How many articles do you need to write per week or per month if you want to get traffic? How many articles do you need to write if you wanted to make $500 a month? What if you wanted to make $3,000 a month?

Unfortunately, there isn't one cookie-cutter answer. It depends on your industry, it depends where your articles are published, it depends on the search engines and it also depends on the quality of the article contents.

That said, this article will seek to give a rough guideline of how much you need to write to hit your income goals.

 Where Are the Articles Published?

Where the articles are published has a huge impact on how much traffic you get from the article.

If you're publishing on article directories, the traffic probably won't be huge. It's rare that an article on a directory makes it to the top of a competitive term. Usually, you'll rank for low-volume terms and get a very modest stream of traffic from it.

The amount of traffic you get from guest blogging and writing for other people's websites varies a lot. It depends on how much traffic they get, the positioning of your articles, and whether or not the article has a permanent placement.

For example, if you're writing a blog post, what will likely happen is that you'll get a surge of traffic when that blog post is on the front page, then the traffic will quickly peter out. On the other hand, if you get on a permanent page or have a link to the blog post posted on the home page, you'll get a steady stream of traffic.

High-traffic websites and blogs will, of course, bring in more traffic than smaller sites. That said, it's still often much more effective to work with a bunch of smaller sites first before approaching larger and more established websites.

 How Many Articles per Month / Week?

Some people who make their living primarily through internet marketing write as many as 40 articles per week. Even if most articles only generate a trickle of traffic, with 160 articles a month the site will soon be getting flooded with visitors.

On the other hand, prominent blogs can write just one single good article a week and still get thousands of visitors. Particularly controversial, funny, or informational posts can even go "viral" and hit astronomical levels of traffic.

The short answer is: the more the better. No less than three a week for the first two months is recommended if you're just starting a brand-new site. If you have an established site and an established reader base, you could tune it down to as little as two per month without losing reader interest.