One of the best ways to promote a Website inexpensively is to write articles about your Website's topic and submit them to "free content" sites. These sites are easily found; just type "submit free content" into your favorite search engine. Each article you write will have a "resource box" that includes your name, a brief bio and a link to your own site. These articles are shared with other Website owners to publish them, and soon, your name and links to your site will propagate throughout the Web. The system works well, since search engines respect incoming links to Websites as indicators that the site is important. The more links you have to your site, the more highly the search engines regard your site. Many authors realize that writing articles will generate links, but most write a few articles and then give up. The reasons vary, but most authors will probably say that it simply becomes tedious to spend time writing articles without direct compensation, only to give them away with the faint hope that Website traffic will come about as a result of the work. It is indeed difficult to maintain the discipline to continue writing articles day in and day out, but there is one thing that motivates me on a daily basis ? readily observable statistics that show that writing articles is generating traffic for my sites.

There are several easy ways to check if publishing articles is generating incoming links and traffic. One way is to go to Google and type in "link: name-of-website.com" (without quotes.) Google will return a list of sites that contain links to your own site. Usually, these links will come from your published articles, and you can browse through them to see how your articles are weaving their way through the Web. It's fascinating to see how your articles appear on Websites you've never even heard of! If you do such a search on a daily basis, you will almost certainly see the number of links increase daily. It's a great source of motivation to see that the site that had 20 incoming links yesterday now has 200 today. Each of those links represents a place that someone can click to come to your site, and 200 links is nice, but why not 2000? The more the number of links increase, the greater the incentive you have to write more articles. More articles yield more links, and more links yields more traffic.

I started writing articles about eight weeks ago and I've been astounded at the results. One of my Websites went from zero incoming links to 1000 incoming links in just ten days! Once I saw how quickly the links were increasing, I vowed to write at least one article per day. I begin each day by using a link popularity check software tool to count my incoming links. Such tools are freely available;; Link Popularity Check is one such tool. These tools show link counts for several different search engines at once. I'll also check the stats through my Web host to see where the incoming traffic to my sites is coming from. More often than not, the visitors came from a site with a published article! Once I see the day's link and visitor count, I am usually motivated to find a topic and write the article for the day.

Writing articles is a great way to generate incoming links to your Website, and the results can increase daily if you just keep up with it. It only takes a few minutes per day to write an article, and the time is well spent.

?Copyright 2005 by Retro Marketing. Charles Essmeier is the owner of Retro Marketing, a firm devoted to informational Websites, StructuredSettlementHelp.com, a site devoted to structured settlements and LemonLawHelp.net, a site devoted to information regarding automobile lemon laws.