Would you be surprised to learn that nearly every successful website owner is heavily engaged in an ongoing article marketing campaign?

You only need two things to have a successful website …content and traffic. And, while traffic can come from any number of sources, the most coveted traffic comes from organic listings in Bing, Yahoo, and Google, the top three search engines.

Although developing and promoting a website which ultimately achieves enviable search engine ranking requires substantial time and work energy to develop, the resultant traffic is free. If you elect to promote your site via advertising, it is unlikely that your cost will be less than $5 per targeted visitor. And, research has repeatedly proven that visitors who reach you after a search in Bing, Google or Yahoo are far more likely to be buyers than those advertising drives to your site.

Actually, that shouldn’t be surprising news. The person who arrives at your site after clicking on a banner ad or getting an email ad may have some level of curiosity about what is on your site…he or she might be called a shopper. Conversely, he person who actually utilizes a search engine to find your site is far more likely to be an actual customer, not just a shopper.

That explains why successful website marketers spend significant time and energy chasing search engine rankings. And, as anyone engaged in search engine marketing realizes, obtaining links is the most critical element in achieving top rankings. In most cases, article marketing is an integral part of SEO campaigns because no other activity yields as many links as quickly. In fact, a single popular article can result in hundreds of links within a week and thousands of links in a month. It’s not that uncommon.

In most cases, website marketers write about topics closely related to the subject of their sites. And, basically, that’s a sound strategy.

However, if all of your articles are related to your website content, you are leaving money on the table.

By submitting articles on a limited range of topics, these people also limit the article directories and websites which will be consider using their articles. Thus, they significantly reduce the number of links their articles produce and the „link juice“ they receive. Here’s a better way to proceed. I own a number of education sites, so my articles are most often related to college admission, financial aid, online education, and similar topics. I’ve gotten…literally… thousands of links from these articles, but there are any number of article directories and websites that have no interest at all in the aforementioned subjects. Realizing that, I also write 100-200 articles a year on topics of general interest. That way, I reach a whole new group of readers and…even more important…my sites get a far higher number of links than they’d have if I confined myself to writing on education.

I recently wrote an article on gardening. I have also written about parenting, dealing with difficult people, preparing a winning resume, dozens of other topics wholly unrelated to higher education. You’d probably never guess that my education sites got more than 1,000 links from an article I wrote on gourmet hamburgers, but they did. Not bad for an hour of work, right? That is why the best piece of advice I can give you after ten years of internet marketing is this: you should regularly compose and submit articles on at least twenty or twenty-five different subjects to supplement the articles you write that directly relate to your website content. I can almost guarantee you’ll find the results well worth the effort.

Marion Newman is a community college transfer counselor who counsels students on upper division online degree programs and online college financial aid programs.