Traffic Generating Techniques - Part II

ARTICLE MARKETING

Article Marketing in my view is one of the most powerful traffic generating techniques that you can employ. Why? It promotes the likelihood of having other sites point to yours, something that we know as backlinks and something that the search engines love.

Every time another site points to yours it is like a vote of confidence telling the search engines that your site is a good site for content, i.e., information, on the topic at hand.

Valentina. What are you talking about? How does article marketing point back to your sites and what exactly is article marketing anyway?

Glad you asked…

Lets start with article marketing. You already know the value of frequent fresh content on your blog. Now you can have that same content published as an article in Article Directories so that webmasters and bloggers can find good relevant information for their own sites or blogs.

First, take the fresh content that you just posted on your blog. Some say you can publish it as is to Article Directories, others say that you should massage it a bit so it is not a mirror image of your post. Why the two points of view?

Publishing the artivcle as is. Article Directories are hungry for original content. As long as you are the author of the article, you own it, and, the argument says, you can publish it anywhere you like, as is.

The nip & tuck proponents. The alternate argument is that you need to make it a little bit different – not much – from your blog post otherwise the search engines may not recognize it as an original. I prefer to make a few minor changes. This can easily be done by introducing a summary paragraph before cutting and pasting the rest of the article for submission. You might want to massage a word or two here and there as well. It really is a personal choice.

Article Directories are just like phone directories. They accept original articles and place them in the appropriate category for available content. Now here is the good part: every time you submit a piece to an Article Directory, they allow you to add a resource box which gives a little bit of information about you and allows you to put your site as part of that information. THAT’S FREE ADVERTISING FOR YOU AND YOUR BLOG!

But it doesn’t stop there.

Lets say you have chosen bird watching as your niche and you just published a post on your blog about the eagles in Squamish, BC. You massage the article a bit, add a summary – many article directories prompt you to do that at time of submission – and submit to an Article Directory. On approval that article is now available for others to publish on their bird sites with one caveat, they must include the full resource box, that is credit for the article is given to you. Since you included the URL back to your blog, then that eagle site is now pointing to your blog. That gives it a vote of credibility. It’s also called a backlink.

This process can happen over and over and over again. The more often your article is picked up, the more credibility you gain with the search engines. Eventually you are recognized as an authority in that field of bird watching, and the search engines reward you by driving traffic to your site for the keywords “bird watching.”

There are many article directories. You can go on Google and type in “article directories” and Google will return pages and pages of them. Some of the bigger ones are

Ideamarketers
ezinearticles
articledashboard

Happy Blogging!
Valentina

PS... you can always write about cheese.