You've seen the promises, you've visited the blogs and message boards and forums. There is always somebody willing to give you the ultimate answer to building Internet traffic. More often than not you'll find that someone who is suggesting something easy and radical will have an affiliate link in his/her signature.
Let me give you an example of this misdirected guidance. Recently I've been looking for ways to broaden my base of advertising on my web sites, it isn't that I'm unhappy with my current advertisers, but as many people are, I'm always looking to improve my click-through-rate and payment per click. I found a thread on just such a subject on a well respected SEO forum. Almost every poster was gushing about a new ad agency, promising better ads, higher payouts, etc. I bought right into the hype , signed up (earning the person who's link I signed up through a $25 referral fee) and over the first 3 days made a whopping 34 cents.
Saying that I was devestated would be a bit of an exaggeration, but I was definitely disappointed. I went back to the forum to see how others were doing with this program and this time I noticed that 95% of the people promoting this new ad agency had an affiliate link to the agency's referral program in their signature. To be fair, the ad agency is valid, the people referring me to it were exaggerating their profits, however. It seems that everyone out there will sell you your dream, but most of what they are selling doesn't work.
You want to know what I've found that does work? Article marketing works! I've been doing article marketing on my web sites for more than a year, in fact I think it works so well that I decided to start up two article directories of my own. I see article directories and article marketing as a win-win-win situation for everyone. First of all, the authors of articles get exposure for their web sites, given by links in their authors resource box. Second the publishers who use the articles get free, quality content for their web sites. Of course the article directories themselves also benefit by the traffic of authors and web masters visiting their sites. Everybody wins, and all it costs is a little elbow grease!
So, start up notepad, write and article. Make sure it is SEO friendly, but most of all make it easy to read (not too high-brow). Make it useful for the market segment. Write something that you would want to put on your own page. You see, with article marketing you get the good old link kickback twice. Once from the article site you originally submit to (like Article Chimp) and then again every time a publisher puts it on their web page.
Let me give you an example of the second link kickback. Last year I wrote a Christmas article about sleigh rides. Okay, honesty time here, my wife wrote the article about sleigh rides. Anyway, I submitted the article to a few article sites and then didn't think about it again. What I did notice was that about two months later I had a big increase in traffic and wondered why. I did a search in Google on my domain name and found that my article was on the front page of a page rank 5 blog. Do you have any idea what a link from a high profile blog like that is worth in traffic? Of course you do, if you didn't you wouldn't be here reading this article.
I don't need to tell you that article marketing is a solid, proven technique for driving traffic to your web site and building up a wealth of quality back links to your site, you already know that. What I do need to do is tell you that it takes time, hard work and patience, but it will pay dividends. Sometimes it takes 4 or 5 months for an article you've written to start paying those dividends, but it will. I see you need another example.
I started an account on a popular article site more than a year ago and started submitting articles. I was recently doing a search and one of my articles on that site came up in the research results and I decided to take a peek, for old times sake. To my surprise the page that my article was on was a page rank 2 page. So page rank 2 isn't a big deal, but the face that I got three links in my article from a page rank 2 site and didn't pay a cent for it is a big deal. So I looked at the rest of my articles on that site, all of the older ones had a similar page rank. Then I looked at some other, older articles. Some of them had a page rank even higher! So, even if your article doesn't get picked up, it's value appreciates over time on the article site, the high page rank that the site enjoys is passed along to the hard working article authors pages.
Start writing articles today. I am being honest with you here, the article you write today will not generate huge traffic for you in 24 hours, but six months from now that article will be generating traffic and improving your search engine rankings. The good news is that the longer your article is out there in the web-sphere, the more it is worth to your web site. As the links pointing back to your site get older, your importance in Google's ranking algorithm gets higher. Article marketing is the one true, proven way to increase traffic to your web site.
Article Directory : http://www.articlecube.com
