Article marketing is a great way to drive traffic to your website, and what’s more, it can be totally free. I say “can be” because  not everyone has the necessary facility with words to write compelling, attention-getting articles, and if you’re one of those, you may want to consider hiring a professional writer rather than doing a less than stellar job of it yourself.

But if you write well and interestingly, you can do the writing yourself, and all it will cost you is your time. Placing the articles costs nothing at all. (There are three venues in which you can place the articles: On your own website, on that of a complementary business, and in an article repository such as ClickBank.)

So how do you go about it? Here are five tips to help you.

1 –  Seek out a niche within the scope of your website. Say your website deals with pet care. (You’re a groomer, a veterinarian, a purveyor of organic pet  foods, a manufacturer of pet toys….) Don’t just write a generalized article on pet care or teaching old dogs new tricks.Seek out a niche: “Are Toxic Toys Harming Your Pet?” “Canine Dentistry: Make It Painless for Both Rover and You.” “Is Your Cat Getting All the Nutrients She Needs to Live Healthy Longer?” If the article is for an article repository or someone else’s website, be sure that the bio that follows the article includes your website.

2 – Seek out an underserved  topic to write about. This is allied to the tip above. For example, you think of the three articles mentioned in tip # 1. Before simply writing those articles, take a minute to either google key words or phrases and see what comes up, or go to the article repository of your choice and feed the words in the search engine there. If you get a huge number of hits, consider that you’ll be up against an awfully large number of competitors for your readers’ attention and might  better write one (or more) of the other articles instead.

3 – Think in advance of what SEO keywords you want to use if possible, and shape your article to employ as many of those keywords as you comfortably can. Note that I said “comfortably.” Too often, the usage of SEO keywords is obvious and glares from an article like a zit on a nose, calling attention to the keywords instead of to the content of the article. As long as you don’t abandon completely the list of keywords you had in mind, you can safely omit some of them… especially if you started with a list of more than two or three.

4 – Cross-promote with complementary sites. That is, to use our earlier example, suppose you’re a veterinarian. Call a local groomer, or pet store, for example, and offer a trade: Instead of simply trading hyperlinks, suggest trading articles. The groomer’s article on your website will attract more traffic to your site… and so will your article on his or her site (with your URL included in the bio that follows the article).

5 – If you aren’t a good writer, hire a pro. You want to not just write articles but write articles that get read. If the article is on your website and doesn’t grab the reader, s/he is likely to surf over to someone else’s website in search of a better article. If the article is in a repository or on someone else’s site, the reader is likely to abandon it partway through and never get to the end, where your bio and URL are. Too, a professional writer will not give up readily, as you might on hitting writer’s block or some other obstacle. Instead, s/he will not only complete that article but write as many more articles as you pay him to.