Can Writing Articles Help Market Your Online Business?

Yes, it can.

But you have to have the right expectations of the results.

How many times have you read one of those "courses" that claim to give you massive amounts of traffic just for writing articles and submitting them to directories (or even worse "without having to write them using PLR garbage).

That is not the whole story.

Here are a few tips that you can use immediately in your article writing strategy to get that extra traffic coming to your site with just a little bit of work:

Write your own articles for submission to the directories like ezinearticles.com, don't use those PLR articles or rewrite them. Most directories will not accept them anyway, and that wastes your valuable time. Plus, you receive more credibility as a true author of the article written. That leads to more traffic in and of itself. Remember that word...credibility. That is what you are after anyway.

Avoid writing a novel. Keep article length to 350 - 700 words and no more. Remember, this is the Internet, and people are not going to read a long story from you just yet.

Use bullets (like I have here). Bullets get your intended points across easier for the Internet reader.

In most article submission directories, there are tools to use such as rss feeds that you can put on your own website linking back to your articles. You simply write about 10 good articles and then get the html code to place on your site. This is a good resource for your website and leads to that credibility stuff again.

Your byline, or resource box as it might be called, is the absolute key to your article marketing. The main idea here is to provide value to your readers in the box...not to try and sell something. Write a free report with valuable information and link to it from the resource box in your article. After you have written about 10 - 15 articles, you will see "autopilot" traffic start to come to that link. Repeat...do NOT try to sell something here. Offer value to your readers. This is probably the number one reason articles are not as effective as they could be.