How to use the power of articles to drive traffic to your website?

Ok, here it is again, everyone is talking about it, all newbies are told or have read at some point of time about it. Write articles and publish them to article directories with free reprint rights. Yes it does work, it has worked me miracles. I started my interior design website in September 05 and by mid October 05 it was ranking in top 10 at MSN search engine. Google rewarded it by a Pagerank 4, all because of the art of writing and publishing articles. Today I am going to show you how articles generate traffic to your website at 4 different levels. Let's see these levels one by one. LEVEL 1 You write an article related to a specific niche. For example I wrote on "bedroom design and decorating ideas". Submitted this article to 10 article directories which already had a decent archive and good Google pagerank. While submitting this article I took proper care to select the right "keywords" which would trigger my article for greater readability. So on the first level I started getting visitors directly from article directories who came through by clicking the link in the resource box. SO here two thing are of most importance 1)A good and catchy title to your article. 2)Selecting the right keywords that would trigger your article. LEVEL 2 After visitors at the article directories started finding my article, some of them used it on their own website. This helped their own visitors. I got some traffic from these websites as well and most importantly an "inbound link" to my website LEVEL 3 This I found accidentally. A few months I wrote an article on "Google AdSense", submitted it to article directory and forgot about it. After a few weeks I was browsing the Google result pages for improving adsense income, I saw one of my article title listed at number 5 in the search results. This was a total shock to me. My article page at the article directory was picked up by Google. That's the reason why it is necessary to pick article directories that already have good Google Pagerank. I prefer submitting to article directories have a Pagerank of 3 or more. So on this level you start getting traffic directly from search engine results. This strategy is also useful for affiliates. You can write an article in such a way that the search engines will pick up the title and rank well at the results and send the traffic directly to the vendor's website through YOUR affiliate link. (NOTE: Some article directories do not allow affiliate links in resource box. You will have to go through the publishing guidelines before submitting.) But there are 2 disadvantages in this method. 1)The article page can not rank permanently at that number. This is because, an article directory is a dynamic place. Every hour hundreds of articles get submitted there. If someone else does a good job than yours then you are likely to loose that position at the search engine results, quickly. 2)You can not guarantee than the article will always be picked up by search engine and be ranked in top 10. But there is a surefire way to write an article which will always rank well at the search engines. LEVEL 4 Though I am calling this level 4 this level becomes level 1 over a period of time. This is because of all the incoming links which point to your website. As you write more articles(level 1), more webmasters around the world copy and paste them on their websites(level 2), your website starts ranking well at the search engines because of massive amount of incoming links. Once this happens you start getting an immediate flow of free targeted traffic from search engines. A good monetization program like Google Adsense can be used to quickly convert this crowd into money. But as I said earlier there is a special way to write articles. If you want to enjoy the benefits from all these 4 levels, then there are surefire techniques you have carry out in a few seconds. The best part about all these levels of traffic is, you don't have to pay a single dime to do this stuff. The key is to write for humans as well as search engines. It's not at all difficult. Anyone who can write and read English can do this. Even if you haven't written a single line before, you can go ahead very fine with writing articles for attracting website traffic in less than a month. I hope this article was helpful to everyone. Copyright Shrinivas Vaidya