The internet is flooded with an unlimited amount of websites, fresh ideas and free content and even now as we speak is growing at an unbelievable rate. Knowing all this, do you still wish to build a successful article website? The chances of success sound slim, right?

Well it shouldn't because it actually isn't that hard. I'll get straight into it and tell you step by step the main paths I took to accomplishing my popular article website.

First things first, choose a niche topic or market, in my case it was 'Self Help'. It is vital that you try to remain unique and focus your site on one single topic. Make certain that you do not get carried away and begin adding non-relevant content to your site.

When it comes to choosing a topic, it requires two important steps. Firstly, choose a topic that you are interested in so that you are motivated to build the site. Secondly, choose the topic keywords based on words that are searched for regularly online. Now, in order to get a rough indication of how many people are actually searching for the keywords I wanted to optimize my site for, I used the Overture search suggestion tool. It's not exact, and doesn't measure Google searches, but it does give a very good estimate.

Now it is time to start building the site! I was lucky that my brother is one of the developers of an Online Content Management system called ArticleLive. It's created by Interspire and is so easy to use. I pretty much had an Instant Web Site that gave a feel and look of great quality. I was able to build and manage my own content site from scratchand this was back when I had absolutely no technical experience!

One of the most vital factors in order to have a successful article site is differentiating your site from the rest and provoking visitors to always come back. How to do this is basic. Simply make sure that all you provide is quality information. And that was exactly what I did and still do.

There are literally millions of articles for me to upload onto my site from other article websites and from authors submitting their articles to me. Note that you are allowed to copy articles off other websites, so long as you keep the original author's bio intact.

It is indeed tempting to quickly upload and add as many articles as you can to grow your site quickly and increase traffic. However, this will only be beneficial in the short term. For the long term, you wish for your visitors to come back to your site over and also continually attract new visitors. Quality articles will help make this happen. I made sure that every single article on my website was proof read at least once as well as be interesting and helpful. All articles trying to sell or advertise a service or product were not accepted. Articles with links in the body were also not accepted. Although this process does take more time and effort, the return on your investment can be huge.

One great form of promoting your article site is to do what I am doing right now. Write an article that relates to the topic of your article sitewith your bio and link intactand submit it to well known article sites around the web. This way your link is displayed all over the web, which as a result will help build your Google Page Rank (if you are unfamiliar with the term 'Page Rank' I highly suggest you begin researching and understanding the importance of it). In addition to this, your article can be read by millions of people all over the world who are highly likely to click on your link and visit your site, just like you are going to do after reading this article :)

There are off course other important factors that affect an article site such as:

? SEOSearch Engine Optimization
? Google Page Rank
? Customer / Visitor feedback and friendly support
? Website look and feel
? ROIReturn on Investment techniques

However, these factors would require an article all to themselves!

Nevertheless, I can not stress enough the importance of quality. Out of every factor mentioned, quality is the one thing that will guarantee your website success in the long run. An article site that offers free and high quality articles is surely guaranteed to attract new visits and sustain loyal visitors. By simply going through the easy steps I went through before, you could easily have one of the best article sites for your choice of topic.

Remember, quality content results in a quality website.