[Read part 1 of this here]

When you publish a web page with quality content and that you’ve made the effort to target a specific keyword phrase on, you can expect to get traffic from 3 primary sources. The Search Engines that index your page, External links (backlinks) that your page acquires on other web sites, and any social networks where your page has been submitted.

That alone can lead to decent and consistent traffic numbers to your page. However, it isn’t the whole traffic picture, it is just a piece of the puzzle.

[click image for large view]

Now lets add in several supporting articles (see part 1 for a description of good supporting articles).

If you create a handful of quality articles that each link back to your web page with a “call to action” for readers, and publish those articles in places that have a human readership following and also are trusted by the search engines you can see something amazing happen.

Your articles will be indexed by the search engines, which leads to more traffic for you when people find your articles from search engines, read them and then follow the link through to your page.

Your high quality articles can also get submitted to various social networks, leading more traffic to the articles and finally through the article links to your web page.

In addition, and this isn’t even represented in the basic diagram I made to graphically show how all this comes together, but in addition to what I’ve already said, the web pages on various social networks that list your articles are probably (most are) also being crawled and indexed on search engines, adding another opportunity for searchers to find your articles and your web page.

I hope that makes clear just how useful Article Marketing can be when done properly, and I hope I’ve helped to explain how to target your articles to be the most effective in supporting your SERPs and traffic building efforts.

Article Marketing isn’t a magic bullet, or the end-all-be-all either. Like building backlinks and publishing quality content to your own site pages, Article Marketing is another piece in the puzzle.

But, unlike a lot of other online marketing methods that go into making up the whole puzzle, Article Marketing can be easily mastered by anyone, done at any time and from any place, and doesn’t cost a single penny to do.

One final note about the diagram I’ve included here, is that in the center it says “Your Web Site!”, but really I should have written “Your Web Page!” because what you really want to do is turn every page of your web sites into one of these Wagon Wheel type traffic flow patterns for yourself. So instead of thinking of your site at the center of this picture, think of a hundred copies of this picture in a big circle, representing a hundred pages on your sites, and with your own internal page-to-page linking traffic flowing in all directions from one page to another across that circle. How great is that?

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I always see people putting down Article Marketing as too ineffective for the time and effort it takes to write them, and until today I just thought they must have written some poor quality stuff, didn’t get results from it, and decided article marketing stunk based on that.

But today while chatting with someone who is desperately trying to make Article Marketing work, and has been for a while now, I realized what his problem was and it hit me that others may be doing the same thing.

It isn’t that he was writing bad articles, on the contrary, he was writing some really good articles, but he wasn’t optimizing them to the specific pages of his web site like he should have been.

Article Marketing can drive very nice, targeted traffic to your site, and can also help to boost your page’s rankings in the search engines, but you have to be smart about it.

Here’s a hypothetical walk-thru of how it can boost a page’s SERPs rankings:

Let’s say we have a web page targeting the keyword phrase “Little Drummer Boy”

We optimize our page by placing the phrase into the page title, the META tags, and 2 or more times in the actual page content.

Now time to write 4 to 6 supporting articles. Start with titles, we want to include the keyword phrase in them so we come up with “The Little Drummer Boy Revisited”, “Lessons to Learn from Little Drummer Boy”, “Children Love The Little Drummer Boy”.

There’s 4 titles, all using the right keyword phrase. Now it is just a matter of writing a good article for each of those titles, making sure to include the keyword phrase (not necessarily the full title again) in the opening and closing paragraphs of the articles; and also in a “call to action” link at the end in the Author’s resource/bio box. For example, your link text could be something like “Learn more about the Little Drummer Boy”.

When search engines find your articles, they’ll be associated with the keyword phrase, and see that the article not only links back to your specific page (not your main web site home page, but the one targeting the Little Drummer Boy), but even uses the keyword phrase in the link anchor text.

Here’s how it all looks to the search engines, showing how the articles act sort of like supporting legs for your page’s keyword targeting:

Part 2 of this will explain further how those same articles would be supportive in driving targeted traffic to your pages from multiple places as well.

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