One of the best ways to promote your online business is by using article marketing. Writing and submitting articles to the different article directories online can drive traffic to your website for years to come. Here's a few tips to market your website using articles.

The first thing you want to do is concentrate on your on site articles. These articles are going to be the focus of attention on your website and must be good to great quality and usually between 600 - 800 words long.

The trick to land traffic from the search engines to these on site articles is to use specific keywords. Do some keyword research to find keywords that get a decent amount of searches per day but little to no competition. Compile a list of useful keywords and the use them when you write your on site articles.

On site articles are just one phase of the article marketing strategy, the other phase is the off-site articles. These would include all the articles you write and submit to other places online other than your own website or blog. Generally speaking you want these articles to be between 400 - 500 words long.

These articles are going to bring you traffic two fold. You'll get it first through the people who are actually reading your articles. And second they will bring you traffic through the search engines.

These off-site articles should be unique and decently written as well. I'm usually not as picky with the quality of these articles as much as I am with the ones on my site, but they are still good none-the-less.

At the very bottom of these articles, most article directories will allow you to leave a link back to your website. What you need to do now is use anchor links using the same keywords as your on site articles and link it back to them. So if your on site articles keywords were 'cleaning fish tanks', you should leave 'cleaning fish tanks' as an anchor link pointing to the article on your website that used those keywords.

The more anchor back links you have pointing at your on site articles, the higher your article will rank in the search engines for those keywords and the more traffic you are going to get them. The trick here is to write numerous articles and submit them so your on site articles can move up the rankings and bring you more traffic.

You can see how powerful article marketing can be after using this process over and over again with several keywords. The traffic for each article will begin to add up and over time you should be getting enough traffic to automate your online business. To keep the traffic coming along with the money, all you will have to do at this point is the bare minimum site maintenance.