The most effective way to generate links and traffic to your website is by submitting articles to ezine or newsletter owners. Most internet marketers fail to show great results when article marketing because they fail to follow a few simple rules to make their articles stand out from the clutter.

The first step is creating a powerful headline. You should spend a good portion of your time on the headline itself. Make it something compelling and interesting. It should make the user want to know more about what you are writing about. If you can't get people to stop and take a look at your article, who cares what's written in your article? Nobody. Again, spend some time on the headline, it's worth it.

Next, the article needs to be engaging, informative and well written. Put a unique slant on your topic. Then throw a bit of your unique personality into the mix. You aren't writing for a computer, you want humans to actually read it and finish it! Make sure to check for spelling and grammar errors. If it seems it's written by a 2nd grader, nobody is going to trust what you say! Now, you'll want to send out unique versions to each publisher. The duplicate content penalty is real. The real name should be the omitted results penalty, but under any name it hurts your chances of creating back links that count and driving traffic. Create at least 3 versions of your article and get a software tool to merge them into a unique readable whole to be sent out.

Finally send out your articles to as many publishers as possible. There are tons of software packages and services available to send out your articles to publishers, though few that combine sending out unique content automatically. You can find some though, including free ones. I suggest spending an hour a week building your list of publishers until you are submitting to 5,000 or more.

Once you've done all these steps, I can't help but think you'll be a success. Traffic will start finding your sites more often, more back links will count and the search engines will give you a lot of love by positioning you well. All it takes is a little extra time, which most people aren't willing to put in. Differentiate yourself from the crowd by doing so!

Steven Lohrenz has been marketing online for several years now. His most powerful traffic generator is article marketing. He offers a free tool to do unique article marketing. You can get it here: Unique Article Submission Software