Free Website Traffic
Article Writing
Article Writing
By using article writing to promote your website you are able to pick up free website traffic by piggybacking on other sites high search engine rankings. Don’t be scared by the thought of having to write something. I’ll be showing you easy to follow steps and shortcuts to creating quality content.
What you will be doing in this section, is writing articles about your niche market and submitting them to article directories like ezinearticles and goarticles. What is great, is that you can link back to your own website at the bottom of your article. That way, if someone finds your article interesting (which they will when you use the tools I give you) they will click on the link and arrive at your site, giving you free web traffic.
Good article directories like the ones above have fantastic search engine rankings. So if someone searches for a phrase that’s in your article, there's every chance you'll appear high up in the google search pages.
Before I get into the actual article writing, you should probably take a quick read through my section on creating a good keyword list. This will make it far easier to optimize your articles and get them read as many times as possible.
Optimizing You’re Article
When most people create an article that will promote their website, they go for the "most searched" keywords. As an example I will use this website. If I was to write an article, you would think that I would optimize for phrases like "make money online" or "make money from home". But these phrases are the most popular ones so therefore have the most competition.
As you can see above "make money online" has millions of websites competing for web traffic. Lets face it, even if you optimize your article amazingly, you probably won't be ranking anywhere near the top. So, what you are going to do is create articles based around the less competitive "long tail" keywords. You will find these are much easier to dominate.
The "long tail" keywords are the keywords that have a low amount of daily searches. And this means that there aren't as many people out there competing for their traffic. As an example I've used a long tail in my niche of "make money online" that got 84 searches a day last month. "how much money do you make selling avon"
As you can see there's only 250 thousand websites competing compared to the 170 million of "make money online".
So there might only be 84 searches but no one else is optimizing for that keyword phrase so you should gain traffic from it with little effort.
But I know what you're thinking. 1 - 100 searches per day doesn't sound like much compared to the 5,000 searches the "more popular" keywords get. But if you're ranked on the top page of google for 100 long tail keywords that get an average of 20 searches per day, that's a potential of 2,000 visitors to your site per day.
Are you getting excited now??? While everyone else is competing for the free web traffic of the "popular keywords" we're dominating the long tail.
So Far…..
By this point you've got yourself a long keyword list of all of your long tail phrases. You need to go through these phrases and search them on google to look at the number of other websites competing for that phrase. Anything under 500 thousand websites should be ok. If there's too many then you'll just be wasting your time. After that you'll have a nice list of phrases to write your articles on.
Creating Your Article
Writing articles isn't an amazing skill. Anyone can write articles and lots of people do. That's why the majority of them don't get read. It's being able to get you’re articles read that separates the men from the boys. There are three different ways I'm going to show you how to write articles but in every one of them you will still decide the title, and this is what will make or break you.
Your Article Title
Firstly, your title should contain the keyword phrase from your list. This means that when your article appears on google it will have that part in bold. But you also want to create a title that will entice someone to click through. Put yourself in the other persons shoes. When people are searching for information, they want it quick and simple so you need to convey this is in the title. Try and include the terms below.
- 9 things to avoid….
- 3 simple rules of….
- The most important tip on…..
- Are you at risk of…..
- 7 fantastic reasons to…..
- why (insert niche) is useless, unless you read this first
*when using numbers in your title to talk about tips, use odd numbers. It's less formal.
Writing Your Article
The three different ways of writing an article are:
- do it yourself
- use article writing software
- get someone else to do it
Do it yourself
Simply type in your keyword phrase on google and do a bit of background reading on what other sites are saying. Take a few notes and then put them down in paper in your own words. DON"T PLAGIARISE! Try and include plenty of paragraphs and try to keep it in the "quick tips" format from the title section above. Use your keyword phrase in the article body about 3 - 5 times (not too many more than that). There's no need for article to be anything more than 300 - 500 words long, remember it needs to be quick and simple.
Writing it yourself can be slightly more time consuming and I understand if you still aren't keen on doing it.
Article Writing Software
Basically, using article writing software you are able to enter a list of keywords into a programme and it will take snippets of millions of pieces of information and form them into a completely unique article. It does lighten the work load and come up with good articles. They're not amazing, but we're not in this to make fantastic articles, we're in it to generate free traffic.
I probably use article writing software about as much as I write my actual articles. I still write my own because it's good to sometimes put a more personal "feel" into your writing. People respond much better to articles written by you. However using article writing software can allow you to create an article about something you know nothing about in 15 minutes. I use the software listed below. I recommend it, but I still suggest you use your own writing as well if you're looking for the best content.
Take a look at the article writing software I use here.
Get Someone Else to Write It
This is by far the easiest option. By using companies like www.elance.com you can simply provide a very brief summary of what you want and someone else will write you’re article for you. It's easy to use the elance website and there's plenty of support if you have any problems. I use elance all the time for anything from articles to ebooks. The best thing is that you can post a job and then choose whichever applicant you want to do it.
I personally recommend trying out a mix of all the above, to find what you're most comfortable with. I've been doing this for years and I still find some days when I just don't have it in me to write anything. Do what suits you best.
Your Resource Box
At the end of all of you’re articles there will be something you need to create called a resource box. This is what will make people click back to your site and generate your free web traffic. You could have a great title and a great article, but if your resource box is poor you won't get any visitors.
Don't make the mistake most authors do and write something about yourself, because people just don't care…. sorry. Just offer the reader a benefit and tell them about the great tips and tricks or other stuff you've got on your site. Grab they're attention and make them click through.
Submitting Your Article
Submitting articles to article directories is simple. It's just a case of signing up to the directory and pasting your article and resource box into the correct fields. The two main directories that I recommend are ezinearticles and goarticles. However there are thousands of different ones you can submit you’re articles to.
Article Submitting Software
You will most likely have seen adverts for different article submitting softwares which claim to be able to submit to thousands of directories with very little work. I did buy one myself but to be honest it's all quite frustrating and quite hard work. I can see that it would get an article (and therefore your website) lots more free traffic, but I didn't even nearly get through the list of directories I was given because it was just taking too long.
If there are any of you out there that have used an amazing piece of article submitting software, then please feel free to comment and give us some info.
I used a piece of article submitting software called Article Submitter Pro but I wasn't really all that impressed. I got the idea from the adverts that it could just submit to thousands of directories at the click of a button, but there was a lot more work involved than first implied.
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