What does it take to get search engine traffic? Besides PPC, of course. Besides using tons of search engine optimization techniques. Besides using every trick in the book to outsmart every other web master on earth, to get to page one.

How about a truly simple method? Where you ride other web sites pagerank. Where you get the same exposure as big 80,000 page sites. Where it doesnt cost you anything but your time?

Youve heard about it. There are books out there teaching you how to do it. You could spend 50 dollars or 150 dollars to learn the ins and outs. You have probably already read a lot on the internet about it and youve probably asked yourself, does this really work?

I can tell it does. From personal experience.

It is article marketing.

You write the articles, submit them to a list of directories, and they market them for you.

Sound simple enough? It is. I think that is why you havent written many articles yet. Because it sounds too easy. But I dont want anything from you for this (just send me a tip when you start getting more traffic than you can handle).

Heres how it works. You write articles on topics you already know about. Preferably on the same or a related topic to your website. Include a link at the bottom to your web site, or better yet, to your opt-in page.

Download a free copy of an article directory list from the internet. (Just type in article submission list in your favorite search engine).

Submit your article to as many directories as you have the time. Before you do, type your article name, in quotes, into the big search engines. Create a title for your article that no one else has used before so that there are no results when you type the title in. That way you can track the propagation of your article. Every week or so, type in the name of your article and the search engine will tell you how many sites are hosting it.

How does it work? Several things happen when you submit an article to a directory. First, the directory publishes your article in their web site. Many of the directories have decent page ranking in the search engine system. So someone types in a keyword that is in your article, and your article comes up in the search engine.

Next, many directories have RSS feeds that literally go out to hundreds or thousands of web sites and blogs. Your article is uploaded to all those sites.

Next, if your article is good, a web master may publish it in a newsletter to his subscribers.

And finally, when you get all those articles all over the web, each one containing a back link to your site, the search engines think that your site is really popular.

All of that for free, and the time it takes you to write your article and submit it. (This article took me about 20 minutes to write).

Go for it!