Now that you are a webmaster, or one who has a web site, you need to drive traffic to your site. One important way to do this and one you should use often is article marketing.

You are not trying to sell anything in your article. You may not even mention a product. What you want are links to your site. Now maybe you will not have a lot of readers. I always thought that was most important but a SEO expert told me that I had so many visitors to one of my sites was because Google reads links to my articles and gives me a gold star not because the article is so great but because it links to my site.

The premier article web sites to submit your articles to our tough on Internet marketers, especially affiliate marketers. Google hates affiliate marketers and article sites want Google to read their listings. Therefore you should read carefully the guidelines of the article site. Remember that you are supposed to be supplying information relative to a keyword search. That is what you must do.

Why are articles rejected. Often they have too many (if allowed) links. The links may not lead to further relevant information. You may have got "caught" copying some other website's content. (You may not have copied at all. You may have just used too many of the same keywords as another site. Once I was accused of copying my own article!) Maybe you quoted too much from another web site. Maybe your content is not good enough, too feeble or insignificant. Maybe you had poor grammar or punctuation or placement of paragraphs. Maybe your editor is just having a bad day (actually it is often the system that rejects you before the editor has a chance.) The good sites are very picky.

Once you have found a topic that you want to submit to an article site, go to Google's external keyword tool and find a good title. Put your title in quotes and place it in the Google search box on your browser. See how many sites come up with that exact title. If there are over 5000 sites, find another title and perhaps a new topic.

Use your keyword or keyword phrase in the first paragraph. Don't start the first paragraph with your title. Some sites don't allow this. Use your keyword or keywords sparingly. If you try to stuff your article with keywords it will be rejected at the best sites. Salt and pepper!

Some article sites are popular but have different guidelines. Squidoo, for example, will let you build what is called a lens on a subject. They are quite reasonable and I have never had a lens rejected other than for the topic being on affiliate marketing. That has seldom occurred on the first submission but when I have tried to update the lens. I got angry once and removed many lenses. Later I went back promising myself never to discuss marketing at Squidoo.

Some sites accept pics. Most of the best ones do not (except your mug shot). Some accept video too. Search the Internet for listings of the article sites. See what suits you (and Google).

Article marketing will turn you into an expert. I have written many hundreds of articles. If you put my name in the Google search box, you will see many references, over three million when I checked this morning. I have been a member of the premier Internet marketing training site for over three years, a good place to learn article marketing.

Fly Old Glory!