From The Rock

One of the most effective methods of generating traffic to your website is writing articles and submitting them to the article publishers. The efforts of the next few days may not drive any real traffic to your website but writing articles and submitting them will serve you well in the future and it is in your best interest to use this technique to your advantage. While you may not think you have any writing talent, you are probably incorrect. You may not be the next John Grisham, but you can effectively write about your website and products that you sell. Of course you need to know the rules for writing articles effectively. The number one rule is that the headline or title HAS To contain keywords pertaining to your website or product. This will be the determining factor when E-zine publishers or website owners decide if they want to publish your article. This is because they are aware of how much importance the search engines place on keywords in searches.

* Note: The way people find products or information on the internet is by the use of search engines. These people use key words to find what they want by entering them into the search box and clicking “Search”. One such search may be for “car parts” or “car tires”. What is returned by the search engine is based on whatever key words the searcher used.

Another thing of importance regarding the headline or title of the article is that it MUST draw attention. Using something simple like Car Parts won’t do. Your title MUST be interesting enough to grab the reader’s attention and keep him reading. “Car Parts for Your Mercedes”…well, that isnt really great either. How about, “Car Parts for your SL-600″ or “Car Parts For Your SL That The Women Can’t Resist”? These last two headlines should encourage someone looking for parts their Mercedes to continue reading the article.

After the title, the next most important words in your article are in the first line. Experienced internet surfers are well known for having a short attention span and rarely read anything word for word unless it is information that they think will meet their needs, solve a problem they have or make life better for them. So…the title…and the first line become the bait and the hook that is used to lure the reader to truly read the complete article. If the first line contains the key words it must also be be attention getting. “The customers were begging for more tips after the first line!” If you were an internet marketer, wouldn’t you keep reading?

Another thing about writing articles that you plan to submit to article banks is that they need to be short. Very short! They should be a maximum of 400 words and closer to 300 would be better. Its easy to get carried away and suddenly have an article that is 1000 words or more when you are discussing a subject that you know a lot about and are interested in. If you start writing and forget to stop, break long wordy articles down and make three or four articles out of the one long one.

Use short sentences and short paragraphs. Remember that short attention span that we talked about? Dont use big words and dont use run-on sentences. Make your article easy to read.

Take it easy on those exclamation points. One exclamation point is all that is necessary to indicate importance or excitement… half a dozen are just rude.

Your resource box which comes at the end of the article is the most important part of all. Anyone who downloads and reproduces your article is required to include your resource box. And this box should contain your full name, your contact information and, most importantly, the link to your website. That link is the reason you are writing this article anyway. It is to help increase traffic for you.

Warning! Your link should NOT word wrap! It must be complete, http://www.whatever.com. Not all email programs that are used by E-zine editors to send out their newsletters and E-zines support word-wrapped links so you can defeat the whole purpose of writing the article by word-wrapping your website url.

Submitting Articles: Once you have found article banks and article repositories on the Internet by simple doing a search using your favorite search engine it is time to submit your articles. Every site has their own guidelines for accepting articles which you must follow or risk rejection.

Software is available for use in automatically submitting articles to the article repositories and banks. The problem here is that most of the larger, more effective repositories and banks will not publish automated submissions. So even though this software can save time when submitting to smaller sites, this doesn’t help much with the bigger more well known sites.

Submitting articles can be time consuming and boring, but it is work that will provide a lot of targeted traffic to your site. Every person who reads an article you’ve written is also exposed to your URL. If they like the article because it provides good information for them, they will visit your site. Once there, they may buy something you are selling or maybe opt-in for your mailing list… or possibly even do both. There are services available to submit your articles for you. You do have to pay for this service.

Another solution which I use is Unique Article Wizard. UAW submits unique articles to hundreds of article publishers at the click of a mouse. Spend a couple hours writing your article, click Publish and watch the traffic grow to your site.