Several years ago I began an online business.

At the time, the field I was entering was not all that crowded, search engine algorithms were much easier to manipulate, and links from relevent sites were not too tough to come by.

In short - if you wanted traffic, and were willing to do a little footwork, you could get it.

Over the past few years, things have changed.

Almost by accident, I stumbled upon a method for increasing, quite dramatically, the number of visitors to my website.

It turns out that almost everybody can design a really cool website...but very few people can write an interesting article. Writing is not a skill which is crucial in todays world, and very few can do it well.

(I, on the other hand, have the opposite problem...it's one of the few thing I can do well)

So, what is a webmaster to do if he wants to provide well written content to his visitors? Obviously, he needs to get somebody else to write it for him.

That leaves two options:

1. Pay cold hard cash to a professional writer.

2. Find a way to entice good writers to write good content for free.

3. Trade something of value for well written content.

My father once told me that there's no such thing as a free lunch. I believe he was correct, so option 2 is out.

That leaves paying or trading as the only viable options.

Most webmasters have opted for trading.

But what, you may ask, do they have to trade?

The trading arrangement which has evolved is one of wriiten content in exchange for a hyperlink.

Hyperlinks are gold in today's Internet economy. The more links a website has back to it, the higher it will rank in the search engines.

Therefore, if I, as a webmaster, can obtain several hundred relevent links to my website, my search engine rank goes way up, and I end up with a ton of visitors.

Do you see the possibilites? If you're a decent writer, you can end up having your articles published all over the Internet, with hyperlinks galore pointing back to your website.

"But how" you ask, "do I hook up with website owners who will publish my articles?".

Basically, there are several large article repositories online which will allow you to post your articles. Some of these are:

Go Articles Article Beam iSnare Article Factory Ezine Articles

There are actually quite a few more, if you do a search in Google.

Write a few articles, post them, and see what happens!