on a regular basis with offers they may be interested in, and include your affiliate link so you get paid if anyone buys. Once your list builds up into the hundreds or thousands, this is the BEST way of giving yourself regular income.

Blogs are easy to set up, but you need content to maintain them. Make sure you are writing, or purchasing, unique content on a regular basis. The more content you have, the more the search engines and the visitors will love your blog. That can only mean more earnings for you!