Writing articles is one of the best ways to promote your website and best of all it is free! You don't need to be an expert on the topic you are writing about - just pick an area that is related to the theme of your website, do a bit of research using a search engine and before you know it you will have more knowledge on that subject than most.

Submitting your Article to Directories

Once you've written your article, you can submit it to article directories for free. There are hundreds of article directories on the web so I won't list them all here as you can easily find them by searching on Google, but to get you started, here are the directories that I have had the highest exposure from in the past:

• Article City
• Article Dashboard
• Article Directory
• Ezine Articles
• Go Articles
• Idea Marketers
• Internet Home Business Articles
• Search Warp

Be careful to follow the formatting instructions for each article directory. Most directories require articles to be submitted with no formatting. It will save you time if you create an unformatted article with no hard line breaks (apart from between paragraphs) in a text document. It also helps to prepare a short description of your article along with your keywords as some directories also require this information to be submitted with the article.

Also, don't forget to include a a resource box at the end of your article. This is your chance to tell everyone about you and your website. If someone has taken the time to read your article to the end, the chances are that they will be interested in finding out more. This is your opportunity to gain another targeted visitor to your site.

Article Submission Tools and Software

If you don't have time to manually submit your article to all of the article directories, you may want to consider paying to have someone to do this for you. There are various websites offering this service, but the most comprehensive and value for money article submission service that I am aware of is Article Marketer

Alternatively you could use software to automate your article submissions e.g.

• Article Post Robot - allows you to submit your articles automatically to over 240 article directories and over 50 announcement lists. You can read a review of Article Post Robot here.
• Article Announcer - this software allows you to automatically submit your articles to all the article directories, ezine owners and announcement lists. Check out my blog for a review of Article Announcer.
• Ezine Announcer - allows you to automatically submit all your articles to article directories (and your ezines to ezine directories). If you write articles regularly or have your own ezine this software is a great time saver.

Don't want to write your own articles?

If you really don't want to write your own articles, one solution is to pay someone else to write an article for you. This is known as Ghost Writing - the article is original and 100% yours to add your name and resource box to.

Another alternative to getting your articles ghost written is to use Private Label Rights Articles.

An even cheaper option is to buy a package such as the Viral Article Toolkit. If you buy this, you receive 199 rebrandable articles, which you can use and publish with your own personal resource box. You can change these articles in any way you like to make them more personal, or you can just leave them as they are.

Once you start writing all these articles and getting them published you will find that the number of visitors to your site increase and your search engine ranking will also be given a boost as a result of all these extra back links.