You need traffic, and Google can give you traffic. There are two ways that Google can send traffic to your site: an expensive way and a free way. I'm going to show you how to make Google give you traffic for free.

You don't want just any traffic, you want TARGETED traffic. For those not familiar with the terminology, targeted traffic refers to clicks to your website from people who are actually interested in the topic of your site. Your marketing will be much more effective if your clicks are targeted. Here is an example of targeted marketing. Imagine a salesman who is trying to sell dental chairs. He puts together a flyer describing the great benefits of his particular brand of chair, and he decides to give the flyers to people. Which group of people do you think will respond better to his flyer - a group women at a scrapbooking convention, or a group of dentists at an American Dental Association meeting? It's a no brainer! But better yet, what if he went to a seminar called, "How To Start Your First Dental Practice From Scratch." These guys are already in the mindset to buy dental chairs. That’s targeted traffic.

When I started my first online business, I went straight to Google Adwords. This is one of the fastest ways to get targeted traffic. Basically, you pay Google to have your ad appear on the right side of the browser. You do this by bidding on keywords. When someone types your keywords into Google, the ad appears. Just go to Google and type anything into the search box. If you look on the right side of the screen, you will see little three-line ads. You probably didn't even know these were ads. Not only are they ads, but people are paying every time you click on those ads. This is the perfect kind of targeted traffic because people are actually searching for your topic.

So when I started my first Adwords campaign, slowly but surely I developed a targeted marketing campaign that was sending 40 to 50 visitors to my site. These people were ready to buy what I was selling. And they did; but at what a price! I was spending $80 per day in advertising. Way too much! I was only making about $100 in sales per day, so after subtracting advertising costs, my net income was only $20 per day. If I could only get traffic without paying for it, my yearly income would increase from $7,300.00 per year ($20/day x 365 days) to $36,500 per year ($100/day x 365 days). You’re probably wondering how you get free targeted traffic - I'm going to tell you in the next few paragraphs.

When I realized how much I was spending on advertising, I started to research methods of getting free targeted traffic; often referred to as search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. If your site appears on the first page of results for a Google search, then you get free traffic. Not only that, it is targeted traffic because someone has just typed in the phrase or keyword related to your site. So how do you get on the first page? In order to understand this, you need to know a little about how Google ranks their pages. It all comes down to one principle: Google wants to provide high quality search results, so they want to rank relevant links higher than irrelevant links. One of their methods of determining relevancy is to count how many other websites are linked to your site. These are called "back links." The assumption is that, the more links to your site, the more relevant your site must be.

Armed with this knowledge, I went out and bought some links. You may not know this, but there are actually companies that will allow you to buy a link on their web pages. I bought one link for $20 per month, another for $75 per month. It was much cheaper than Adwords, but it didn't get me ranked any higher, and it didn't get me much extra traffic. Two links was just not enough links to rank me higher on Google. What I needed was a way to get LOTS of back links. Then I heard about an intriguing idea: article marketing.

Article marketing is simple. You write an article, you put a link to your website at the bottom of the article (in the author information area). Then you post your article to an "article site." That's it. For every article that you post, you get a link to your site. And not only that, it's a targeted link because the content of your article will be related to the content of your website. It is best to post to as many article sites as you can. Every time Google sees a new targeted link to your site, it will rank you a little higher. There are literally hundreds of article sites and they are all looking for fresh content. Post your article to as many as you can find. Presto! Now you have tons of back links. That is article marketing. It's that simple. And it's free.

At first, I manually posted to about seven article sites. This was fairly time consuming. I immediately notice a few extra hits to my site. But in order for article marketing to be cost effective to me, I needed a way to post to hundreds of article sites quickly and easily. Then I heard about article submission software. Basically, this software has a list of article sites in it and it guides you through the process of mass posting your article to multiple sites. So I posted the article to about 200 sites. Bam! Now my site is ranked #2 for a certain keyword combination. This is effective search engine optimization. This is article marketing.

That's it. Now you know how to make Google work for you. You no longer have to work for Google by paying for Adwords. Plus you can contribute a helpful article to the internet and make tons of money doing it. Put article marketing to work for you today. Write an article, post it, make a link, and make more money!