If your online business has leveled out, and your attempts at advertising do little to build site traffic, your situation is anything but hopeless. There are always new and developing online marketing strategies perfect for small businesses, and it's really just a matter of choosing one and going with it. But which one is best?

Article marketing is a small business marketing strategy that has been around for years, but which is now gaining steam. Though its basic ideas have been around as long as business itself, online infrastructure is only now catching up. For years after the advent of the Internet, large corporations with broad, pre-existing name recognition were favored, as Web technology was still insufficient to adequately support small businesses.

Today, however, the "You Revolution" is sweeping the Internet, leaving no online sector untouched. Large corporations are floundering with unimaginative, traditional marketing strategies, while smaller businesses are gaining more ground every day.

Blogs, MySpace, and YouTube have all played a large part in this revolution. By their very nature, they put the individual voice on a level playing field with large businesses and corporations. You may already use this yourself. Many small businesses have begun to include blogs on their websites, which they use to keep their customers informed on new developments.

MySpace and YouTube, meanwhile, are developing mediums, and still open to innovation. Yet the problem with blogs and these sites is that large companies are beginning to use them to make themselves look like small businesses. For example, if you search YouTube for "Coca-Cola," you'll find several faux-folksy videos generated by the Coca-Cola Corporation itself, made to look like the subversive, individual-generated content that YouTube is known for.

Article marketing goes a step further. In addition to marketing your small business, article marketing, in the long-term, can actually help undermine the power of large corporations.

It's already quite obvious, in most cases, that smaller businesses tend to provide better quality products and services than larger businesses -- but most consumers don't realize this, assuming that the bigger and more visible the company, the better its service must be. Small business owners see through this fallacy.

To draw more customers to your online business, you must make people aware of your own exceptional expertise in your field. The secret to doing this is article marketing.

In short, through this strategy, you're going to generate solid content, which will then be distributed throughout the Internet. Each time a piece of your content is published, it will include an "About the Author" section, in which you'll tell readers a little about yourself and provide a link to your business.

Generating content is easy. If you spend any amount of time on the Internet, you probably read many short, thought-provoking articles. This is the content on which the Internet thrives. When we consider the fact that, at this very moment, there are millions of people doing nothing more than sitting at desks and reading short online articles, we begin to grasp the potential power of article marketing.

It's basically a three-step process. First, write articles. Second, submit your article to an article marketing service, which you can find through Google. Third, watch your site traffic grow.

Article marketing services help you revise your articles, and then, after you place your articles into categories relevant to your field, your content is distributed to a ready-made market -- that is, people who regularly read Web content relating to your field. It's a mutually beneficial relationship; they'll learn important information from your articles, and you'll gain new customers through the link included in your "About the Author" section.

To cap it off, this increased traffic to your site will raise your website higher in search results. As you've probably noticed, search engines seem to favor large companies. This is because search engines base their results on the number of times a site's links are clicked. So in addition to gaining new, interested customers through your informative content, you'll also be easier to find.