Dreaming of getting tons of targeted traffic to your site without spending a red cent? Fantasizing of effective free advertising? Then you should definitely start writing articles for promotion! The things you’ve gotta love about articles are:

A. They are free to submit, allowing thousands of people to read them (and see your web link) without costing you a dime.

B. They prepare a visitor for purchasing your product or service much more effectively than a three line Pay Per Click ad possibly could.

C. They create a ton of inbound links to your website, which in turn boosts your Search Engine ranking (making it easier for people to find your site).

So, whether you have a product to sell, an affiliate product to promote, a newsletter, or just want more truly targeted traffic to your website, writing articles is THE way to go.

Here are the 4 steps to getting NON-STOP traffic using articles:

1. Write an informative, interesting article that your target audience would enjoy reading. Make sure that the subject covered in your article relates to the content on your site or you won’t convert very many sales or opt-ins.

For instance if your website caters to dog owners: DO write an article on the different breeds of dogs or anything else to do with dogs, but DON’T write an article about cats.

2. If you don’t believe you can write a very good article then pay someone else to write it for you. Elance.com is an excellent place to find potential article writers. Someone on Elance will write you a quality article for a low one time fee, and then you just slap your name on it and promote it as your own (this is perfectly legal).

3. The next step is writing the ad that is inserted at the end of your article in the byline, authors bio, about the author, resource box or whatever else it may be called. This little 3 to 5 line ad will entice your readers to visit your site.

EXAMPLE:
Jane Doe is the author of Hot Copywriting Tips, a must have online newsletter for all website owners. Go to http://www.JanesSite.com to grab your FREE copy now.

4. Submit your article to every article site that has a category relevant to your article, and you’re ready to roll.

My favorite article sites are:

www.ideamarketers.com

www.goarticles.com

www.articlecity.com

www.articlesfactory.com

www.buzzle.com

www.ezinearticles.com

www.netterweb.com

www.isnare.com

Now get started promoting your articles. Get them out there fast if you want to set your traffic counter spinning.

In order to learn how to do it properly, we need to take a look at others who are already doing it, and winning the never ending game of promotion.

Never ending is a bit of an understatement if you consider the vast opportunity you have presented to you through promoting your business online. Millions and millions of people log on every day, but what you don’t consider is that millions more have yet to log on for the very 1st time. If you’ve ever questioned the fact about whether or not there is an opportunity for yourself online, this small but powerful paragraph should end that doubt.

To make it big online, you have to think big. The internet is no different than real life… what you put forth, so shall you receive. There isn’t any greater statement than that.

So what does it really take to make it big?

Create something bigger than yourself! Bottom line. Creating something bigger could be accomplished in a few different ways. I know there are some of you who are thinking, I don’t have the money to create a massive website! Who ever said you’re “something big” has to be owned by you?

For instance Authors a.k.a Writers / a.k.a Bloggers / a.k.a Columnists are taking the internet by storm and for a good reason… This type of promotion REALLY works.
With the vast amount of websites out there that accept articles, you’re practically guaranteed to create a resourceful website of your own. You don’t need to be the best web designer in the world to figure out how to buy a domain name, create a blog or two (that is programmed by someone else) and link to your articles that way. You can even talk about your products and services within your blog, you have every right.

Go to http://www.blogger.com to create a blog.

That is the easiest way in. Let’s also take a look at why you should have a website and promote it through your knowledge, we can only do this by taking a look at other peoples success. In this next small section, I am going to randomly pick out a couple of authors that consistently write articles and measure out their “visible” level of success.

Halstatt Pires (www.marketingtitan.com): We consistently see this author write articles and submit them to us. Halstatt is a good writer who talks about a wide range of topics including web design & SEO.

If we take a look in Google/Yahoo/MSN to see how many times we can find “Halsatt Pires”, the numbers would look like this…

There are over 45,300 web pages listed within Google with the name “Halsatt Pires”.
There are over 18,500 pages listing in Yahoo
There are over 7,500 pages listed in MSN

Wouldn’t you like to have over 71,300 pages online with your name on them? I certainly would. Even if your articles get read a 10% of the time every day or every month for that matter, it would mean on average over 6,200 people could possibly read your articles every single day.

MarketingTitan.com has an alexa.com ranking of: 171,746 best ranked website out of millions of other websites.

Let’s now take a look at another author.. (all random)

Joy H Gendusa (www.postcardmania.com) Writes a great deal about postcard campaigns, direct mail campaigns and is quite good at it as well.

If we take a look in Google/Yahoo/MSN to see how many times we can find “Joy H Gendusa”, the numbers would look like this…

There are over 13,800 web pages listed within Google with the name “Joy Gendusa”.
There are over 24,000 pages listing in Yahoo
There are over 4,800 pages listed in MSN

In only 3 search engines, “Joy Gendusa” is found 42,600 times!

PostcardMania.com has an alexa.com ranking of: 76,065 best ranked website out of millions of other websites.

Again, it begs the questions, wouldn’t you like it if that was your name at the bottom of those articles with your website right beside it?

You DO NOT have to be a professional writer to start writing. In fact, when I started writing, my grammar was so bad, people would actually call me to guide me through my articles and point out the mistakes within them. The point is, people still called. Now thanks to my editors, my writing skills are improving a great deal.

Don’t be shy. Just start somewhere and don’t stop. Before you know it, you’ll be writing 2-5 articles a week and won’t be able to stop. That is when the true power of your promotion will start kicking in.

Just for people who want to know…

Let’s take a look at my success as a writer. If you were to search for my name within quotations like so “Martin Lemieux”, here are the results you would find. (In quotes to narrow down to an exact match)

There are over 65,600 web pages listed within Google with the name “Martin Lemieux”.
There are over 32,300 pages listing in Yahoo
There are over 17,600 pages listed in MSN

That is over 115,500 “registered pages” online that have my name on them. Just remember as well, I haven’t submitted an article in over 2 months due to illness. Only a fraction of those aren’t me, they are someone else. Again, I ask the question… Wouldn’t it be nice if that was your name and your website was right beside those tens of thousands of pages?

Just for curiosity, if you do a search for Martin Lemieux without the quotes within Google, you will get around 1,040,000 pages found. When I started out, those search results weren’t even close to that, maybe even 10% of 1,040,000 because of “Claude Lemieux” & “Mario Lemieux” two famous hockey players.

Does something like this happen over night? Absolutely not. In the last 4 years, I’ve been able to write around 70-80 articles in total! That’s it. There are writers out there that have personally written over 1000 articles in a matter of years.

What else can you do to increase your popularity? Accept articles from other authors of course! Why not share your success with others. Doing so will only increase your credibility online and increase your visitors a great deal. Not only will authors talk about you, your website will increase every time you list another authors article.

Why do you think that many of the article directories world wide get the most traffic on average beyond the Gorillas like Google, Yahoo, Ebay, etc? They all have one thing in common, they’re creating a community of people writing their hearts out and exposing their business further online.

In Conclusion:

If you’ve ever doubted why people write articles, think again. The internet favors the bold, the ones who are not afraid to speak their mind and put their thoughts in digital format get rewarded. More and more authors who have written actual books are now writing for the internet to get more sales for their books. It’s a proven fact that unique content is king and so are your thoughts.

I sure know I would. The good news is… I’m going to share with you how to get that highly targeted free ezine advertising absolutely FREE and also at the same time have you seen as an expert by their audiences.

Hows that sound?

Now, this technique I’m about to share is known and used by many of the Top marketers online simply because it works, it’s highly effective and targeted, and is what 85% of the web surfers out there are searching for on a daily basis.

As a matter of fact, your truly going to be surprised by what I’m about to reveal because it’s exactly what you’re searching for right know… Answers!

So… here it is in plain English.

Articles!

More specifically, articles that answer the readers questions to a particular problem they’re dealing with.

Thats right, Articles are the single most effective way toget targeted FREE advertising in ezines of all sizes absolutely FREE and at the same time be seen as an expertin your industry, giving you INSTANT credibility and thereader even more reason to stop by your website to see ifyou have what they’re looking for to solve their problem.

It’s that simple… Really! Now I know some of you are saying to yourselves, “I don’t know how to write articles”. Well… neither did I at first, but I learned how and so can you.

It’s really just a simple formula and once you master it your articles will flow out of you easier and easier everytime. The best resource I have come by and personally used to get my article writing off to a good start is article announcer. You can read up more on this at:http://www.announce-article.com. I also wrote an article earlier called… The 7 Step ‘Formula’ For Writing POWERFUL Articles In Less Than An Hour … which will show you how to structure your articles for easy writing. Here’s the link:http://www.internetwondersezine.com/article_11.html. Well, I hope this helped and wish you good luck in your article writing and all the free exposure you’ll gain by doing so.

Now, all that’s left to do is for you to get those creative thoughts flowing.

Sure, the content has to be worthwhile; it has to be helpful, informative, and not just a sales spiel. And there’s no denying that a well written article can be very compelling. But if your headline doesn’t cut it, the article won’t stand a chance. The best article in the world will never see the light of day without an effective headline.

Now, more than ever, article submissions need a good headline. But it’s not just the reader you have to worry about. In fact, the reader is secondary! When it comes to reprint article headlines, your main focus should be the publisher.

You may think the requirements of a good headline haven’t changed over the years, but they have. Unlike headlines for traditional newspapers, magazines, etc., which target only the reader, online article submission headlines target first the publisher, then the reader.

So how do you write a headline for an online publisher?

Here’s a few tips…

1) State your domain

No matter what your business, you can be sure that potential publishers of your article are inundated with information every day. Imagine hypothetical ‘Publisher Pete’. He’s the webmaster of a high PR site. He receives hundreds of article submissions every day. Additionally, he farms article submission sites (aka ‘article banks’, ‘article submit sites’, ‘free-reprint sites’) for articles on a regular basis. Because so many of the article submissions he sees are spam or unrelated, Publisher Pete is quick to dismiss anything that isn’t obviously – and immediately – relevant to his website. So make sure your headline signals the general subject area of the article submission, not just the exact topic.

2) State your argument

Every website has an agenda. Whether it’s to sell, persuade, or inform, there’s always an angle. When our friend Publisher Pete looks for free reprint content for his website, he wants something that complements his agenda. If he’s selling chemical garden fertilizers, he doesn’t want an article about the evils of chemical fertilizer. Nor does he want an article espousing the virtues of organic fertilizer. He wants an article promoting the value of chemical garden fertilizer. If that’s what your article is about, make sure the headline lets him know.

3) Don’t make empty promises

Sensationalized headlines may work in traditional media, but they’re not so effective in online article submissions. Few things frustrate an online publisher more than being lured in by a promising headline which turns out to be nothing more than hot air. For publishers who take the time to carefully filter content before publishing, empty headlines are nothing more than time-wasters. For publishers who are a little less meticulous, empty headlines result in a site which is characterized by disjointed, contradictory, low-quality content. Either way, the publisher isn’t impressed, so make sure the headline of your article is relevant to (and validated by) the body of your article.

4) Put yourself in the publisher’s shoes

Always think about ways to make the publisher’s job easier. It’s as simple as that. Brainstorm 5, 10, 20 headlines, then put yourself in the publisher’s position and ask which one you’d choose. That’s the best headline for your article submission.

5) Think about your publisher’s readers

Publishers want articles that readers will open. But remember, your publisher’s website may cater to an entirely different type of reader to your website. Whenever you find yourself thinking about your secondary audience (the reader), make sure you’re thinking about the publisher’s readers – not your own. That settled, you can go on to focus on regular audience-headline considerations such as making the headline attention-getting, targeted, and benefit driven.

Conclusion

With the emergence of article submission as a great way to generate a high search engine ranking, and the associated proliferation of article submission spam, the right headline is more important than ever. The important thing to remember is that you’re faced with a gatekeeper, and you need to address their needs first.

By following all the publisher-focused tips above, you’ll not only see your article published many more times, you’ll also see it published on more relevant websites. This will help both your ranking (because links from relevant sites are always the best) and your click-thru traffic (because the audience will be more relevant).

Happy headlining!
* Glenn Murray is an SEO copywriter, advertising copywriter, and Article Submission Specialist. He is a director of article submission alternative, PublishHub, and also of copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit http://www.divinewrite.com or http://www.publishhub.com for further details, more FREE articles, or to purchase his e-book, SEO Secrets.

Source: http://www.365articles.com

To create a well written article takes time and effort. We have to get everything right: it has to be of relevance to the reader in that subject field; it has to be well researched; all spelling, punctuation and grammar must be correction; it has to be a genuine contribution to that particular area of specialization, and so interesting that the editor will jump at the chance of publishing it. And, oh yes, all the right keywords have to be there, of the right density and in the correct proportions.

The well-crafted article must satisfy both the reader and the bot; both the aesthetics of the eye and the strictures of the code. So those of us who try and be at least a little bit serious about things know that a second draft is always necessary, and then a third. Then it’s best to sleep on it. Even after that, we know that we have to forget about it for a few days until we are able to come back to it again with a freshly critical mind. You prune it and nurture it. You take off the sharp edges and you tighten it up. If necessary you know when you have to tear it up and start over again.

Only after we have got it absolutely right – and then after spending many hours submitting to directories, editors of ezines, article announcement sites and individual webmasters – are we rewarded, perhaps, with those hard-won non-reciprocal inbound live hyperlinks.

But wait. There seems to be a problem. It appears that an increasing number of people are quite happy to simply copy and paste our work onto their own sites without a link back. Or they don’t bother to check if the link is ‘live’. That would be bad enough. But there are other people who print our articles and then don’t even bother to name the person who wrote it.

But there’s far worse: those people who print our article and then announce to the world that they wrote it themselves! Some of those even have the temerity to add the copyright sign next to their name!

I may be being a bit too harsh. Perhaps these people don’t realize that they’re doing anything wrong. After all, the Internet was originally conceived as ownerless and based upon free and open source information. And I can think of nothing more Public Domain, in fact or in spirit, than the World Wide Web.

Yet just consider what it is these people are doing. They are stealing other peoples’ work and passing it off as their own. They are effectively also stealing the web traffic that goes with it, the traffic that our labours should be rewarding our websites with, and diverting it to their own. This is blatant plagiarism. It just should not happen. Theft is theft, in whatever medium.

I wrote an article a few months ago on Internet marketing for small businesses. A search for the title of that article on Google now returns 10,800 pages, so at least the title itself has been reproduced that number of times and in that number of different places. A search for a chunk of text from the middle of the article returns 536 pages, which suggests that the article text has been published in its entirety no fewer than 536 times. Great! So now I have 536 inbound links from that one article! Wrong.

I looked at individual entries of the article and in a surprising number of cases there were no backlinks at all. Also surprising – and somewhat sickening – was the number of individuals who wantonly attached their own names to my work.

I recently posted the same article to a fresh source of publishers. I was astonished at the response of one editor of a well-known directory who had rejected the article on the grounds that it was not mine! She had seen the same piece on many other websites under different names, she said, and it was not her policy to publish work that had been produced using “cookie cutter” techniques. I wrote back saying that it really was my own work, citing the URL of SitePro News where it originally aired as that day’s headline feature. She apologized and was even good enough to supply me with a list of names of people and sites who had published it as their own. I’m so tempted to publish their names here (perhaps I will on my blog; so watch out!) but have decided that discretion should rule. For the moment, at least.

But I think there is a clear message here. The fashion for article writing and publishing for content and backlinks is going through the roof at the moment. It’s like a mini Internet boom all of its own. And like any other boom it has attracted its own inevitable pack of rat-racers, chancers, charlatans and cheats; shysters who go for the shortcuts every time, while remaining quite happy for other people to do their work for them.

For the record, the convention is this: distribute and publish the article freely by all means. But it must be published in its entirety and unedited, and MUST include the resource box with a live hyperlink back to the author’s site (or wherever the author wants, for that matter).

Hey, now even my lawyer understands!

Next time I will publish their names gleefully, and be damned.

Gordon Goodfellow is an Internet marketing practitioner who lives and works in London, UK. He finds his efforts taken in spreading the word have been hugely reduced by the use of this helpful article publishing tool.

Source: http://www.365articles.com

Well after these several years that I’ve been on the internet I too heard the call and have followed the many internet bandwagons that have rolled into e-town touting the next ‘latest and greatest’ snakeoil software to get one traffic that they won’t believe.

You know the cry… ‘The traffic explosion your favorite web guru gets – and it’ll only cost you $795 to attend this three-day conference to learn how to play with the big boys (and girls) online.’

Sound familiar? To most owning one or several websites it will.

But after being dragged around the reciprocal linking millstone over the last several months in a valiant attempt to obtain many reciprocal link exchanges and closely monitoring all completed link requests I can truthfully say that that job in itself is a bugger to track and stay on top of.

Why?

Because for the most part one has to rely on one common denominator in that equation… people. I finally realized that this tactic of getting traffic ‘for free’ and having it prove itself as viable was indeed true. Link-exchanges do work. But they ARE work too. But with me being the type of person who writes with my eyes closed (literally), I was told by a couple of e-friends that I should pursue ‘articles’ more vehemently. I didn’t know what they meant so what I did was find out about a couple of the bigger article directories on the Net and I submitted a couple of my writings to them. And then I promptly forgot about this process because it was extremely labor intensive.

And with me being a relatively lazy fellow at times I ‘moved on’ to other tasks that seemed more to my liking. And ease of use. But after getting relatively burned out with this link-exchange stuff and dogging real live people to honor link exchange requests after I had ‘nicely’ place an unexpected link to their site on my site, I was tired of this whole process

Yes, I know there are automated processes and software out there that will do this linking stuff for one, but again, I’ve also read how the SE’s are ‘onto’ these tactics and reciprocal links aren’t as effective as they used to be. But they are still effective, that’s why I still honor the odd link exchange request I get. I just don’t spend all my time doing this anymore. But getting back on track to the actual subject of this article…

Back a couple of months ago, I somehow received an email about a new software program that would do ‘article submissions’ almost automatically. But let me first digress somewhat and tell you what ‘article submitting’ is. Article submitting may sound kind of formal and only for ‘writers’, but it isn’t.

Essentially, anytime one writes something of extended length, even a longer webpage, they’ve written an ‘article’. Think about it. If you have a website that you’ve personally written, then you have written articles related to the subject of your website. So, if your website is all about the best way to burp babies, then you have a whole bunch of ‘articles’ that you’ve written about parenting, specifically, burping babies. What you can then do is submit these articles throughout the WWW and get yourself known as a baby burping expert.

But even more importantly, you can take each of the webpages you’ve written on your website and turn it into an ‘article’ – add a link BACK to your site in the footer of the article – and voila! you have written an article and ALSO obtained a link back to your site whenever someone else uses that article. And all this without having to hassle with e-chasing that non-compliant link partner to honor their link exchange with you.

Sound cool? It is.

Now, like everything else, there is a downside to all this article writing. It takes time to do. First you have to have written YOUR OWN articles/webpages. And then you have to personally submit them to any of several hundred article directories floating around in cyberspace. And of course there is the whole idea of you having the motivation to do this submission stuff too, so let me share a little bit of motivating statistics with you.

Remember how I mentioned earlier about having piddled with submitting a couple of stories/webpages I had written to several of the major article directories? Well, that was about 14 months ago. And remember how I told you that I did this and then promptly forgot about all this article submission stuff? Well, over those 14 months since I did this, which by the way only took about one hour to do, I now have about 300 STATIC, incoming links to my site from those two articles being posted around the Internet. Yes, 300 incoming, NOT reciprocal, links.

And so what I did was after I received that email from someone touting this article submission software was to do some research on this whole article submission automation software process. What I came out of this research with was that as of now there are two main article submission software programs that allow one to automate most of the process of doing this sometimes laborious task. And since it is so repetitive and sometimes painstaking to do manual article submissions I thought that this would be one way to get me back into this process that I think is well suited for the way I like to promote my business online. With words, that is.

After much mental deliberation, and financial detailing, I opted to go for an article submission software that was released during the summer of 2005. Besides it being almost one-third the price of the other main player in this article submittal software e-competition going on, it also appeared to have a lot going for it with a money-back guarantee and a manual and good developer-support. So I bought it several weeks ago and have been using it everyday to promote several of my websites by submitting ‘articles’ I’ve written to the several hundred article directories included in the automatic submissions this software does for the user.

And to say the least, the results, so far, are extremely impressive.

One little statistic. Remember those two articles I submitted 14 months ago and obtained over 300 incoming links from doing so? Well, I’ve used this software to continue submitting them to other article directories included in the software program. And now that 300 incoming links number now numbers almost 700. Yes, 700 incoming links from just those two articles. An increase of approximately 400 incoming links, in just five weeks. To me, those are some GOOD results. Especially without having to chase other humans to reciprocal link with me, building link webpages, tracking linking emails, checking links, buying tracking software, and all that stuff that goes along with the reciprocal linking process.

So, if you’re tired of buying links and chasing other website owners for reciprocal link exchanges, do consider using content you’ve written as a way to get links, and eventually traffic, into your site.

Written by Andre Best
President, Ultimate Results, Inc.
http://www.ArticlesandAuthors.com – THE Premier Site for Articles AND Authors