There are numerous ways to go about generating traffic on the web. Writing articles is a method that has two benefits, but only if you keep the quality of your work at a high level.

Writing articles is a great way to promote your site for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, you generate links to your site through the author byline. As people republish your article, you will find the link getting clicked as people want to see what you and your site is all about. In short, we are talking about free traffic.

The second benefit is, of course, the increased link count to your site. If you are pursuing a search engine optimization campaign for your site, you need quality links from other relevant sites. When your article is published on another site, you get an inbound only link to your site, which is far better than a reciprocal link. In general, you can also expect that site to be relevant to your site since a beauty site is probably not going to publish your article about plumbing.

Finding success through writing articles is a double edged sword. Typically, you need to crank out a few articles each and every week. After a bit, this can get pretty tiring. When you lose focus, the quality of your articles goes down. A couple bad articles can really hurt your efforts. Why? You can lose loyal webmasters that republish your work.

Webmasters come to article directories looking for high quality content that they can implement on their site with ease. The problem, of course, is there are a ton of articles that are junk because they are poorly written, sales pitches and so on. Once a webmaster finds an author that writes good stuff, they tend to stick with them. Every time they need new content, they are going to search to see if the author has published anything new since they last looked. If you keep the quality high, they will often just grab your articles without even reading them!

Obviously, you want to obtain as many loyal webmasters of this sort as possible. That being said, you cannot take them for granted. If you start writing poor articles, they are going to eventually mark you off their list of writers they can trust. When that occurs, you can really see your republish rates drop dramatically.

I use articles to promote a wide variety of sites. I tend to use different author names for each site. For one site subject, I developed a strong webmaster following. When I published new articles, I would quickly get 200 reads within three days. Due to a family problem, I had to stop writing articles on the site for about six months. I hired a freelance writer to do the work for me and submit the articles. She wrote okay, but it turned into a nightmare. By the time I got back to work, a new article would produce about 10 views in three days. Yikes! Making matters worse, it is going to be very difficult to get those webmasters to even look at my fake name again. Instead of having a reputation for quality articles, that name now has a reputation for writing crap.

If you write articles to promote your site, learn from my lesson. Nothing is worse than having your efforts go down the drain because you slacked off for a bit.