Why Article Marketing?
If you are looking to get more traffic then you probably want to increase your rankings in the search engine. A great way to do that is with article marketing, but why does it work so well? Can it be effective across every niche or is a different tactic needed for your market? Is it considered black hat by the search engines?
Why It Works
Search engines want and need content. They don't provide any of it on their own so in order to provide answers to the queries that are posed to it by users, it needs to index and serve up content that others provide.
Search engines aren't the only ones relying on content to make their money. Publishers also want and need content. Content is how they show up in the search results to get traffic. It's also where they post their ads in order to make money off of their sites.
If you are able to drive traffic to the publishers site by giving them quality content that people link to, talk about in social media, and visit, you are going to be even more popular with them and the webmaster is going to want more content from you.
Why Do Article Marketing
The reason is that you want links. Not just any old link either, but a quality link that uses the anchor text you are targeting and that points to the landing page you want to rank for. You are doing the work to provide the content for another site and in exchange you want a link back to you.
You can also get traffic from the links. This traffic should be highly targeted because it clicks through a link from an article that you provided. While the traffic is nice, the real goal out of article marketing is to accumulate links with the anchor text you want to rank for.
If you get enough links to your site with the keywords that you want to rank for, eventually you will climb up the search engine results and get to No. 1. That is where the high volumes of traffic start coming in to your site.
The best part about article marketing is that it is as white-hat as you can get. This isn't toeing the line, approaching black hat status. Search engines aren't out trying to target article marketers to de-list them from their indexes. Quite the opposite in fact! They want and need the content to serve to their users so you are actually helping them out.