Article marketing, you shouldn’t let those two words scare you. In fact you should embrace them because they can help build your Internet or Affiliate business by leaps and bounds.
In this article I’m going to show you two powerful ways to use article writing to dramatically boost your website, squeeze page, or affiliate page traffic for free.
First let me show you the two ways article marketing will help build your traffic. Both are based on the fact that you are allowed to place an author resource box at the end of every article. In this author resource box you can add a link to just about anywhere you want. You can link to your main website, your blog, your opt-in list, and in some cases you can link directly to an affiliate page. Naturally you’re going to want to link to your opt-in page if you’ve got one. If you still don’t have an opt-in page a good alternative would be to link to your blog. If you don’t have a blog it’s time to start one because article writing and blogging go hand in hand.
The first type of traffic you’ll receive is from all the people reading your articles and then clicking on the link in your author’s resource box. I’ll show you how to get readers for your articles in a minute.
The other type of traffic comes from the fact that the large search engines like Google® and Yahoo® base their website rankings on how many relevant links are pointed at a particular site using a specific set of key words.
What you do to gain some of these brownie points from the search engines is to make sure and use some basic html code in your author resource box that is targeted to a specific set of keywords. Once your article gets picked up and reprinted by a lot of publishers you will get some help with your search engine rankings when the search engines’ spiders start finding all of those keyword rich links pointing to your website.
The best way to make use of the traffic generated by your article marketing efforts is to send your readers to your opt-in page! If you don’t have an opt-in list I strongly encourage you to start one.
Now let’s discuss the fear a lot of people have about writing articles. I think the fear is because most people think they have nothing to write about. The truth is if you’ve been in this business for any length of time you probably know much more that you give yourself credit for. I guarantee you there are other people out there who would love to know the things that you know. That’s what you want to write about if you want to write articles.
If you’re brand new to affiliate marketing, at the end of this article I’ll show you a simple way for even you to use writing to get your links out there.
I told you earlier how writing articles can boost your traffic but how do you get your articles in front of enough people that you can really see an effect on your traffic? The most common and probably the most effective way is to submit your articles to article directories like EzineArticles and Article Marketer.
These are not the only two available but they are two of the biggies. If you get your articles accepted into several of the article directories there’s a good chance that website owners and newsletter and ezine publishers will pick up your article for reprint. The more times your articles get reprinted the more times readers are going to see the links in your author resource box.
Earlier I mentioned one of the better places to link to in your author’s resource box is a blog. That’s because when you start article marketing, a logical spin-off is to start a blog because a blog is basically just a collection of articles you have written and that you continue adding new articles or “posts” to. Plus you can start a blog for free with services like Wordpress.
Blogs have evolved over the years and now some of them are basically just a different looking type of website. If you start checking out other people’s blogs you’ll find a lot that were just designed to get traffic and then show as many ads as they can so the blog owner can make some money. I strongly encourage you NOT to go this route. If you are going to start a blog do it to provide valuable information to your readers.
You can still put a link or two to a site that might make you some money but don’t try to cram them down the readers’ throats. Even if you’re links are placed over on the side of your blog where you think they can’t be seen I guarantee you your readers will find those links.
Guess what? If your readers feel they have received some value from your article or “post” they are more than likely going to click on those links.
Now for the method new marketers can use to get their links out there without writing full blown articles or blogs. Become a blog reader. Find blogs related to the program you’re trying to promote and start reading them. Most blogs give their readers the option to leave a comment about the blog posts. If you leave a meaningful comment most blog owners are not going to object to you signing the comment with your name and one short link under your name. However, don’t abuse this privilege by trying to cram a bunch of links and pitches for your product or program in your comment because it will just get deleted.
Hopefully you can now see the importance article writing and blogging. All that’s left is for you to get started!
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