Saturday, January 24, 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: Search engines are used by people looking for information or products on the internet. They type "key words" in the search box and click submit. An example might be "planting tomatoes" or "growing tomatoes". What the search engine returns is based on whatever key words were entered into the search box.

Another thing of importance regarding the headline or title of the article is that it MUST draw attention. Using something simple like Car Parts won't do. Your title MUST be interesting enough to grab the reader's attention and keep him reading. "Car Parts for Your Mercedes"...well, that isnt really great either. How about, "Car Parts for your SL-600" or "Car Parts For Your SL That The Women Can't Resist"? These last two headlines should encourage someone looking for parts their Mercedes to continue reading the article.

The next most important words are in the first line of the first paragraph of your articls. People surfing the internet today have terribly short attention span and mostly skim for information unless it is information that they think is going to solve a problem, make life better for them or serve a need. As you can see, the title and first line are bait and hook used to encourage a reader to continue on and read to the end of the article. Again, the first line must contain the key words and grab attention. "The women were hanging all over my car looking at all the neat gadgets I had". If you were looking for attention from women, you would keep reading.

Another thing about writing articles that you plan to submit to article banks is that they need to be short. Very short! They should be a maximum of 400 words and closer to 300 would be better. Its easy to get carried away and suddenly have an article that is 1000 words or more when you are discussing a subject that you know a lot about and are interested in. If you start writing and forget to stop, break long wordy articles down and make three or four articles out of the one long one.

Short sentences and short paragraphs will keep the reader's attention better than long wordy sentences or paragraphs. Your article should be a joy to read.

Go easy on the exclamation points, as well. One exclamation point indicates importance or excitement... a 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 your url! It must be typed out in full, http://www.whatever.com. Not all E-zine editors send out their newsletters and E-zines using email programs that support word-wrapped links so it is possible to ruin your own purpose by word-wrapping your website url.

Submitting Articles: Article banks and article repositories are easily found on the Internet by a simple search using your favorite search engine. Once you have located them you must follow their guidelines to submit your articles.

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.

Another solution which I use is Unique Article Wizard. UAW submits unique articles to hundreds of article publishers at the click of a mouse. Spend a couple hours writing your article, click Publish and watch the traffic grow to your site. - 16069

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