Many have started a legitimate work from home business online due to its flexible working hours and high earning possibilities. Well, they would get all excited, register a domain name for their new found online business and sign up with a hosting company. The next step is to drive traffic to their site and generate sales. More traffic equals to more sales, simple. In this article I will be touching on the importance of article marketing and how to utilize it to boost your ranking in the search engines.

There are basically three ways of driving traffic with article marketing. One way is, you write interesting articles on popular topics and persuade readers to visit your site and find out more information through your author biography. This is the direct traffic driving method, because you will get a direct response from the readers to visit your site. The effectiveness of this method would very much depend on the online business niche that you are targeting and how big your market share is.

The other method would be to write articles on the keywords or keyword phrases that your site is optimized with. Now, this helps in boosting your ranking in the search engines. This is what I call the indirect traffic driving method, because you will only see the results after 3 or 6 months down the road of constant article writing and submissions. The best part is, once your site is placed in the first page of search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN, you will get an avalanche of traffic for free. Needless to say, this is the best means of traffic online business owners can hope for. Let me elaborate more on this.

When you submit your articles to article directories, you are actually creating one-way backlinks to your website and these are backlinks of the highest quality in the search engines point of view. Generally, the higher the number of one-way backlinks you have to your site, the higher your site ranking will be. There's one crucial point to take note of though, when creating anchor texts in your author biography. That is, always use keywords or keyword phrases that your article is optimized with as your anchor texts and no other. The third and the ultimate method would be to combine methods one and two above. This way you will get instant and long-term traffic.

My advice to you who are just starting out or have started a legitimate work from home business online is to learn SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Do the on-page optimization for your website and carry out off-page optimization (backlinks) with article writing and article submissions to article directories. You will also be viewed as an expert or an authority in your market niche when you start writing articles, thus, gaining trust and respect from visitors to your site. To me, this is the best way of promoting your online business.