I'm sure that you hear all the time about the benefits of writing articles to drive traffic to your site, but are you really doing it correctly? It's more than throwing out some plr articles you bought and hoping that it has the desired effect. So I'm going to share with you some tips on how to find topic ideas, what makes a good article, and where to submit them.

The first thing that you should do it to decide what it is that you are going to write about. This is where your keyword research comes into play. You don't want to write an article that no one will ever read, so find keywords that are getting a large number of searches but that has low competition. I use wordtraker.com which is a great service whether you use their free or paid option. Once you have your keywords, you should do a little research on your topic. Either find a prl article that you own that deals with your keywords that you can rewrite, or head over to ezinearticles.com and do a little reading. You'll find a ton of articles on pretty much any subject, and once you feel you know enough about your topics you are ready to write.

Now you can open up your favorite word processor and start putting words to paper (or to screen i guess). If you are rewriting an existing plr article you should go line by line and reword each one. You ultimately are using it as a starting point, not a be all end all. This also goes for the articles you read during your researching. Plus if you were to submit an article unchanged, ezinearticles.com will probably just kick it back to you, so save yourself the trouble and make it unique.

One thing you should keep in mind when writing is that you should be sharing some kind of valuable information, not promoting your product or service. You want to provide enough good content that the reader will want to click through to your site. Well written articles would also boost your sites reputation. If they are filled with good information you will be regarded as well informed and an expert on the subjects that you write about.

In connection, you must write articles on subjects that are closely connected with your business. Many articles searched for are tips, guidelines, or how to's so these would be good content that people would find useful. Don't forget to include your keywords at least once in each paragraph and in the title. You don't want to use it more than this or else you run the risk of it be rejecting due to keyword over saturation. Therefore, be mindful of how often they are used as well as if they fit with the flow of the writing.

Once you have your article ready to go, it is time to submit it to an article directory. Your first two stops are ezinearticles.com and goarticle.net do to the fact that they have a high site ranking. You should download the alexa toolbar so that you can see the page rankings for websites. Don't waste your time submitting your article to anything over a ranking of about 100,000. They will not get enough traffic and is of no benefit to you. Also, you can take your articles and use them to build hubpages and squidoo lenses as well since these also get high rankings in Google.

Now you can just wash, rinse, and repeat to get a large number of your articles out there helping to drive traffic on autopilot. I hope this helps, and I wish you the best of luck.