One of the best ways that you can drive traffic to your web site for free is via Articles Marketing! This is one method that I love best because it is free, effective and it builds credibility for you online!

To put articles marketing in simple terms: it means that you write an article about a topic, submit the article to articles directories, then allows other web sites or individuals to use your article for their own use but with your author’s credits and copyrights intact so that you are still the legal owner of the article or contents that you have created.

Anyone can become an author and writer online if you want. And these are the steps that you can take to start your article marketing:

1.    Write an article on a topic that you are interested about.
2.    Find a popular article directory to submit your article to. One very popular article directory is ezinearticles.com.
3.    Taking ezinearticles.com as an example, you can go to ezinearticles.com and sign up for a free account to start submitting your articles. Most article directories allow you to set up an online account for free.
4.    Upon successfully signing up for ezinearticles.com (or any article directories that you have chosen), submit your article to ezinearticles.com and wait for the editors at ezinearticles.com to approve your article.
5.    When your articles have been approved by ezinearticles.com, your article will appear on ezinearticles.com and you can reach out to potentially tens of thousands of traffic when you are being featured on ezinearticles.com.
6.    When your article appear on ezinearticles.com, many web sites or individuals/businesses will “pull” your article from ezinearticles.com and publish them on their web sites if they like what you write or if they think what you have written is relevant to what they are doing. What this means is that once you submitted your approved article to ezinearticles.com, you may potentially see many web sites all over the Internet featuring the article that you have written! What do you think this can do for you?

Articles marketing can help you to improve your visibility online and increases the likelihood of people finding you on the Internet.

Using my own experience, I took about 20 minutes to write one article in January 2007, another 10 minutes to submit it to ezinearticles.com. So far, this one article has generated me more than 100 email opt-ins, earned me more than USD$110 as of this writing, plus my article is appearing all over the Internet on other web sites. Not bad for 30 minutes of work! What if I multiply the effort by 10 times? Think about it!

Some tips for you when you write your articles:
a)    Remember to include a link back to your web site in your resource/credit box so that you can direct traffic back to your web to collect opt-in, or to read your salesletter, or to buy something from you etc.
b)    Each article directory has their own rules and regulations for submission of articles, so ensure that you comply to all of them. Failure to do so means that your article will be rejected and you will need to re-edit the article and submit it again to ensure your compliance with their articles writing guidelines before your article will be approved.
c)    There are article submission services that can help you submit your articles to many articles directories if you are wiling to pay for such services. You can search for it online.
d)    If you hate to write, you can also outsource your writing to some ghostwriters for a fee. You can look for ghostwriters online if you need some!

In summary, article marketing is a free, long-term strategy to generate web site traffic. To me, this is one of the best ways available to anyone because if you can do it right, you can do it only once, and get paid many times over and over again!