By Kanute Fleming
Article marketing is one of the most popular ways to generate traffic to your website and online business. Webmasters all over the globe are writing and publishing articles online to create traffic to their sites. It’s an old and well-known traffic strategy; however it is still one of the most popular and commonly used methods to attract online traffic.
Article marketing is basically writing articles about topics related to your business, and submitting them to article directories. Then your articles are posted on their site and published on the internet once they are accepted with the directories.
Creating traffic to your website
When people are searching for information related to the content in one of your articles, they may come across your article, read it and eventually click on a link that you have provided. That link will direct the reader to your website, and there you have another visitor to your site.
If you provide good content in your articles, they may be picked up by other webmasters and republished on their website. Many webmasters go to article directories to find good content for their sites, and some of your articles may be chosen if they are unique and of high quality. The webmasters have to keep your name as the author and the links in the resource box pointing to your website. This way your articles can generate an increasing amount of traffic for a long time to come if they are spread virally all around the globe.
Branding yourself and your business
As you publish more and more articles, and some of your articles get republished by other webmasters and possibly spread worldwide, you may become known as an authority in your niche so that people will listen to what you say and recommend. Likewise, your articles will help branding your business, causing more people choose your product or service rather than your competitor’s.
Articles will generate backlinks
As you might know, Google and other search engines rely heavily on backlinks when deciding how important a website is. Article marketing is a proven and popular way to getting backlinks to your website. You are not allowed to have links in the article body, however in the resource box (or ‘about the author’ area) you can add a couple of sentences about you and your business, and include a link or two that point to your website.
Interested visitors – targeted traffic
If you write articles related to your business niche (which you obviously would), the visitors that arrive at your website through the links in your resource box will be genuinely interested in your business (or else they would not have clicked on your links). In other words, your articles will bring you targeted traffic, which is the most valuable because they are potential customers.
So you understand that writing and publishing articles creates value in at least two ways – by generating direct traffic via the links in your resource box, and by building backlinks to your website, which is essential to receive free, natural traffic from the search engines. In addition it builds your brand.
Be patient and persistent
Writing and submitting articles is a long-term traffic strategy. While it can be a tedious and time-consuming task, it’s definitively worth the effort. Article marketing is one of the most efficient methods to create lasting traffic to your website. However, you need to write and publish articles on a regular basis to achieve good results. You will not see any significant result before you have a certain number of articles published, so it may take some time until you see a noticeable increase in traffic. Therefore, you need some patience and persistence with this article business to make it a sustainable traffic strategy.