If you need to find customers in a recession you will probably be looking for creative promotion methods, and I'm guessing it will be even better if there is a plan that's available to those with a rock bottom budget - or even for those looking for completely free advertising.

The best way I have come across to get website visitors, without a doubt, is Article Marketing.

It's free, the prospects are targeted and they are looking for whatever product you are recommending, and what's even better, unlike an expensive month-long advert in the national press, new customers keep coming month on month. I have sites I haven't actively advertised for more than 4 years - yet targeted visitors arrive over and over again.

You really don't need to be (or hire) an expert with website promotion tricks, although if you are able, that's even better. But you do need to use article marketing well. Although you will get SOME traffic, with a haphazard approach, it won't be the best you can obtain for the time spent.

Some business owners may be afraid to even consider article marketing because they feel they're not "literate" enough. This should NOT be a barrier. Of course your submission needs to be correctly punctuated and free from spelling errors, because that will reflect on you and your business as "sloppy". But a decent spell-checker, in Word or even the one in your browser, will warn of the corrections you need.

If you still feel unable to compose content for your articles, you can hire authors to write them for you at a surprisingly low cost and, if you pick a good author you can end up with excellent work. Tip - give authors a small project to work on first, as some are better than others. Just one of my initial mistakes!

Another alternative is to obtain low-cost PLR articles and rewrite them yourself. Please note that th rewriting step is very important; it is what puts your own personality and stamp to articles that other people may already be using.

So having removed fears about being unable to devise good content, you're well on the way to starting to use article marketing to get free traffic. It really can be that easy.

My initial attempts were successful even with a few "raw" articles I'd written myself without considering any of the finer points. But for just a little extra thought, using a few more tips and tricks, I could have achieved so much more.

A few of the article marketing concepts that can help you improve your results are:

- How to decide what keywords to use?

- Are you trying to get prospects to sites that already have too much competition?

- Which article directories are the top ones to submit to?

- Should you submit your work to many sites or just a few - is more always better?

- What is the best way to compose articles?

- How to choose the best title for your article?

- How to defeat writer's block?

- What about Google's duplicate content penalty?

Formatting your articles for the benefit of the people who will download them

The REAL benefit of Article Marketing, that most people aren't even aware of.

Research some of these finer points and you'll be streets ahead of most article marketers who don't even know the questions to ask.