Article marketing is still the best way to promote your website or business for free. It generates hundreds, sometime thousands of one way links to your site. This its the best source for unlimited traffic to your website in terms of linking strategies and search engine optimization. You can submit your articles online to article directories and ezine publishers. You ?re probably reading this article right now from one of those sources!
Well written articles establish you as an expert, provide readers with valuable information, and will give you unique content for your website. So you want to focus on a niche that you have some knowledge about. It could be about golf, dogs, computers, or anything you want. Articles are normally 400-600 words in lenght, answer some question or need, and include a 'resource box'. The resource box contains your name, credentials, and a link to your website.
This is where the real power of marketing articles is revealed. Article directories have thousands of subscribers and also thousands of webmasters who use these articles as free content for their site. In exchange for giving them free content, they must leave your resource box with your name and link back to your website. If their website has a high page rank, search engines will see your link and this will improve your page rank as well. If their website has lots of traffic, some of that traffic will come to you through your link. So you're killing two birds with one stone - one way links to your site from high page rank sites, and a constant flow traffic from the your links.
Generally, a good article marketing campaign requires writing at least 1 or 2 articles everyday. Submitting them to all the directories, mailing to your subscription lists, and adding them as content to your own site. This can be a very time consuming task, but you'll be rewarded with free high quality targeted traffic.
There are several tools available to help you and will save you a lot of time. If your having trouble writing articles, there are several private label content companies to choose from. Private label content companies will have a directory of articles that you are allowed to copy and use as your own. There are private label content companies popping up everyday, so it's important that you pick one that is established in the industry.
If you don't know where to submit your articles or it's taking too long, there is software that will automatically or semi-automatically submit your articles for you. The software is updated from the vendor with the latest high quality article directory sights available. It then submits your articles to the hundreds of directories in minutes. Doing this by hand would normally take several hours.
Once you have your articles written and submitted, you'll want to add them to your website as content. This will improve your search engine rankings and help drive additional traffic to your site. Many webmasters will add adsense code from google to further monetize there efforts. Using unique article content on your site will also improve the revenue generated from adsense versus all of the ?me too? duplicate websites getting just pennies per click.
In summary, articles generate unlimited free traffic, establish you as an expert, and generate more income for you as an internet marketer. In part 2, I will talk about how to write articles, how to find a popular niche, and how to make money from articles.
Robert Rogers is a writer in the Washington DC area. For more free tips and information about this article, please visit his blog at: Professional Internet Marketing Blog