By Robert Deigh, author of the PR book "How Come No One Knows About Us?" available in bookstores and on Amazon

When potential clients do a search on your name or company name online, what kind of impression do they get? What do they see? Your Web site, certainly; maybe some past press releases and a bio. But as an indie PR practitioner, one of the best ways to separate yourself from the pack without spending a lot of money is to position yourself online as a communications expert using a technique called article marketing. Its easy; its cheap and, best of all, its very effective.

Article marketing will do two things for you: position you as an expert and, in time, increase the number of browser search hits on your name from just a dozen or so to possibly hundreds of thousands! Article marketing is, by far, one of my favorite, and one of the most powerful, ways to increase visibility.

Heres how it works: You post short articles on any of the thousands of business-related Web sites that are looking for fresh, original articles to provide to their visitors. People find your articles through Web searches on whatever topic you have covered. Other industry sites link to them and, within a few weeks, your name appears all over the Web as an expert. It is a great arrangement. You are providing the sites with free information and they, in turn, are giving you free publicity and more listings on Web search results.

Here's how you do it:

1. Do a search on the Web for articles in your industry (for us indies, it might be a PR topic or something related to one of our clients). As you scroll down through the search results, find sites that feature articles on your topic of expertise. Open them up and see if they accept article submissions. Start with about a half-dozen sites. You might try these three general business-article sites for starters:
www.ezinearticles.com, www.articlesbasecamp.com, and www.businessarticles.org.

Familiarize yourself with the content, tone, and length of articles on any site before you post your own work there.

How do you find the best sites on which to post your stories?
In addition to searching for the ones that best match your industry and expertise, pick a couple of best-selling authors in your field and see where they have posted their articles. Then, put yours in the same place. Too busy to write these articles? Dont start from scratch  edit down a presentation, white paper, case study or other PR/marketing material (about 5001,000 words is standard) and smooth it out into a nice how-to narrative. Voila. You have an article.

2. Here is the easiest part: Simply paste your articles into online forms that the sites have provided for that purpose. Generally there are blank spaces for your name, the title of your article, a summary of the article, the full text itself, andmost important for youa place for a short paragraph about you, the author.

3. The cardinal rule of article marketing is this: Post real articles, not ads cleverly disguised as articles. Sites wont accept the latter. Provide real value to the reader and save your ad for the paragraph at the bottom that lists your name, company, and contact information.

4. If you really want to get your articles out quickly to a much broader number of Web sites, there are -- you guessed it - companies that will do it for a fee. Visit www.articlemarketer.com, which charges about $200 per year to submit your articles (as many as you like) to thousands of Web sites that are interested in new content. Also check out www.submityourarticle.com. They are well worth the expense because they greatly speed the process of getting your articles out to Web sites.