If you don't have much money to spend advertising your online business, writing ezine articles is the most effective and least costly way to attract visitors to your site.

Increasing numbers of people use the Internet everyday to find information. To satisfy this growing quest, ezine owners who don't have time to write their own material are always looking for fresh articles to publish in their newsletters.

You may be cringing at the idea of writing articles, or writing - period.

However, writing a how-to or tips article on a relevant topic is no more difficult than writing a letter, or talking to a friend. Simply share good information that demonstrates your enthusiasm for the subject and encourages the reader to learn more.

The most compelling reason to write articles for submission to ezines is the amount you save in advertising.

A single ezine ad can cost anywhere from a few dollars to thousands of dollars.

However, ezine article submissions are free. In fact, it actually pays you to write and submit articles to ezines and newsletters! By adding your byline at the end of each article, your personal bio and your site's URL are published, and that's free advertising for you.

Furthermore, the author's resource box, in which your byline is placed, is usually the size of a typical ezine advertisement. Better yet, your article is ten times that size. So, you've saved advertising dollars and earned ten times the coverage. That's great value for an investment that only cost an hour or two of your time.

Depending on the subscriber base of the ezine that picks up your article, the potential for new visitors to your site could be enormous.

For example, I wrote an article entitled '10 Ways to Gain Visitor Trust and Increase Your Conversion Rates' for Allan Gardyne's Associate Programs Newsletter in October 2002. With a subscriber base of 20,000, the appearance of that article doubled traffic to my site for the next week. Because Allan archives the newsletters on his web site, that article is still sending me traffic!

Onsite archiving has an additional benefit. As more of your articles and links to your site appear on more and more pages, your search engine link popularity increases tremendously.

With the increased exposure and link popularity, your name becomes better known and your credibility as an expert in your field grows. This effect becomes cumulative, as 'experts' are frequently interviewed for other publications which again increases their popularity.

In many ways more important than popularity is the goodwill that you build by teaching and sharing your experiences freely with your readers. You also invariably learn more about any topic you write about, and knowledge is power - earning power.

Taking this proactive approach to site promotion builds traffic faster and beats waiting for the search engines to spider your site and send you a visitor or two.

When your articles are published in ezines relevant to your site's topic, they are read by people who are interested in your subject matter. With your skilled and informative approach, interested readers become interested visitors, who in turn become motivated purchasers, and then repeat buyers.

Not bad, all in all, for an hour's work and zero down.