This post was guest blogged by Tim Somers, Bizarre Promotions, Inc.

Online advertising is exploding; a good campaign can be very expensive. Using Article Marketing is a very efficient way to drive traffic to your website at little or no cost at all. Writing articles based on topics that your products or services fall under must contain valuable information to your readers. Do not hard sell them; they should be informative giving the reader confidence that you are an expert in your field.

Why Is Article Marketing Powerful?

Articles should be 300 to 400 words long, and just mention the “keyword” or main topic a very few times. Your articles should focus on sub-topics that go hand in hand with your main keyword. This will give search engines like Google some great food for their spiders. Articles stuffed with keyword and meaningless dribble will not help your search engine rankings, in fact they may hurt you more than not posting at all.

Many miss this very important part; make sure you include a resource box or bio at the end of each article. This is how you plug yourself, your product and provide a link to your website. It’s always a good idea to invite the reader to visit your website or blog for more information on your article topic.

So you aren’t the best writer in town? You can still use this promotional strategy to increase your website traffic. Finding ghostwriters that write good quality articles can be challenging, but you can use services like Enlance and Rent Coder and usually pay around $5 per article. You may what to tweak the article just a bit to make is sound like you are the one talking to the reader – make it personal!

You Have An Article – Now What?

You have completed the hardest part of this marketing technique, writing or buying a good informative article. Now you need to submit it to various article directories. GoArticles.com, EzineArticles and Search Warp are some of the top directories that accept articles for free. You will find may pay to post directories, but I’ve never used them with so many legitimate free resources available.

Some guru’s will tell you should submit to 100 or 200 directories for each article, but I have found that submitting to 5 to 10 directories per article is more effective. This will reduce any penalties for duplicate content – which would make all your efforts worthless.

To streamline the process of submitting articles I use an article submitting program called Article Submitter. This program is very cost effect and includes a hugh database of directories cutting down the time it takes to find the directories in your niche and then submitting to them. Can’t stress enough not to summit the same article to more than 10 directories, rewrite them or submit different topics.

You should also create a “Google Alert” with the title of each article you submit, this will notify you when one of your articles has been indexed. You can also see who used your article, and then you can contact the website or blog owner and build a relationship so you can regularly provide him/her with articles. This type of relationship is even better for rankings than submitting articles, because you do not submit these articles to any other directories or websites – the content is fresh and unique and Google loves that – no duplication what so ever.

Tim Somers is owner of Bizarre Promotions, Inc. a promotional products distributor with over 750,000 promo items to help your business grow.