Free Article Writing Tips to Increase Website Traffic

FREE ARTICLE WRITING TIPS TO INCREASE WEBSITE TRAFFIC

By: John Michaels

If you're not doing so already, you may want to consider writing articles about your website's topic. Writing copyright free articles is a great way to:

    * Establish your credibility and build your reputation and brand
    * Establish yourself as an expert in your field
    * Increase your exposure on the internet
    * Gain laser targeted traffic to your website
    * Increase the number of one way links to your website, which should help your website in the search results.

Writing articles about the topic of your website is a fantastic way to demonstrate your expertise and credibility and at the same time allows you to build your reputation and your brand. Submitting your articles to the various free article sites gives your articles the opportunity to be picked up by other webmasters for their websites and newsletters. When your articles get used on these other websites they must be used with the author bio section un-edited. This means that you can generate one way links to your website, which in turn leads to greater exposure and better rankings in the search engines. If the readers of your articles on other sites click through to your site, you gain targeted traffic.



Some Article Writing Tips
To get the greatest benefit from your article writing endeavors, try to keep the following article writing tips in mind:

    * Try to stay away from turning your article into a sales pitch. Give your readers credit - they will be able to distinguish a sales pitch right away. Once they think they're just reading another sales pitch they will quickly click away from your article. I can just about guarantee that no one will pick up your sales pitch and use it on their website, unless it's one of your affiliates.

    * Don't include too many hyperlinks within the article body and stick to only one in the author bio section. Most webmasters will not pick up an article, no matter how good it is, if there are too many outgoing links. I would recommend not having any links within the article body but sometimes this is unavoidable.

      Which situation would you rather have: 1 article with 1 outgoing link to your website that gets picked up by 1,000 webmasters or 1 article with 10 outgoing links that gets picked up by 10 webmasters?

    * Check, re-check and then check your article again for typos and grammatical errors. Have someone else proofread it for you before submitting it. Nothing says amateur more than typos and grammatical errors.

    * Write articles that complement the topic of your website. Don't write about something totally unrelated to your website. Remember, you want to establish your credibility and expertise. Write about what you know.

    * When adding that one link back to your site, make sure to include a keyword targeted link back to your site. I'm talking specifically about the words between the anchor tags. For example, this is how you should structure the link back to your website: <a href="http://www.yourwebsite.com">keywords go here<a>.

      When the search engine robots come across this link they will index the anchor text and it will help you with those keywords in the search engines. Do not waste this valuable link by just having your website address (www.website.com) as the anchor text unless you have your main keywords in the website address. Try to vary the keywords a little as well when creating this link. There is speculation that having too many "uniform" links to a site may hurt you - just something to keep in mind.

    * Do not place a copyright notice at the top of your article. This leads to confusion and may cause webmasters to stay away from posting your articles on their website and in their newsletters.

    * It may be a good idea to write completely new content for your articles. Some writers just copy and paste parts of their websites and put them into articles. This may lead to a "duplicate content" penalty and may end up hurting your search engine results. I would recommend that you should play it safe and come up with totally new content for your articles.

How Many Articles Should I Write?
The number of articles that you will have to write really depends on how good your competitors are. If you're competing against many highly optimized websites, then you may have your work cut out for you. On the other hand, if you notice that your competitors are not all that great at the SEO thing, your road to article writing will be much shorter. Any way you look at it, writing articles can bring too many benefits that are yours for the taking.

Author Bio
John Michaels is a part-time editor for ArticleGeek.com. John has developed many websites over the years in many different business areas. He is a professional web developer/designer/architect. ArticleGeek is a free website content resource for publishers and webmasters and a place where authors may submit articles for FREE!

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5 Steps to Powerful Articles Marketing

Today, article marketing is probably one of the most powerful and inexpensive forms of marketing online available to small business owners and non-profíts. For those not savvy with the term "article marketing," here is a quick definition:

In exchange for a little sweat and focus, an article author (you) shares their wisdom and experience with the world by posting their short article of advice or insight to blogs, social media, and article publication sites. Within those articles are one-way links leading back to the author's own website, raising the website's "authority" karma with the search engines and increasing qualified traffíc.

You Are the Expert

Here is a little mental preparation for you. I want to make sure you are looking at article marketing - and yourself - through the proper lens.

When you produce articles, it is your goal to encapsulate gems of experience-hardened wisdom and share them with the online community. In doing so, you:

1. Help to advise those who are seeking that knowledge, and you

2. Position yourself as an expert on the topic. (Important!)

Warning: Don't get caught up on the term "expert." Many humble folks who are vastly knowledgeable about their industry wouldn't refer to themselves as experts because they are also aware there is much they don't know. You don't have to know it all. You just need to know more than your customers and then know where to find the answers when you are stumped.

Your Mission: Inspire, Inform, Entertain

Your primary goal in business is to help, right? Businesses and nonprofit organizations provide products and services with the intent of helping people. (Naive? Maybe. Choosing to see the best? Definitely.) That might mean helping to:

1. Provide a solution to a problem,
2. Offer inspiration, motivation or elevation,
3. Foster greater awareness to a social concern, or even to
4. Entertain and enthrall.

The best place to start? Begin with what you know. Offer advice. Offer your life experience. Offer sagacious words of wisdom. Expound and elucidate. Maybe even do a little research. Article marketing is your vehicle for taking your wisdom to your audience, answering their questions before their questions have bubbled up.

Step 1: Target Your Topic

What do you specialize in? What do you know a lot about? What is the point to your website? After all, the goal of any article marketing campaign is to place articles of value out into the world and grow your number of back links (links that point back to your website from another website.) Google and other popular search engines/directories see these links leading into your website as proof you must be something of an authority.

Translation: On the Internet, you are somebody important if other people say you are. It's like high school all over again! Yeah!

Step 2: Write the Article

To begin marketing with articles, you must write the articles. No kidding. Sure, there is some work involved here, but the rewards can be great as qualified traffic to your website increases. Yes, I'm aware there are certain sources for pre-written articles on a myriad of topics, however I would recommend against putting your name on other people's work. Call me paranoid, but here are some possible dangers with this:

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1. Loss of credibility and damage to your reputation when it's discovered you're not writing your material,
2. Being called upon to discuss a topic you barely considered to begin with, and
3. Being accountable for someone else's errors if they pop up.

Remember: One of the greatest things about writing is the fact you're building an asset when you write. You are building a piece of reproducible and shareable knowledge. This is what "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" author, Rob Kiyosaki, refers to as "doing it once and replicating it over and over."

To write an article, you don't have to be a Harvard literature graduate, but you should know how to complete a thought, hold a one-way conversation with a person, and use spellcheck.

   * First, know what your goal is for your article. What is your point? Being clear on this will help keep you on track as you craft your introduction, body and conclusion.

   * Next, pretend you are relaying this information to a friend. What would you say? How would you counsel them if they came to you seeking this advice?

   * Finally, use spellcheck. Proofread, proofread, proofread. Read the article aloud to test for smooth flow and phrasing. Ferret out all typos, grammatical errors and punctuation gaffs. If missed, these mistakes can detract from your writing and credibility.

The Resource Box

The last detail you'll consider for your article will be your resource box. Your resource box is the little paragraph at the end of your article that tells the reader a little about you and how to contact you. It should always include a link to your website. Always. You want your readers to be able to find you if they desire more information and you want the search engines to see you as an authority through that back link, remember?



Key point: In your resource box, you don't always have to use the same link back to your website's homepage. In fact, you will likely have greater success by linking to the page on your site most closely related to your article's topic. This moves visitors from the article directly to their topic of interest. (For example, if a web design company also offers web hosting, their article "How to pick the best web host" should link back to the page on their website that describes their web hosting services.)

Step 3: Launch!

There! You have produced a shiny little gem of literary brilliance. Now it is time to set it free.

1. Place it on your blog (if you have one and if it fits appropriately).

2. Share it with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and your other social media outlets. You can post it over and over by hand or use tools like PingFM to automate this process.

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Read the rest of Matt's article at SiteProNews.com
"Marketing Mastery Series: 5 Steps to Powerful Article Marketing"

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About The Author
Matt Schoenherr is a husband, father of four, business owner of Dreamscape Multimedia, and marketing consultant. As a syndicated author of a marketing and public relations column, Matt writes for a national online news magazine. Matt has over 17 years of national community outreach experience. His blog at www.mattschoenherr.com analyzes marketing concepts, delivers marketing ideas and occasionally explores the more magical side of life.

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