Writing articles to promote your blog is a free and most effective way to advertise your site. With quality content in your articles you will not only receive traffic to your site but also a lot of backs links. The back links will cause the search engines to notice you and send even more traffic as they consider this as the popularity of your site. Placing your articles in article directories gives you the opportunity to have your articles republished on other websites which can create another flow of traffic to your blog. Between 400 and 600 words is a good length for a marketable article. Most people don't have the time to read a really long article, but if your content is compelling enough a longer article could be beneficial. When writing your articles to be put in article directories you can use your author's bio to place your URL to direct people to your site. You need to make sure that your articles relate to the theme of your blog or these people will be disappointed and will not come back. The search engines would also not be happy if your article was about back pain and your blog's them is internet marketing. You don't want to disappoint the search engines! They are your key to building a successful blog. If you can't write, you can outsource your article writing to people who can write. You can just consider this as part of your advertising expenses. Articles written for you can be as low as $5.00 each but usually you will get a better quality article by paying more for it. Doing a search on Google will bring you your pick of article writers in many different price ranges. The content that you already have on your blog can be utilized to generate traffic by turning it into articles. Group together two or more of your posts to make a good article and submit it to the article directories. If you are worried about duplicate content, then you can do some minor rewriting and have some fresh articles to submit. You can place Google Adsense on your blog for your article marketing traffic to click on and bring you some income. Your Adsense ads will be relevant to your theme and therefore your targeted traffic will be more likely to click on the ads. Google pays a certain percentage to the owner of the blog every time an ad is clicked by a visitor.