TIPS and TRICKS
Increase website traffic with articles
Quite frankly, it's hard to quickly increase website traffic. When you submit a site to a search engine or a directory, it takes a while before it gets listed and the effects start to show. However, if you happen to be a webmaster of a new site, you know that it is difficult to wait for the traffic to start growing. There's nothing that would sound better than receiving a few hundred or thousand visitors within the next day or two, but how are you going to make that happen?
While there are many possible solutions, the best way to increase website traffic for a brief period of time is to write newsletter articles. All that is required is an idea, decent writing skills, a couple hours of time and someone who would be interested in publishing your work. Because there is no money involved, this promotion technique is especially suited for small business owners who don't have a large marketing budget.
The resource box is the key
Newsletter editors are always looking for good content. Especially when their newsletter is published daily or weekly, it's hard for them to produce all the content they need on their own. However, while they admit that they need the content, most of them can't afford or simply don't want to pay for it.
Because too many people aren't willing to write articles without any compensation, someone invented a clever arrangement: In exchange for allowing his content to be published for free, the author is allowed to place one small advertisement in the newsletter without charge. These advertisements are placed immediately below the article and are called "resource boxes" or "bylines". A typical resource box contains some information about the author and a link to his site. To give an example, here's one of my own:
----------------------------------------------------------------
Lauri Harpf runs the A Promotion Guide website, where he
offers free information on how to increase website traffic by
using search engines and directories. His site can be found at
http://www.apromotionguide.com/
----------------------------------------------------------------
But is there any point in writing a full article just to get one 4-6 line ad? There probably wouldn't, if you were limited to publishing it in just one newsletter. However, usually you'll only give newsletters a right to use your article instead of transferring its ownership. This makes it possible to write a single piece and then have it published by several ezines. A good article may be featured in more than ten newsletters, thus allowing your 4-6 line ad reach tens or hundreds of thousands of subscribers and increase your website traffic substantially.
As this one ad is the only compensation you'll get from your article, it has to be a good one. No matter how good your articles are, they won't produce too much traffic if your resource box is unattractive. To improve the effectiveness of your resource box, make sure that it
- Mentions the address of your website, preferably in the form http://www.mysite.com/. Unlike simply using your domain name "mysite.com", the longer "http://www.mysite.com/" allows users of Outlook Express and several other E-mail programs to click on the link rather than forcing them to open a new browser window and cut & paste the address.
- Doesn't have any affiliate URL's, ie. http://www.affiliateprogram.com/index.htm?affiliate_id=affiliate . The people who have been on the net for a while generally tend to avoid clicking at long URL's that look like affiliate links. If you really want to use such a link, create a page, for example "program.html" on your site that is nothing more than a JavaScript redirect to the affiliate program's address. Then simply use http://www.mysite.com/program.html in your resource box.
- Has been tested. If you write often for the same newsletters, it wouldn't be a bad idea to create several different resource boxes and compare their performance. Well-planned resource box testing enables you to get as many clickthroughs from your articles as possible.
Some marketing required
When you decide to start writing articles, the first step is to find as many newsletters as possible that are dedicated to the topic you want to write about. There are several methods you can use to accomplish this. Start out by visiting the leading sites about your topic and see whether some of them publish newsletters. Then use the search engines and ezine directories to find more of them.
While searching for newsletters that might be willing to publish your article is not much fun, it's a very important job. Try to find 10-20 medium/large newsletters and absolutely refuse to quit until you have done so. The reason why this is vital for your success is that most of the work involved in this promotion method comes from writing the article itself. Once that is done, sending the article to a hundred editors instead of five will not take much more time, but it will explode the amount of visitors you'll receive.
After you've found enough newsletters that accept articles from readers, arrange them into a list based on how many subscribers they have. Many newsletters publish the current number of subscribers in each issue, but if some of them don't, try to make an educated guess based on how professional they seem.
When you're done, send the article to the first newsletter on your list, then wait a couple of days for their response before moving on to the next one. Granted, it would be easier to simply send your article to every newsletter at the same time, but it isn't wise for two reasons:
- Large newsletters tend to only accept articles that haven't already been widely published, while most smaller ones are not as picky.
- If you'd send your article to everyone simultaneously, two or more large ezines might publish it at the same time. This makes the editors of said ezines look bad, which in turn can result in them forwarding your next article submission straight to the trashcan.
When you've sent to your article to all of the newsletters/ezines on your lists, it's beginning to approach the end of its lifespan. The last step is to send it to various lists and sites that distribute free articles, where it can be picked up by owners of smaller ezines that you don't know about. There are a large amount of these lists, but a few of the most important ones that accept nearly all sorts of articles are
Article Announce:
http://www.web-source.net/articlesub.htm
IdeaMarketers:
http://www.ideamarketers.com/
Publisher Network:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/publisher_network
Does it increase my traffic enough to pay off?
It's hard to answer this question, because everything depends on how good your article is and how well you are able to market it. In the best possible scenario your article will be published by several ezines that have 100,000+ subscribers each, resulting in >5000 visitors to your site. On the flip side of the coin, it's possible that nobody will publish your article and you won't get a single hit. My personal experience is that a reasonably well-written article that is actively marketed usually produces around 500-2500 unique visitors.
If you decide to try your hand at writing articles, remember that the results tend to improve as you become more experienced. Should your first pieces be rejected by most newsletters and only produce a handful of visitors, don't get depressed. It takes a bit of practice, but it is worth it in the long run.
OK, so it works - how do I do it?
Writing newsletter articles isn't the easiest job in the world, but it isn't the hardest either. However, if you don't have any past experience, it might be difficult to get started. For that reason, I chose to write two articles about this subject instead of just one.
In the piece you just read, "Increase website traffic with articles", we discussed how to market your articles and what kind of results you can expect. The other article, "Writing newsletter articles" has a few pointers on how to create the articles themselves. So, if you haven't written anything before, consider taking a look at it as well for maximum benefit.
