Part 4 : Online Traffic – Article Writing
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
ONLINE TRAFFIC: ARTICLE WRITING
Article writing is a major consideration in any serious traffic generation profile – and to make sure you’re getting the most out of article writing, you need to understand the basics of why they work.
Article marketing is simple, and effective basically because it’s hands off. You can use articles as viral marketing – the back links that sites like E-zine articles and other article marketing sites alone make it a valuable and viable contribution to your article marketing projects.
Its important to remember though, you’ve got to actually work at it – article marketing is a high quality form of marketing – you’ve got to make sure that the final product reflects well on you – not only to get them accepted, but also because this article will be your ‘face’ on several sites. Article reprints spread far and wide, and the best ones can carry on for far longer than you’d normally expect.
Once you understand how they work, you can work with the methods that make them so successful, and go from standard success to stellar in a couple of simple steps.
What you’ll need
Article writing or production is simple – take some PLR or an article concept, stick it into your word processor and that’s about it. Depending on where you want to send your articles will depend on what exactly you’ll need next.
You’ll also need to get accounts with sites you want to submit your content to – and check out their guidelines. Make sure you understand the rules on keywords specifically, as it’s the single biggest ban reason – once you do, you can find some great traffic goldmines writing for other sites, with your own links in the bio.
Writing a bio
Bios are simply a brief description of who the author is, and further links to contact, or read more by them. Most bios relate directly to the information that are being shared in the articles – and will share one or two urls relating to the subject at hand – in your case, your site, or sites. Using articles to promote your sites will, of course, mean that you should promote the sites in question, without shunting traffic through intermediaries. Which, in turn, means that if you’re offering reprints on your site, you should archive them on the site, with a current bio in place.
Writing
Content writing isn’t easy and for that reason, you might want to consider taking a day of time to brainstorm, write and submit. You can write articles in a couple of hours – submitting itself can be done when you have a spare couple of minutes – but the most important thing to remember, and keep firmly in site is the quality of your writing.
You may think that you’re not a good writer, but anyone and everyone has some writing ability – it just takes a certain mindset to actually commit the words to paper – a mindset that professional writers take years to hone.
Hiring a writer
You CAN hire a writer – there are lots of places you can find a good writer, or writers, including Getafreelancer.com and elance.com – but for every good writer, there are tonnes of poor ones. Its important to know what to look for in a good writer.
Can they articulate WHY they are a good writer? ” I is da bomb!” really isn’t a vote of confidence for anyone’s writing abilities. Its important to look at how well their personality shines through their CV, and how well they express themselves.
Style or substance? If their style fits yours then they might be a better fit than someone with an impeccably written CV with no feel of style to it. Substance too is important, if they can easily express ideas, you’ll find that they are entertaining, enthusiastic and engaging, and therefore, make better articles to read.
What are their clips like? – if they’ve got clips, review them, and get a feel for how they handle topics – if they are comfortable over the topics they are presenting, its another point in their favor.
Do they speak English, or at least pass as speaking it properly? – one of the biggest issues with freelancers that price themselves low is that they are possibly English Second Language writers. Which means that they’ll either have a perfect grasp of the language and genuinely be brilliant, or more commonly, they have turns of phrase that gives them alway as ESL writers. These turns of phrase WILL need to be edited thoroughly.
What are their reviews like? Do they have glowing reviews, high ratings? Information such as how they’ve handled previous contracts is very important.
Building a strong article
The first and most important few words of your article are in the title or the headline – they should indicate, or offer something that ties into the article itself, and makes sense to your reader, once they’ve read it, which means that if you name it something like ‘When life hands you lemons, build a dot com’ – it should make complete sense to the reader as to why you chose that specific title.
Once you’ve chosen and written your title (which can be before, or after you’ve written the article itself), you should move on to the first paragraphs – they should explain, clearly, the message you’re trying to share, over the course of the article, but to This is one of the primary methods that e-zine owners and newsletter producers, and of course, website owners use to choose content by.
Your title should be informational
If you’ve started your content with writing your title – you can then move on to running over the points you want to share in your article, a piece at a time. This way of sharing information makes for good, interesting articles that aren’t overly long and can focus on one or two important points that you want to share.
Article writing for the net isn’t complicated – a great formula and rule of thumb to remember is most people skim read content online, so you need lots of subheadings, and paragraphs of between three and eight lines long. You can write slightly longer, or shorter, for things like bulleted lists. This works well because people skim read – and have an incredibly short attention span.
Go easy on the exclamation points, as well. One exclamation point indicates importance or excitement… a half a dozen are just rude, and mark you as an amateur writer, which, in turn, will get you rejected from the article sites you’ve been working towards being accepted in – another sign of amateur writing is all capitals in the titles.
It’s also important to remember that people will read content by you if they’ve enjoyed you as a writer, or content provider, they will look for you again, and visit your site, which is why its of vital importance that you create a landing page from all of your articles, linked via your resource box.
Your resource box at the end of the article is the part that is most important to you. You’ll use it to direct people to your site. Its a short biography at the end of each article you produce, which anyone using the articles has to leave in place. This is why they are so good as traffic tools – these article marketing high points are just a couple of the perks.
Submitting Articles:
Once you’ve written your content to submit, you shouldn’t submit your article to everywhere that will take it. Article marketing has recently been crippled by the Google Slap, so avoiding, or at least accepting that your articles will be caught in the Google duplicate content filter (and on any search engine for that matter) is an important first step to relaxing where you send your content to.
You should choose five article submission sites to send your content to at most – recommended sites such as E-zinearticles.com, articledirectory.com and other, possibly niche based sites will give you excellent coverage of a vast market of potential readers.
While there’s lots of software that you can use to submit and produce articles, such as article architect, that you can use to automate your submissions, and working on articles, all you need do is bookmark the sites that you submit to the most, and ensure you’re building strong, interesting content on these sites, so that not only do you gain a reputation for solid content, but you’re also creating a marketability platform.
Syndicating your own articles
One of the advanced methods of article marketing is self syndication. Self syndicating articles is as easy as setting up your articles on a feed – and allowing people to use the feeds to post your content on their sites. Self syndication on a personal level isn’t as complex as it once was, but you need a high amount of traffic, or several interested parties to make it worth your while.
One of the easiest ways of syndicating your articles though is to use WordPress and Feedburner – with them both you can offer your own mini syndication site, and control what articles people get, when. Empower Network Blog ranks well and get traffic fast!
There are also other scripts that allow you to syndicate articles – if you’ve got a lot of them on one topic to share, and you want to build your own site that shares the content with others, syndication style, you could use article dashboard. Article dashboard is free, and a great piece of software that you can build your own article based directory on.
Press releases
If you’ve got something truly newsworthy, or can, at least build something newsworthy around your site, you’ll be able to produce and release press releases. Online, or offline, these handy little business tools are used badly by some people – and overlooked by others.
First and foremost in press release is to actually find your ‘reason for release’. That reason could be a launch of a site, an expansion – an award. Think inside, and outside of the box, and see what you can find that would make a good reason to share your news with the world.
There is a universally accepted format for press releases, one which you can either use, as outlined below, or go to a website and generate one from there – two great places for this are – http://www.canadaone.com/promote/pressrelease.html or http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/Instant-Press-Release.htm.
Alternatively, there’s this one, which is one of the basic layouts used.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact Information:
Your Name
Your street address
Your city, State
Your telephone number (with area code)
Your website address
Your email address
Your headline in bold type goes here. This headline need not be a complete sentence but it can be. It should read like a newspaper headline.
Your city, ST -The date-Begin your press release here by restating the headline or adding to it. Continue with pertinent information.
A press release can be between 600 and 1500 words long. The following is the accepted way to end a press release:
For Information: your website address followed by
Your email address
# # #
All press releases end with the three number symbols centered at the bottom of the release.
Press releases should be formatted correctly, and then you can submit them online at places like http://PRWeb.com. Submitting to this one place will usually result in it being distributed to several sites, increasing your chances of having more links back to your site.
The single most important thing though, other than having valid news to share, is to ensure that your contact details are up to date and usable. There are several press releases that I created that are still circulating, four years on. Unfortunately, because the site that it relates to is now down, we’re losing all those back links and traffic.
You can also enclose them to other venues, such as newspapers. You’ll need to write a cover letter and send it to the person in question that deals with these things, which, in turn, means developing contacts.
The Next Post will talk about Forums and Blogs .
To Our Success,
Brandi J Roberts
This is your invitation to lock arms with thousands of like-minded individuals that share the same goal – to obtain prosperity in every aspect of life! Do you think You could blog about things that are important to you?
I want to share with you the benefits and bonuses of locking arms with Team Take Massive Action.
Team Take Massive Action Is One of the Fastest Growing Teams within Empower Network!
We are focused on helping the average person, regardless of their experience level, to have success with Empower Network. The core focus of our team is teaching the “3 C’s of Online Marketing”.
How to CREATE Traffic, CAPTURE Leads, and CONVERT Sales!
Even at the basic member level in our community, you get access to a ton of additional training tutorials, community support, and more.
…On our Team we are focused and dedicated to help you succeed! Here Are Just A Few Of Our Team Benefits that help people stick with us!
- Daily Mindset Calls – Monday-Friday…
- Free Internet Marketing Webinars …
- Daily Action Assignments & Accountability
- Facebook Group Mastermind…
- Training Site (All Recordings & Tutorial Trainings)…
- Marketing System & Pages That Do All The Heavy Lifting For You…
And this is just the scratch on the surface of the value offered with your membership in Team Take Massive Action.