We all love immediate gratification – and when we’re starting a marketing plan for our websites, such as one including article marketing, we would certainly love to see the fruits of all our hard work right from Day One!

Realistically though, this is usually not the way it works, and that’s true of any online marketing strategy, not just article marketing.

While it is possible that with one article submission you may see a huge surge of traffic right away if a major ezine picks up your article for publication, for the most part article marketing has a “delayed gratification” element to it.

Fortunately, as with most instances of delayed gratification, the wait is worth the payoff!

When you hear successful article marketers talking about how much traffic they get from the articles they submit or how they’re dominating the search engine rankings thanks to their article submissions, you have to keep in mind that they didn’t get there overnight.

Using articles to drive traffic back to your website isn’t hard, but there are a few things you should know if you want to position yourself for success:

1) How many articles should I submit?

Article marketing is one of those tools that almost anyone can do. You don’t need to be a SEO junkie or a technically advanced internet user. All you need to be able to do is write educational articles in relation to your website’s niche and submit them consistently over the long term.

How much is “consistent”?

While you don’t want to inundate publishers with your articles, you do want to submit a steady amount of articles. I would recommend submitting at most 1-8 articles a month.

That number is pretty doable most of us can find the time to write at least one quality article a month, and even more if we put our minds to it!

If you submit at least one article a month, you can see great results, and the more articles you submit (up to a point), the more exposure your website receives.

I wouldn’t exceed 8 articles a month though, because in my experience most quality publishers don’t like to be bombarded with articles from single authors, simply because in general the higher the quantity, the lower the quality of each article.

By submitting a limited number of articles a month, you can focus on quality, rather than quantity – the results from a few quality articles will generally always far outweigh the results from lots of low quality articles.

2) How long does it take to see results?

When you start article marketing consistently (submitting 1-8 articles a month), you can expect to see results within 3-4 months.

Why does it take that long?

Google doesn’t update their rankings on a daily or even a monthly basis–usually their ranking adjustments are done every 3 months or so.

So, no matter what link building or traffic driving method you’re using, if you were hoping to see an increase in search engine ranking and more traffic from Google, you need to be a little patient.

Don’t submit one or two articles, and then a week later say, “Ugh–this isn’t working! I quit.”

Take a clue from the experts who are seeing the results you’re after–commit to doing your article marketing consistently over a long span of time (ideally over the entire lifetime of your website), and know that it will likely take 3-4 months to see results from your efforts.

3) How can I measure my results?

There are 4 main ways to measure your results with article marketing:

*An increase in traffic to your website.

*An increase in backlinks

*An increase in PageRank

*An increase in your search engine ranking for your keyword terms

Obviously, in order to measure your results using these factors, you want to take a baseline of each of these stats before you start article marketing, so you’ll have a basis of comparison.

Remember though, when you take your initial baseline of these 4 elements, you will not see a change right away. It will take 3-4 months from the time your article marketing campaign begins to see changes in your baselines.

The biggest obstacle I see with folks not seeing the results they were looking for with article marketing is not the actual writing and submitting of articles it’s managing their expectations.

It’s natural for people to want to see results right away, but you know better now!

Article marketing is an extremely effective way to build links and drive traffic to your website over the long term, so don’t let unreal expectations spoil your ability to stick with it.

Now that you know what to expect, how many articles to submit, how long it takes to see results, and how to measure your results, you’re light years ahead of the pack and are right on track for following in the footsteps of other expert article marketers!