Article Marketing: How to Get Traffic to Your Website

As I mentioned in previous posts article marketing is, in my opinion, one the top 3 ways to drive traffic to your website or blog, however, with all things that are web, there are certain nuances that you must account for when creating an article for the web.

When you first set out to write your article for your website or blog there are a few things to consider:

• Write an article that your potential readers will want to read. Pick a topic related to your business or niche. An easy way to find a current topic to write about is to search the news. Here’s an example: If your business was executive protection, you could choose topics about the state of Mexico and then add your personal experiences, advice and tips. Your article should be organized (opening statement, body, conclusion) and well thought out. What I like to do is write my article on paper (old school – I know!), then type it out in Word, adding along the way, then do editing. Your article should between 350 to 800 words.
• Come up with a creative title that will bring traffic to your site. This is critical. Your title should include keywords that a visitor would type in a search engine. Take the title to this article. My keywords are “article marketing” and “get traffic to your website.” Articles tend to reach more eyeballs if you add these keywords: How-To, Top 10, or advice and tips.
• After you have come up with your title you will want to test it. Go to Google and type your title and click search. Look at the results – sponsors (ads) and organic (no ads). The organic results should be related to your article. This is your competition. The more competing pages found the better. Look at the sponsored ads (top and left of the page) For example – I did a test on Article Marketing: How to Get Traffic to Your Website – and the organic results were spot with over 10,600,000 results found with 10 sponsors.
• Write your article in everyday speech. Basically you want to write in a relaxed conversation style as if your visitor was sitting next to you in your living room.

After your article is complete you’ll need to start marketing it. One of the best ways of marketing your article is to submit it to the hundreds of article directories that are online. Most are free. You will need to sign up (register) with all that you use.

One big caveat here: most article directories, or submission sites, have somewhere posted under author guidelines that your article is considered free content. This means that any webmaster, publisher, or editor may re-print your article(s) subject to the basic terms and conditions outlined on the site which is usually to give the author the credit for the article and post a link back to the author’s website. The link back to your website will drive traffic to your website. The more link backs you receive the better your website is ranked in search engine results. The higher the rank, the more visitors you receive. The more visitors you receive, the more trust and relationship you build. The trust will lead networking, comments, and buying your products and services. As you can see your one article does a lot for your business however, it won’t happen overnight.