How to Get Traffic to a Blog or Website Using Articles

Tuesday, April 22, 2008
 

Instructions

Choose Your Carrier Pigeon

  • Step 1:
    Go the easy route with article directories. Submit your article to a submission service and take the work out of searching and positioning your articles on the right site. These services take your article and expose it to content searchers for use on websites and blogs or as personal enrichment. While they may serve as a quick fix, a more comprehensive approach gets more results.
  • Step 2:
    Determine the market you're looking to target. Figure out who's most likely to buy your product or service and which websites they frequent. Research websites that do or sell a similar product or service. If you're selling buttons, look for fabric, craft or sewing websites for article placement. Target your articles toward related Web vehicles to get qualified traffic from interested prospects.
  • Step 3:
    Contact the webmaster to find out if they publish a newsletter or blog or accept unsolicited content. You may be a solution to a webmaster needing content to fill Web pages. Once you find the right pigeon for your message, make sure you're sending the right message.

Carry the Right Message

  • Step 1:
    Motivate readers to click through to your website with compelling content that incites action. Use articles to communicate useful information about your website or blog, not as an advertisement. Write about how to select a dog leash if you have a website that sells dog leashes.
  • Step 2:
    Boost your site rankings and increase traffic with search-optimized, keyword-rich copy. Keyword-hungry spiders like to see your links in relevant places. Increase your site search rankings by putting your URL on as many related sites and blogs as you can. Many good keyword-suggestion and keyword-ranking tools are available free on the Internet.
  • Step 3:
    Be a stickler about grammar and punctuation. A badly written article leads prospects to perceive you as unprofessional or uneducated. Use the spell-checking and grammar-checking functions of your word processor.
  • Step 4:
    Keep the length to about 500 to 1,000 words. An article that's too long may bore readers before they ever get to your bio box. Use headers and bullets as appropriate to break up content and provide a visual break to the eye.

Confirm the Pigeon Hit Its Mark

  • Step 1:
    Use tracking methods to find out where your clicks are coming from. Write multiple articles with distinctive content that lands on specific pages of your site, and track hits.
  • Step 2:
    Check out an analytics program. These programs attach code to your links to track activity on your site such as conversions, abandons and unique clicks. Many programs are available free online, such as Google's comprehensive analytics solutions.
  • Step 3:
    Analyze results over a period of months. Article marketing is proven to produce results, but not necessarily immediate results. Be patient. If you find that traffic isn't increasing, adjust your content or continue searching for new pigeons to carry your article.

Tips & Warnings

  • Don't rely too heavily on article directories. The increased number of duplicate links that aren't from actual sites or blogs can actually get you blackballed with Google, the big daddy of them all.

Resources


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