The biggest challenge facing any online business today is how to generate enough traffic and leads for the business to succeed.

By the time the online business owner is through with paying to establish their new business, there is hardly any cash left for the most important task that has to be undertaken by every brand new enterprise, which is advertising to generate leads and ultimately badly needed customers and clients for the new online business to take off.

It gets worse because many people, who launch online businesses like joining lucrative affiliate programs, do so without spending any money and also expect to succeed without ever having to reach for their wallets.

And even if the online business entrepreneur were to have a generous advertising budget for their brand new online business, most of the initial efforts would mostly end up being a waste. This is because in most cases the entrepreneur will not know enough about the business at this stage.

The answer to both situations is posting free articles all over the net with a well written resource box that has all the information to help lead loads of traffic to your site.

Posting articles has taught me a lot about what works and what does not work. I must admit that it continues to be both an entertaining as well as a highly profitable experience for me. And it can be for any online business entrepreneur. All it requires is that you ensure that you install a meter on your web site or blog to carefully track the traffic that you are attracting with your articles.

Then you must really be prepared to test and test and test again. Even when you start to experience some minor successes with your articles, that is in fact the time you should increase the number of tests you are carrying out with your free articles marketing campaign.

Tests teach you a lot and with each new test you introduce, you learn something new and valuable that you can use to improve your business even more.

And what is more, when you have found a way to build up your opt-in email list as you go along (this can easily be done by offering some valuable information or e-course available only via email) you will actually be growing your client data base. Growing the list of your prospects and clients whom you can email regular updates to later is extremely important.

It is important to ensure that your articles are both interesting and useful to your target market. Avoid any sales letter-approach here. In fact the more you sound like an expert genuinely out to help, the more successful your articles marketing campaign will be.

You can of course find loads of valuable information on how to write articles (even if you are not a writer) and where to post them at my blog. See the resource box of this article for the address.

Christopher Kyalo is a writer/marketing expert who has made money online only by posting free articles. Visit his blog NOW which is loaded with valuable free information at; http://www.big-online-story.blogspot.com