Webmasters use article marketing for two purposes. One is for SEO (search engine optimization) in which case they are primarily looking to get links to their website from article directories and any other sites that happen to publish their article. The other is for traffic itself, from readers of the article that follow the link in the author’s bio section.

Publishing articles for traffic requires more attention to detail than just publishing them for backlinks. They need to be of better quality and thought through a little more. You need to catch the reader’s interest enough to make them want more information and click the link at the end.

There are two ways to use articles for targeting traffic. One is the “bum marketing” method where the article itself is targeting long-tail keywords in a related market. This strategy involves publishing the article at ezinearticles.com, squidoo.com, or hubpages.com and then establishing some links to the article page to help get it ranked well. The traffic comes from search engines, as people searching for the targeted keyword find your article in the search results. A little traffic can also come from within the website that the article was published at. These types of articles should be of decent size, well-written, and informative.

The other method of targeting traffic with articles is writing them for ezine publishers. These are people who have mailing lists that will publish your article in one of their newsletters. This type of article should be shorter and more to the point, as not to take up too much space in the ezine email. They need compelling titles to get the attention of the list owner who is scanning the article directory for material.

Another little-known tactic is to write articles for highly-ranked authority sites in a related (but not competing) market. Here you have a website with a lot of traffic in a prominent position. If this site will publish your articles, they will get a lot of reads. Approach the web owner with a proposition to provide free quality content in exchange for a link in your bio-box. (The best way to approach them might be to snail-mail them from the whois information address, as most emails like this don’t even get opened and this type of site is sure to get a lot of them.)

Finally, using articles for blog posts is guaranteed to get traffic if you have an established blog with quality content. All you have to do is ping the blog aggregate sites with a service such as pingoat.com, and submit your posts to the top social media sites (tools like onlywire.com make this a quick and easy task).

If you need to increase your quality website traffic, it’s hard to beat article marketing. If you don’t have the time or inclination to write the articles yourself, quality writers stand at the ready to provide this service for you at less than $7 per article. This is something you cannot afford to ignore. Content is still king.