It is true that it's easier and cheaper than ever to establish yourself on The Net. But it is also true that the competition for website visitors and potential customers is fierce. This can be seen in the exorbitant bidding price of some hot keywords in Google's popular Adwords program. If you don't have the marketing resources of some of the big guys, don't worry. There are several ingenious ways to drive targeted traffic to your website, without emptying your pockets.

Enter the free article directory. Where there used to be only ten or so big article directories, there are now more than 500! While many of these directories are little more than advertisements wrapped around some moderately useful content, there are others that are well laid-out. Article directories are like a cross between an encyclopedia and a blog. They provide information on a variety of topics with articles written by a diverse group of authors.

The good directories are updated at least daily and are well-indexed by the search engines. Visitors can view the latest or most popular articles, as well as search through all articles by topic or author. Those searching for information will often end up at article sites as there are literally millions of article directory pages cached by the Google engine.

Article directories offer an amazing avenue for website promotion. Anyone who is managing a site can benefit from the stream of traffic created by article directory submission. If you have the time and ability to write the articles yourself, then this is a great way to increase your website traffic. Not only do you receive human visitors that click on your promotional links for more information, you also get valuable backlinks pointing to your pages. The search engines eat these up!

As a website owner, it is not enough to write a few articles a month and hope for a wave of traffic to your site. Your articles must be written well. They should be grammatically correct, spell-checked, with correct punctuation and capitalization. The content should be informative and/or entertaining. The article should be written with the reader in mind - not as an advertisement laden with self-promotion.

To make full use of the promotional capabilities of the article directory, you must write compelling articles with enticing resource boxes that will motivate the reader to follow the links to your website. You should also get into the habit of submitting at least one article a week. Articles bring in lots of traffic when they are first approved by the directories. This is because they are current and they will bring in the most traffic at this time. However, the pages are often quickly dropped from Google's search results (in as little as one month's time).

Submitting an article a week will keep current backlinks to your site in the coveted Google search results. It will also increase the total number of backlinks to your site, thereby increasing your rank within various search results. While quantity is important, it is not as important as the frequency with which you submit articles, or the content and quality of the articles you submit.

If you submit well-written articles on a regular basis, article directories can provide you with a consistent stream of visitors to your site for a very minimal cost. In the world of internet marketing it isn't always true that you get what you pay for.