Let’s move on now to lesson #3 about how to drive traffic to your website.

Part 3 — Article Marketing

Article marketing is yet another no-cost way to drive traffic to your website.  While it takes a bit of work, and you do have to take care to make your content unique, it is today one of the more effective ways to bring traffic to your website.

Essentially, you write a relatively brief articles of 250 to 400 words about subjects that are related to your business, or the content of your website and post them on to a variety of article network sites that are available.  You can generally include one or two pieces of linked anchor text, which points to your website in the body of the article in the signature block at the end of the article.  A cleverly written  signature file should entice those people who read your article to visit your site.

When your articles are posted among the various article networks, traffic can be driven to your site in a number of ways:

  • The articles you write are generally free to be used by publishers of e-zines, blogs and websites as content of for their own sites, provided that the articles are unmodified and the anchor text links and signature files remain intact.
  • As your articles proliferate throughout the web, not only are they likely to be read by a large number of people, the linked anchor text then become one way links back to your site, providing additional ‘link juice’ for your search engine optimization efforts.
  • In addition, if you write the articles well and incorporate keyword variations that are likely to cause the articles to be posted at or near the top of related searches in the search engines, this will again increase the likelihood that your article will be read and that people will visit your site by clicking on the key anchor text.
  • Finally, people do in fact, just browse the article directories trying to find information on certain subjects, and if your article happens to interest them, they might well click on your anchor text and thereby bringing additional visitors to your website.

The publication of articles in the various article directories is indeed a very powerful way to both create one way links back to your site, as well as to attract website visitors directly.

How to Write  Articles

I highly recommend a great tool that I use called Instant Article Wizard that will enable you to create high quality articles on any subject in 15 minutes or less.

Before you begin your article, it’s important you do keyword research and find specific keywords to incorporate that are both relevant to the article content and to your website.  It is important in the selection of these keywords to be sure that they don’t have excess competition.

You can search for the keywords on Google, and note how many competitors there are for the keyword.  You should shoot for a maximum of 1000- 5000 competitors for your selected keywords.  This gives your article the best chance of ranking high for those particular keywords.  Obviously, the higher the search engine ranking, the more article readership you’re likely to achieve, to be followed by direct visits to your website.

So, here are a couple of important things to remember as you write your articles.

  • Keep your articles relatively short with 250 to 350 words and they must provide content that is relevant to the keywords around which your are writing your articles.
  • Make your articles as entertaining as possible so as to ensure that the reader will get to your signature file and hopefully click through your website.
  • Your signature file needs to be well-crafted to make a compelling case for the reader to click through to your website.
  • Be original in your writing, and let’s your personality shine through in a way that people were not only read the article through, but will also be more than interested in clicking through to your  website to see what else you have to offer.

These are several of the best directories where you can post your articles:

EzineArticles.Com
ArticleDashboard.Com
Articlemaker.com

There are indeed literally hundreds of directories to which you can post your articles.  You can find them easily with Google searches.  Once you have started your article market strategy, you may find a need to use article distribution software that enables you to post tomany directories with literally the click of a button.

Brad Callen’s  Article Submitter is one of the best of those article submitting services.

There’s no question that article submission should be a key strategy for driving traffic to your website.  If you are able to compose and submit at least one article per day, you’ll soon have a multitude of articles posted over the Internet.  They will not only drive traffic back to your site, but will also provide additional  one-way links back to your site.

Part 4 of the series will be on Forum Marketing.