I'm sure that most of you reading this will know that writing articles and distributing them to online article directories is probably the most potent and immediate way to increase traffic to your website.

In this article I will give you the benefits of this type of free website marketing.

Firstly, having written an article on your chosen subject you will be considered by many to be an expert in your chosen field.

Do you think that I'm an expert on writing articles? I've written this article and you haven't, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I know more than you! Perception nearly always defines our reality, and in some ways defies it.

Secondly, your article should always be related to your website topic. If you own a website devoted to trains, write an article about trains. Your readers will almost certainly visit your website to see what is on offer.

Thirdly, with each article that you write you will include a resource box. This resource box (sometimes called an author bio) contains whatever information that you want the reader to know, such as your website address or the web address of whatever affiliate product you are promoting at the moment.

This is perhaps the most important part of the whole process, because your main objective should be to get traffic back to your website. You may just like writing and informing or entertaining people and have no website to speak of. That's fine – whatever does it for you.

Fourthly, every article that you have published will give you a one-way link back to your website. We all know that search engines love links, but your article will be put alongside other articles with similar content and your website will mirror the content of your own article, so the search engines will prize these links higher than a link from a website that has a totally different subject matter.

Fifthly, once you have gone to the trouble of submitting your article to a zillion-and-one article directories you can sit back and relax. Let nature take its course. You now have a zillion-and-one links pointing to your website.

It gets better! Website owners are constantly on the lookout for original content for their own website or to include in their weekly ezine or newsletter. As long as your article is fairly grammatically correct, has no glaring errors and is entertaining or informative, they are entitled to use the article free-of-charge so long as they include the resource box that came with it. Do you see the wonderful potential of this fairly basic marketing vehicle?

Submitting your article to as many article directories as you can find is a fairly laborious task, but once the initial work has been done, you can sit back and relax for a while before starting work on your next article.

This article is free to re-publish.