Hello All, I have been really into article marketing for the past 3 months and have been learning a lot. I am not master by any means, however there are a lot of trends that I have been noticing across my articles for different niches. From what I found, there are 4 very important aspects of an article that should be included every single time you write one. Here are the four main aspects of a good article: The title must be catchy AND informative! Let's say we are writing an article on the topic of bruising. When I first started, my titles were horrible: 'How to cure bruises on your arm' After a little bit of experimentation, I realized that your article title needs to be crafted. This becomes natural after you get the hang of it, but at first it might take you a minute or two to come up with something good. Now, my title would look something like 'Eliminate arm bruises with these three easy to follow cures that work in minutes!' Not the best title you can come up with, however this will lore in a lot more traffic than the 100 other articles out there titled 'how to cure arm bruises' Quality over quantity! This is something you need to play around with to truly understand what a crappy article is and what a quality article is. I first tried getting a bunch of cheap $3.50/300 word articles that covered every variation for the term bruising. Later on I experimented with a smaller amount of $6.00/300 word articles and the conversion rates were over double the $3.50 articles. This is not only better because of the higher conversion rate, but you no longer have to spread out your efforts trying to build backlinks for 100 different articles. Now you can devote your efforts to backlinking just 10 articles and get more traffic and longer staying power. So what exactly is a quality article? Rule of thumb is that any article under $5.00/300 words is going to be a low quality article. Not always, but in most situations. I have also noticed more traffic with longer articles in the 400-500 word range. So take that into consideration as well. A crap article is one that only has common knowledge information - for example: 'To cure bruising, you will want to put an ice pack on your arm for a period of 20 minutes on and 5 minutes off, repeating for up to an hour' Everyone knows about this, so there is no point for it even to be there. The thing is, 99% of the articles I see out there are just common knowledge articles that provide no value to the reader. However, if you write something like: 'Rub lavender oil into the bruise in a circular motion for 30 minutes after you get the bruise. What this does is help break up all the clotting and will help the blood seep out from the bruised area, promoting a faster healing rate' (I doubt this is true, I just made it up on the fly for a good example) You don't have to go all out - just a couple good pieces of information that you didn't know about until you did a little bit of research. The reader has to 'come away with something' for them to consider your article worthwhile. Once they decide that you have provided them with good info, they will natural check out any link suggestions you give them later on. Your call to action. I personally like putting my call to action at the bottom of the article, because this gives them time to determine that your link will be valuable by the time they get reading your informative article. Putting your link right up front gives you no time to 'hypnotize' your reader with good information. Continuing with my above example, my call to action would be something like: 'One of the most powerful solutions that I can personally recommend is the Acme Bruise Be Gone Lotion. This stuff is no joke! Check out my full personal review here: http://www.blah.blah.com/whatever/whatever/' Again, it doesn't have to be perfect - just hyped enough for them to want to check out your link. Build links to your articles. Everyone knows to do this, yet no one ever does! Build as many links as you can to your articles. If your are on some of the popular directories like Ezine or Goarticles, you can be very aggressive with your link building. When I am putting articles on my new sites, I only like to build a link or two a week to the pages. However, with these already authoritative sites, you can go buck wild and build hundreds of links a week if you want to. That's it! Follow the above 4 techniques and I guarantee you, you will at least double the amount of traffic you get out of your articles. This is also a skill that needs to be developed. If you haven't noticed already, I like martial arts. In any art, there isn't much difference between the amount of techniques a black belt knows compared to a white built. The only difference, is the amount of time they spent to master each individual technique. There is a saying I like to use: 'A minute to learn, a lifetime to master' So just keep practicing! Any questions? Feel free to ask! I have subscribed to this thread and will answer any questions you ask the best I can.