Articles if done effectively and correctly are a very powerful means of driving traffic to your website or blog.TRAFFIC is a very important component of any successful website today.You can simply write articles related to the products or services that you are promoting and submit them to a few main article hosting sites such as Ezine Articles or Go Articles.These sites have huge viewership and if your article is good and stays within their stipulated guidelines then it will be published on their high traffic page.

This is certainly a very good way to get some exposure and yes you guessed it, it's FREE. Be sure to include a link to your website on your article so that persons can click through to your site. Also whoever decides to republish your articles on their website will give you credit for it. Before long your articles could be all over the internet giving your website or products some well needed promotion.

YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE A PROFESSIONAL..

You don't have to be a professional to write articles. As long as it is informative and you choose your keywords carefully for search engine optimization then it should be ok.Obviously it helps when you are writing on a topic that you are either very knowledgeable about or have a very keen interest in.

DO SOME RESEARCH..

There is a vast amount of information available online so it's not very difficult to research areas you are writing about if you want additional information. 

Make good use of the Author resource box as this is where you introduce yourself to the world.You may write a short biography and also mention the name of your website hence getting more promotion.

To follow up on how well your articles are doing or to see if anyone is using  your article on their website simply copy the name of the article into the Google search toolbar, insert within quotation marks and search. A result page should come up showing the number of sites that are republishing your articles.