They all tell you to go ahead and submit articles, don't they? Submitting articles they tell you, will then push hoardes of traffic right along to your website.

'Sure, all you need to do is start writing a few articles and then submit them to all the top article directories and in no time at all you'll have all the traffic you could ever want', they tell you. But can that really be true?

Well, the answer is sort of 'yes' and 'no' really.

Let's look at things a little closer and I will explain what I mean.

When I first started writing articles as a method of generating traffic, like a lot of people I just went right ahead and started writing articles and submitting them like a madman!

This was the way, I decided. This was the way for me to get hoardes of traffic to my website. I'll just go right ahead and submit these articles to all the best article directories and I'm good to go!

The outcome was that not much happened at all really. I certainly didn't see the huge amounts of new traffic that they'd all promised I'd get.

So did I do something wrong? If so, what? And why didn't this work for me like they said it would?

Well, in reality I just hadn't spent enough time learning to write and submit articles correctly. Learning the craft, if you like. My 'head down and go for it' approach just didn't work because I had not taken the time to learn what was necessary to produce good, well written articles that would be snapped up by the article directories. Nor did my articles excite and interest my readers at that time.

So, how could I go about learning what was necessary? Should I go and buy some expensive fancy-pants course about how to write good articles?

I suppose I could have gone ahead and done that. The truth is though, it wasn't necessary and I'll tell you why...

If you really take the time to look at all the best article directories, you will discover that all the best ones provide all the tutorial information and help you need. The best of them will have sections that will show you precisely how to write a decent article. Also, you will often find tutorial topics on the site which you can learn from.

The problem is that most people are in far too much of a hurry to get started and as a result they never actually read these tutorials. That is one very big mistake!

If you would only take the time to read the tutorial information on these article directories, you would be putting yourself way ahead of most people who can't be bothered to do so. And the time would be very well spent!

You should also take the time to peruse the best articles on these article directory sites as you will learn a lot about writing good articles and how they should actually be formatted just by looking at the most popular articles. Often you will find them listed in something like a 'Most Read Articles' or Most Popular Articles' section and these articles achieve the top spots for a reason! So make sure you learn from them!

When I decided to take the time to find out why other people's articles were so successful, I finally realised where I had been going wrong and I discovered why all the top online marketers were so adamant that writing articles was always one of their major ways of getting traffic to their sites in vast numbers.

Writing good articles is only the very first part of the process though. It's absolutely vital if you want to really succeed in a big way with your article marketing efforts, that you also know how BEST to submit articles to the article directories. Then you can really show your competitors a clean pair of heels!