Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Article Marketing Creates Tremendous Traffic to Your Website

By Porfirio G Krasternak

The submission of articles to the article banks is a well known method of generating traffic. While you may not accomplish much in the near future by learning how to write and submit articles, knowing how can serve you for a long time and is well worth the effort of learning and using to your greatest benefit. Though you may not feel up to writing Moby Dick because you don't have any writing ability but you are likely wrong. You can provide information about your website and your products because you know exactly what they are. All that is necessary is that you know the rules for effective article writing. Of most importance is the headline or title. This MUST have key words relating to your website and your products. The first thing that eZine publishers or other website owners look at when deciding to publish your article are the key words in the title because they know that the search engines look at those.

* Note: The way people find products or information on the internet is by the use of search engines. These people use key words to find what they want by entering them into the search box and clicking "Search". One such search may be for "car parts" or "car tires". What is returned by the search engine is based on whatever key words the searcher used.

The other thing about the title or headline of your article is that it must be attention getting. You cant just title your article Fish Bait. You have to make your title interesting enough to entice the reader to keep reading. Fish Bait that Works...that isnt very good either. How about, Fish Bait from Heaven or The Fish Bait the Fish Cant Resist? Either of those titles would entice the person who was looking for information about fish bait to keep reading.

After the title, the next most important words in your article are in the first line. Experienced internet surfers are well known for having a short attention span and rarely read anything word for word unless it is information that they think will meet their needs, solve a problem they have or make life better for them. So...the title...and the first line become the bait and the hook that is used to lure the reader to truly read the complete article. If the first line contains the key words it must also be be attention getting. "The customers were begging for more tips after the first line!" If you were an internet marketer, wouldn't you keep reading?

One more thing about your articles is that they need to be short if you intend to submit them to article banks. Very short! No more than 400 words but closer to 300 words would be more appropriate. Sometimes we can get carried away and all of a sudden have an article that is 1000 words or more. This can happen if you are writing about a subject in which you are interested and knowledgeable about. When this happens just break a long article down into a couple of shorter articles.

Use short sentences and short paragraphs. Remember that short attention span that we talked about? Dont use big words and dont use run-on sentences. Make your article easy to read.

Take it easy on those exclamation points. One exclamation point is all that is necessary to indicate importance or excitement... half a dozen are just rude.

Your resource box which comes at the end of the article is the most important part of all. Anyone who downloads and reproduces your article is required to include your resource box. And this box should contain your full name, your contact information and, most importantly, the link to your website. That link is the reason you are writing this article anyway. It is to help increase traffic for you.

Warning! Do NOT word-wrap this link! Type it out in full, http://www.whatever.com. All email programs that E-zine editors use to send out their newsletters and E-zines do not support word-wrapped links so you can defeat your own purpose by word-wrapping the link to your website.

Submitting Articles: You can find article banks and article repositories on the Internet by simple doing a search for them using your favorite search engine. When you have located them, you must submit your articles according to the guidelines that each site sets forth.

Software is available for use in automatically submitting articles to the article repositories and banks. The problem here is that most of the larger, more effective repositories and banks will not publish automated submissions. So even though this software can save time when submitting to smaller sites, this doesn't help much with the bigger more well known sites.

Yes, submitting articles is time consuming and tedious (not to mention boring) work but it is work that can provide your site with a lot of targeted traffic. Each person who reads an article that you have written will also be exposed to the link to your site. If the article is good and if it provides good information, these people will visit your site. They may buy what you are selling or they may opt-in to your mailing list... or maybe they will do both. By the way, there are services that will do article submissions for you. Of course this is a paid service.

The best solution and one I use is Unique Article Wizard. UAW can submit unique articles to hundreds of eZine publishers at the push of a button. Spend a few hours creating your article, Push Submit, sit back, and watch the traffic to your site increase astronomically. - 15254

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