Sunday, November 25, 2007

Drive More Traffic to Your Site with Article Marketing

Since the early days of the Internet, article marketing has been used as an effective way to generate traffic to your website and is still just as effective today.

For you to be successful, you will need to be consistent with your efforts as well as write quality articles. If you can achieve this, it will provide you with not only a constant flow of visitors but also links back to your site that will benefit you for years to come.

Let’s take a minute to examine how article marketing works.

In a nutshell, you write articles and place them on other websites. In exchange, you will now have a link back to your site. You should try to avoid using the same articles that you have on your own site. It is best to share unique, high quality articles. This will get you more backlinks and traffic to your site. While doing this, you will also be building your reputation as an expert in your field. It is a great way to get your name out there.

You may find it difficult to get started with your article marketing campaign. It is not as hard as you think. First, write some articles. Write about something related to your field of work. If you sell lawn mowers for example, don’t write an article about making chocolate. Keep the subject related to your “niche”. Your articles should be around 300 – 600 words and offer genuine, useful information. Stay away from writing a long “ad” for your product or service. You need to hold the attention of the reader so keep it interesting.

As mentioned earlier, you will want to write separate articles for your article marketing campaign. Another suggestion is to do the same keyword research you would do for your own website and put those words in your article. Take some time to proof read and check for spelling and/or grammar errors.

Now that you have your informative and quality articles written, you will need to find places to submit them. It is very time consuming to work on building a close relationship with other webmasters in your field. However, it can be very beneficial to you if you can do so.

An alternative to this would be to use article directories that will allow you to post your article for free. Other webmasters can then read your article and place it on their site. Here are a few of these directories: ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com and articleally.com. Do a search for “article directories” and you will find thousands of these types of sites.

Posting your article to each of these sites individually can be very time consuming. An option to this would be to use a service that would do this for you, such as SubmitYOURArticle.com. These services will charge a small fee to become a member. Once a member, you can post your article once and they will take care of the rest, posting it to other article directories.

Don’t forget to include an author bio with all of your articles. This will be a few lines telling readers something about you. This should be kept short yet capturing the attention of the reader. Always include: your name, URL (such as http://yourdomain.com ) and a short teaser to allure readers to your site. Offer them something if they visit your site. I offer a free subscription to my work at home newsletter just for visiting.

Now that you have the basics of starting an article marketing campaign, you are on your way to an endless stream of visitors to your site.

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