HOW CAN I EARN MORE MONEY?

Posts Tagged ‘traffic’

 No doubt you have heard about Article Marketing. By submitting articles to the many article directories that can be found on the Internet, you can bring extra traffic to your web site both from the people who read your article and from back links.

How does this work? Very simply, when you submit an article that relates to something you are selling – whether something you are marketing yourself, or a product that you are promoting as an affiliate – you let your readers know that you are an expert in this subject. At the end of your article you have a bio or “resource” box, in which you include your name, a little about yourself, and a link back to your site. When people read your article and want to know more, they will click through to your site. Meanwhile, every article contains a link that can be found by the search engine spiders, thus improving your search engine ranking.

Information-based marketing is one of the oldest and most effective techniques in getting targeted prospects to sites and converting them into buyers. As a general rule, people do not like to be “sold”, but they do like to be “told”.

There are many tools available for people to use to make the process of distributing their articles more easy, and are invaluable in getting the contents more exposure, but this is only half of the story.

If you want your article to be effective, you need to implement these three keys before submitting it to the directories.

1. Know Why You Wrote It.

By promoting your articles you will gain several benefits: you will brand yourself as an expert, you will get links back to your web site, and you will get real, live visitors as people click on your links.

However, none of these can be your reason for writing. There must only ever be one reason for writing: you have information or knowledge that you want to share with your target audience. Without this, you will not get branding, links or visitors, because many of the article directories will not accept your article. Even if they do, people will simply not take the time to read what you have written.

If you want people to read your article, and then click through to your site, you have to give them something worth reading.

2. Publish Content that Will Help Your Readers.

This follows on from #1. You may be thinking that all you want to do is get as many links back to your site as possible to help your search engine ranking, but it does not work that way.

Although some article banks and directories accept content automatically, many do not. The best ones definitely don’t. The guidelines of these sites make it clear that they want original content, and that it must be well written and offer real value to their readers. After all, the article directories are not really interested in giving you free links. What they really want is good content so that people will keep visiting their site. Give them that, and they will reward you with links and visitors. Don’t, and your article may quickly find its way to the cyber rubbish bin.

It goes beyond simply being accepted by the directories, too. That’s just the first step. The main point of having articles in directories is to provide content for people who publish blogs, ezines and web sites. The more publishers who pick up your article, the more links and visitors you will get. However, publishers want good quality writing for their publications – and the few who are pepared to publish rubbish will not generate any traffic for you anyway, because no-one will be reading their publications.

The bottom line is that you need to produce useful information, and it needs to be well written (with correct grammar and spelling) and entertaining. Read what you have written through the eyes of someone looking for information on that particular topic. Ask yourself, “Would I find this helpful?” If the answer is “no”, then the chances are no-one else would, either – and it is unlikely to find either many publishers or many readers.

3. Make Sure That Your Article is Clearly Targeted.

On a piece of paper, write the words: “One article, one topic!” Tape it in front of your computer where you will not be able to avoid seeing it every time you sit down to write.

If you are writing about how to build a fence, your readers don’t want to know about your dog, your grandfather’s latest operation, or your daughter’s latest school report. They want to know about building a fence. Keep on target and keep their attention.

This will also help you when it comes to publishers picking up your article. They want content that is in line with the theme of their publication, not something drifting off into a dozen other unrelated areas.

Stay on target with your bio box, too. There is no point in writing an article on dog training, if the product you are trying to promote is about raising healthy tomatoes! (Unless, perhaps, you are writing about ways to keep the dog out of the tomato patch, and even then it is borderline.)

4. Use Keywords Effectively.

Your readers want information. Your publishers want information for their readers. Hopefully, you now have an article that will satisfy both. Now, it’s your turn. What do you want?

Well, first of all you want people to read your articles and recognize you as an expert in your niche. If you have written your article well, it will help achieve that.

Secondly, you want people to click through from your article to your web site. Again, a well-written article should achieve that result.

But you also want something else: those wonderful back links to your site that will boost your search engine placing. A little simple SEO (search engine optimization) will both improve traffic from your links and help more people to find your articles in the first place.

Before you start, determine what keywords you are going to target with a particular article. Hint: choose only one or two. Too many will dilute the effect.

Make sure your keywords are in the title of your article. It may be tempting to give your article some fancy, obscure title, but it will not get you traffic. Nor will it make your article easy to find.

Mention keywords at strategic places throughout your article, but don’t overdo them. Some people use anchor texts within the article itself, but most major directories will not allow it. Better to save the anchor text for your bio or resource box.

5. Write Often.

An old proverb says that “One swallow does not a summer make.” Likewise, one article does not an expert make. Nor is one article going to produce a great deal of traffic or links to your site.

Take time to sit down and brainstorm your niche from every possible angle. Make a list of articles that you could write – just headings and very basic ideas to start.

Then set yourself a schedule that you can reasonably expect to keep. Don’t set a goal of writing 50 articles a day, you’re not very likely to do that (and even if you could manage it once or twice, they would probably not be very good articles.) Aim for one a day, or even one a week. As with exercise, it’s better to do a little consistently than a lot once.

Then, do it. If you write one article a week relating to your niche, at the end of a year you will have 52 articles in circulation. Once they’re out there, they will keep working for you.

Done properly, article marketing can be a highly effective means of promoting both yourself and your products. So what are you waiting for? … start writing!