Article marketing should be the holy grail of web site traffic.

The benefits you can get are incredible. Articles can help you

* establish yourself as an expert,

* bring you an increase in sales and subscriptions,

* build trust in your product or services from proven techniques readers can try before they get to your site,

* help you get better search engine results, (not only through linking) and,

* send you traffic from sites that republish your work,

not to mention a myriad of other benefits.

Some people say the growth in new authors has made it harder to find new content. Other people say abuse of private label article rights/ghost writing has made it harder for publishers to find unique content. And of course, article marketing, done incorrectly, can have you competing against yourself to rank in the search engines (though I can think of worse problems.)

All of those things are factors, but they're minor compared to other factors that have been around since the early days of article marketing online. Article Marketing can still bring you huge traffic and lots of prospects. If it's not working, here are some possibilities as to why not.

1. You aren't writing with a unique style/slant/story.

2. You're focused only on being in web directories, and not in article banks or ezine lists that help publicize your reprint rights

3. You aren't writing at least one article a week

4. You're trying to do all the submission yourself instead of using distribution services

5. The quality of your articles hasn't caught the attention of the big publishers yet.

6. Your grammar/spelling/punctuation was notoriously bad once and you started getting passed over by publishers who normally run your articles in their publications

7. Your articles are too similar to other writers

8. You aren't following publisher guidelines (This is a big one! They vary and you really do need to have multiple formats so you can please them all.)

9. Your writing is more about search engine copy or making a sale, than it is about giving away a little free, useful information away

Make these mistakes - some of them only once - and you may be dooming yourself to obscurity as an article marketer.

Go to http://www.freetraffictip.com to learn more about all aspects of traffic generation, including blogging, article marketing and search engine optimization.