You’ve heard about the Adsense craze and decided that you are going to get your share of Adsense cash cow. You’ve either built a website or purchased one, and now you’re ready to rock! You submit it to every search engine and directory that you can think of, dreaming of thousands of surfers coming in from every engine on the planet. All begging to click your Adsense links and make you rich. Then you sit back and wait. And wait. And wait some more. Checking your stats daily hoping to see the rush of traffic pouring in. But for some reason it just doesn’t come. The days of the above business plan working are long over. It might have worked in 1996, but in 2006 you’re going to have to do a lot more to promote your new website. There are still free traffic sources out there, but they want something in return to link to your new site. Content. This is where article marketing comes in. The concept is simple. You write an article that’s relevant to your sites topic, inserting a link or two within the article or the articles footer, linking back to your website. Then you submit it to article directories. They in turn publish your article, giving you a RELEVANT link back to your site and possibly sending you some of their traffic. Many of the article directories out there have a lot of good traffic to share. They also can really help your Google Page Rank when it comes time for Google to rank your site. Google wants to see INBOUND links to your site from other sites with similar content. So the links these article directories can give you are crucial to the weight of your website in the long run. But the article directories are just the first stop for your article. Almost all of the article directories encourage other webmasters to republish your content on their own sites with similar topics. So one article can really turn into literally thousands of inbound links over the months ahead. This snowball effect is exactly what we are looking for with each article we write. Article marketing is only as powerful as your commitment to it though. To really build your site’s traffic and page rank you are going to need thousands, if not ten’s of thousands of inbound links. One or two articles is not going to do this for you. It’s going to take a daily time commitment on your part. As the owner of two different article directories ( http://www.articles.pn and http://www.articlescience.com/ ) , I can tell you that there are many article marketers out there submitting as many as ten articles a day in an effort to promote their websites. They obviously see the value of article marketing and they don’t intend to do the job halfway. “But Chuck! I can’t write an article!” I hear this all the time from my customers. Frankly, it’s an easy copout. What you’re really saying to me is that you don’t WANT to write articles. You don’t have to be an ex journalism major to write a short article to promote your website. Heck, you don’t even need to be a high school graduate. All you need to do is to be able to read and write. If you can’t read and write then you probably don’t need to be the owner of a website. It’s very simple. Sit down and write about the topic of your website. Hopefully when you built or purchased your website you picked a topic that you’re at least interested in. It doesn’t have to be a topic that you’re familiar with, just something that interests you. If you’re website’s topic is something you know nothing about, do some research! Write an article sharing what you learned with other readers. You can start as simply as “I didn’t know this, and you may not either….” If you’re suffering from severe writer’s block, try using a tape recorder. Dictate things you would like to say about your site or your site’s topic and then transcribe what you recorded later. You can take the recording and edit it in writing and come up with a good article. The bottom line is this. If you want to promote your new website without spending thousands of dollars, you must integrate article writing into your promotion plan. Without it, your road to success is going to be a lot more bumpy. Till next time, Chuck Crawford http://www.affiliatewebdesign.com