Article Marketing

Article Marketing is often suggested as one way you can drive traffic. It is still effective, though less so than it used to be.

The idea here is that you write content, specifically for distribution. You can send it to other site owners and list owners who will hopefully publish your content, and you can submit it to article directories, who will also publish your content as well as make it available for others to use.

When writing an article you should again focus on keyword based articles, in the title and content. This way it will help with search engine listings and enable interested people to find your article.

You gain actuall traffic in two ways. Firstly, you can include a short bio and link at the end of your article, so if people want to find out more they can follow that link. You will also get a pagerank boost as that link will count as another vote for your main site. Luckily, many article directories as considered "authority sites" - so the link will have greater weight.

To encourage people to read further from the article, consider only writing about a subset of your subject, so to read more they have to click that link. A good example is to include an excerpt from a fuller article or book, or include only, say, the top 5 from 10 total tips.

One point to watch out for is that Google will penalise duplicate content across the web. This is debatable (many Google processes are) but to be safe include a rewritten version at your own site. Even if the article appears first at your site and then at another, higher ranked one it could end up that Google would consider your home copy as the duplicate.