Article marketing is a fantastic low-cost way to get advertising for your business. Savvy online marketers have been long using this tool, and in the past couple of years it's become very popular. But how many articles do you need make sales?

All your articles have two functions: to educate, and to pre-sell. In some industries, education takes priority. Your customers may be completely unaware of the value of a service, or a product - indeed, they may be new to your field.

So education is vital. There's a danger here, however, and it's this. Your articles may perform brilliantly in their educational role, and once your prospect has time to think, he may turn elsewhere to make a purchase.

Therefore it's vital that you have some way of staying in touch with your prospects, so that they remain aware of you, and you get the sale. Getting an email address and/ or other contact details is vital. When you stay in touch, you'll be the one a prospect turns to when he's ready to buy.

This means that a prime function of your articles, whether you have two or hundreds, should be encourage the prospect to give you his contact details.

Your articles will pre-sell too; they act as your 24x7x365 sales people, and the more articles you have, the more sales people you have working for you.

Let's look at three ways you can get your articles working for you.

1. Investigate keywords

Your articles act as gateways to your site's sales pages. Therefore you need to write articles targeting the primary keywords your customers will type into the search engines' query boxes to find you.

In competitive industries, the competition for the first ten slots on the search engines' results pages is fierce. Articles will help you to achieve a spot in those top ten slots because of their authoritative nature: they're both informative and educational.

So investigate your referrer logs. Which keywords are winning traffic for you now? Write articles targeting those keywords. These are likely to be "long tail" keywords, which means that they're less competitive.

2. Write articles for those keywords which get traffic

In addition to targeting long tail keywords, target your industry's most competitive keywords directly. With a number of articles, all targeting those keywords, over time you'll get rankings for them, it's inevitable. However, because these keywords are competitive, realize that ranking for them will take longer.

Here's an additional weapon you can use. Once you've written an article and posted it to your site, write a press release announcing the article. A press release will get you onto the Web's news pages, and will provide healthy backlinks which will give your article a real boost in the search engines.

3. Keep track of your articles, and link to them from other pages on your Web site

Although articles are valuable, you can make them even more valuable by making them a real feature of your site. Link to your articles from other pages. I've seen many sites where articles are relegated to an "Articles" ghetto: they're cut off from the rest of the site. Please don't do this - your articles are gold. Treat them with the respect they deserve.

The answer to "How many articles do you need to make sales?" is another question: "How many sales do you want?" The more articles you have online, the more sales you will make. In that sense, article marketing is just like advertising - but unlike advertising, your articles will keep working faithfully for you for many years, providing an outstanding return on your initial investment.