Whether you are just starting out with your online business or you are seasoned pro, writing and distributing articles is one of the most effective and low-cost ways to drive lots of targeted traffic to your site. Writing articles and submitting them to the article directories will get you free traffic when people click on the link in your resource box. It is also a great way to improve search engine rankings, since you will have plenty of incoming links to your site. Let’s take a look at how you can get started writing articles. Here are a few tips to get you started. Write a Top Ten List An easy way to get started with an article is to come up with a Top Ten List. Find a topic related to your business and jot down ten reasons why someone should purchase your product or offer advice on a topic that’s related to your website. Examples would be top ten ways to get your baby to sleep through the night, top ten reasons to write articles, or top ten reasons to buy car insurance. Once you have your list of ten items, write a little paragraph about each, explaining the reason in a little more detail. Next you add an introductory paragraph that pulls the reader into your list. For example an introduction to the baby sleeping through the night article could mention how hard it is to make it through the day and how sleep deprived you are until you get your baby to sleep through the night. Then close your article either by summing up what you just told them in your top ten lists or encouraging them to act on what you just told them about. Congratulations, you just wrote an article. Of course you can easily shorten this to a top 5 list. Just write a little more about each of your points. Record Your Article Some people prefer recording themselves while they are talking about a particular topic and then transcribing and editing it into an article. If you have an easier time talking about a particular topic than writing about it, this may be a great option for you. Most MP3 players now come with a record option, or you can pick up a cheap tape-recorder. Pick a topic and just start talking as if you were explaining it to a friend. Just start babbling and the ideas will start to flow. Now listen to your tape. Write down and arrange the major points you mad in order. Add an intro and a closing and you have another article. Hire a Ghost Writer If you are having a hard time writing articles, or just don’t have the time to do it, you can still benefit from article marketing by hiring a ghostwriter. Ghost Writers will write unique articles for you that become your intellectual property. You can post them as your own work to your site, your blog, as well as the article directories. You can find a ghost writer on sites like elance. There are also some freelance writers with their own websites out there. You can usually buy articles anywhere from $5 – $65. Write an Outline and Have Someone Else Turn it into an Article Another option if you don’t want to do all the writing yourself is for you to write a basic outline of the article and the point you want to bring across. Jot down any ideas you have for the article, then ask a friend or hire someone to flesh it out for you into an article. You may be more comfortable with passing these articles off as your own, since the content of the article was your original idea. Someone else just put it into an article format for you. There is no reason for you not to get started with article marketing one way or the other. Get a few articles out there and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You’ll be so impressed by the results you can get even from a handful of article, you’ll be writing them and submitting them all the time.