How To Drive Traffic To a Website Through Article Marketing

There are many ways to increase website traffic. Some web developers are turning to SEO practices, link buying and even subscribing to pay-for-click programs just to encourage more visitors to their sites. One of the least expensive ways of increasing website traffic is through article marketing. What is Article Marketing? Article marketing is a form on online advertising. Basically, you write short articles about anything related to what you are trying to promote. After completing the piece, you have to make it available for distribution and publication in article directories, in the company website and even on someone else's site. As a rule, each completed article contains a resource box which contains vital information like: the name of the author, a very brief background of the author, and contact information of the author, etc. Essentials of Article Marketing 1. Write quality articles Quality content is still the best way to make article marketing work. You should remember that more than a million people log on to the Internet daily; and a good percentage of them post article after article about almost any topic. When you write an article, try to incorporate all the information your potential reader may need or want. Internet users usually seek out valuable information like the ones that can help them solve their problems. If you can, write and post articles that have the same theme or subject of interest; and write as many articles as you can. This is a way of building up your reputation among your readers. Given time, (and if your articles are interesting enough,) you just may develop a following of readers who are interested in reading what you have to say. 2. Craft the perfect resource box As mentioned earlier, when you market your article, you should always have a resource box. Now, this is really important. This is the one place that can literally point your readers to your website. Here is how you should craft a perfect resource box: The first thing that your readers should find in your resource box is your name and title, but more often than not, its just the name that people scout around for. Do not forget to type in correctly your website address after your name. After this, there is the compulsory USP or unique selling proposition: this is comprised of 1 to 3 brief and concise sentences as to what more you can possibly offer your readers. Finally, you lead your readers into a call of action. This means that you are asking them to do one specific action: particularly asking them to visit your website. 3. Submit your articles Obviously, submitting your article for publication is important, but where do you send them? The easiest choice is to send them to article directories or acquire article distribution services. Submission to article directories is mostly free, and these directories will allow you to add links to your website. Article distribution services have varying fees, but they allow your piece to be posted in more sites than article directories.

How Directories Can Drive Traffic to a Website

There are a lot of ways to drive traffic to your website, and one of the oldest methods is by submitting your website link to Web directories. A Web or link directory is the World Wide Webs directory, and like the yellow pages, it comprises of existing website links in different categories. Its purpose is to link and categorize various websites for surfers to effectively find what they are looking for.

Web directories are different from search engines, because they do not display web page lists that are based on keywords, but rather list a website by its category and its subcategory. The categorization process is normally based on a website as a whole, instead of the content of a page or its keywords, and usually websites are more than often only included in one to two categories. However, Web directories permits website owners to openly submit their website link to be included, and have human editors who evaluate website link submissions for category appropriateness.

RSS directories are also somewhat the same as Web directories, although they contain a compilation of RSS feeds, rather than website links.

Directories in General

Several directories are very much general in range and lists website links throughout a wide scope of languages, regions and categories/subcategories. But there are a handful of niche directories also, which concentrate on a specialist spheres, single languages, or limited regions.

An example of a popular, general, Web directory is the Open Directory Project (ODP) and the Yahoo! Directory. ODP is a major player in Web directories because of its wide-ranging categorization and a vast number of listings. It is also free to use by search engines and other Web directories.

An argument over the quality of these Web databases and directories persists, since search engines utilize ODP's information without any real incorporation, and several test using clustering. A lot of efforts have been done to build a simple directory development, by using links for a type of link submission website that uses a script, or several of the obtainable PHP programs and portals. Currently, social software methods have initiated new attempts in the categorization process, with the aid of adding tags to the contents of a websites pages.

Why to Use Directories

For arguments sake, sometimes a website may only achieve minimal traffic from a directory compared to a search engine, but it does not necessarily mean that you do not need to submit your website links to these directories.


Targeted traffic to a website is a result of directory searches. A surfer who searches using these directories are normally there for a specific purpose, and that is because they are looking for specific needs. This traffic is more than likely to convert to prospective customers for the products and services that a particular website carries.
Search engines rank website link directories, principally those that contain links for a particular significant interest, like an expert website. Whether this is due to the fact that these directories are managed by humans and not some super computers, it explains why it is still one of the trusted sources for information. Website links listed in these directories for that reason are more credible.

Should You Pay To Get Traffic Flowing To Your Site?

If you are hoping to get traffic to your website, you might be tempted to go the way that many Internet marketers are taking. Many Internet marketers are willing to risk all their money in order to ensure that they get some traffic into their websites.

They often spend thousands of dollars in order to buy email lists in order to send out promotional emails, and they spend even more in order to carry out offline marketing methods. Granted, offline marketing methods can help out in your marketing work and can often make your marketing efforts less uncertain. However, with the thousands of billboards already out there, why add to the clutter and spend money doing so?

So Will You Show the Money?

In my opinion, if you have the funds and you are just a young company that has yet to gain exposure from its products and services, then you are better off spending money on improving your products and services and surveying your market, instead of spending large amounts of money on offline marketing, or even online marketing techniques that are very hard selling, or that are more expensive than the features that your online marketing techniques will offer.

In fact, by investing more money in your products and service, you will end up pushing traffic to your website faster, and building your web presence. If you can build up your web presence first and get a good reputation, then you can go on and have some fun with more costly methods. This makes sense, actually, because by then, you will have enough money from your sales in order to spend more on your marketing and widening your audience scope.

What does this mean? This means that you should make the look of your online store better tailored to the needs and tastes of your market. What does this entail? You need to design your website so that it is easy to navigate: make your menus easy to read through, your navigation scheme easy to understand, and your design intuitive.

Make the site easy for your visitors to wade through and read, and make the site attractive so that your visitors will not have a hard time looking at it. Most importantly, update your site frequently, so that your websites will have something new to read each time that they visit.

What should you update your website with? Aside from news and updates about your products and services, try helping your prospective customers out with their lives by providing articles that can help them understand different concepts related to your products and services, or tips lists that can help them get through difficult techniques that they might encounter in the future.

If you build customer relationships early, you increase your chances of touching your customers lives early and getting them to trust you if ever you recommend any product or even sell your own products and/or services.

These are only a few tips that you might want to take into account as you analyze your marketing tactics. As long as you take care of your customers, you won't have a hard time making a profit. And as you take care of your customers, you can find them helping you and referring you to their family and friends, making them the voice of free marketing itself.
As for me, I'm definitely going to pay to increase the conversion of traffic