In the offline world, article marketing is utilized by magazines, newspapers and mailing circulars. It is highly successful, which is why so many businesses are willing to pay a pretty penny to get featured in these publications. Yet, if you possess basic high school English skills, you can take advantage of article marketing to get free website traffic.

In fact, as an Internet marketer, you can advertise through as many articles as you wish completely free of charge.

That's right you could write 100, 1,000 or even a million articles without having to pay a penny in advertising costs. In some cases you may even make money while using online article marketing. How is this so? It's through the power of article directories, Adsense revenue-sharing sites and online writing portals.

Article directories, such as EzineArticles or Article City, don't pay you any money to write your articles, but you get a ton of exposure. This is very important if you plan on getting your site noticed by search engines. What happens is when you submit an article, Google and other search engines immediately notice it because the article directory itself is already ranked so high. You can also get a SEO advantage if other Webmasters decide to use your article on their site. This is because they must advertise your URL with your article. If they don't they violate the terms of the article directory and could be sued for plagiarism and/or copyright infringement.

Adsense revenue-sharing sites work in a similar vein for increasing web traffic, except for two major differences. Firstly, they tend not to offer articles to webmasters. Secondly, they compensate you for your time by letting you have a percentage of their Adsense profits. To take advantage of this, you must provide them with your Adsense code. From that point on, you will get credits for clicks 50 percent of the time, (or as stipulated by the site).

Finally, you can get more website traffic from online writing portals. Associated Content and Informative Resource are examples. To get free website traffic from these venues, you must make sure your article is good enough to get approved by an editor. If it is you'll get two things: more website traffic and an upfront payment. You get the upfront payment because your article helps bring as much traffic to their site as it would yours.

To create your articles, you can write them yourself or you can hire a ghostwriter to do it. If you were to write these articles yourself, it might take you some time, depending on the complexity of the subject.

In conclusion, don't ignore the potential article marketing holds for increasing your website traffic. Sure, you'll still have to work at it, but if you do things properly, you'll get tons of free website traffic.