In the age of online businesses, affiliate marketing, and more websites than you can count, it takes some insight to know where you can advertise for your product or business. However, did you know you could advertise for little to no money?

Many people do a variety of ways to drive traffic to their site. They pay for PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising, which is popular on Google and Yahoo search engines. They may buy impressions for banner ads, which can cost a lot of money depending on how popular the website can be. These examples are fine if you have big bucks to spend in your advertising money bag, but what about the little guy? What about the brand new business owner that does not have a lot of capital for advertising?

The solution is simple. I will share one technique that will help generate traffic to your website or blog. That solution is writing articles. I know what you are going to say, “I never liked writing. It reminds me of term papers in high school. What a scary thought!” I understand the feeling. Here is the good news. If you don’t like writing articles, have someone else do it for you. Hire someone to write or order pre-written articles from an article service. This is called “ghost writing,” and is legal and ethical. Many big name authors have ghost writers to write articles for them in magazines.

If you have an article, and submit that article to an article submission website, you have just created free advertising. Let me explain even more. When people see your article on the article submission website, they are allowed to place that article on their website. They must agree to not change the article and leave your contact information and website link on the bottom. When people read your article, they may want to find out more about your product and/or service, so they will click on your link and “bingo” … you have a new and unique visitor at your website.

Compare it to having someone walk through your storefront door because they just read an article you interviewed for with a local news reporter. Now take that principle a step further. Submit the same article to 30,000 publishers including article sites, email groups and distribution lists. Suddenly you have distributed 30,000 possibilities for people to come through your store front, or website in this case.

This article submission process is also called “back linking.” You are providing a link from the article to your website. If your link is submitted on various websites, you have many back links. This is very attractive to search engines. You will be placed higher up the list of search engine results, if you have a lot of back links to your website, especially if you have fresh material written for your article. You can use some one else’s articles, but you want to make sure it is not stale because it could be published on various websites already. Search engines love fresh material. Ultimately, it is better to write your own articles.

You can manually submit your articles to these websites, or you can pay for an article submission service that can reach all 30,000 locations at once. It all depends on your advertising budget.

So try to forget about those boring term papers and think about the potential profits from this simple and inexpensive technique of advertising.

Much success to your business.