Increase website traffic with articles
Shashank Bhatnagar, 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:
----------------------------------------------------------------
Shashank Bhatnagar runs the Website Art and Design, 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.webartanddesign.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. |
