One of the first questions I’m often asked about marketing is whether there really is a free way to get traffic to a blog or website. My answer is an unequivocal ‘yes’. But the expansion of this answer is often surprising to the reader.
It’s not, as people usually assume, Free Advertising. It’s not, as people often expect, some sort of Traffic Exchange. Both of these work, if targeted correctly to a specific type of consumer, but they don’t work anywhere near as well as Article Marketing.
Now before you start groaning and thinking that you can’t write, or cannot be bothered to write, articles that ‘push’ traffic to your blog or website I’ve just found a neat site that is perfect for those who are looking for inspiration or information for articles.
For me inspiration is the biggest obstacle to writing articles. I’m lucky that I don’t often get stuck for words, but I do get stuck for ideas! This is where ‘GistWeb’ comes up trumps.
Go to GistWeb.com (it’s free to use) and enter a keyword that you wish to base your article around. GistWeb will search across the ‘net and put together a Short, Medium or Long article for you based on collecting relevant bits of published information.
Naturally you can’t just publish the article GistWeb produces with your own name on it. But you can rearrange it and rewrite it so that it becomes your own. Or just do as I do and use the information GistWeb dredges up as an idea base for your own words.
So, then what do you do? Well you add your byline, a catchy title and a resource box and submit it to Article Directories. Then wait for the traffic to arrive. Yes, it’s all free, and so is the traffic!
The volume and quality of traffic you will get is based on several factors, particularly the keywords you use, the attractiveness of your title, the interest generated by your article and the call to action in your resource box. If you want more information on this, particularly a step-by-step guide to maximising the potential of free traffic through article marketing, then I strongly recommend that you get hold of the Article Domination ecourse. I’ve just taken this course myself and found it invaluable.
Article Domination will take you through the whole process of researching and creating articles that act like traffic magnets, where and how to publish them for maximum effect and exactly what you should put in your resource box to provide an ultra-high percentage click-thru rate.
With Article Domination and using the resources of Gistweb you’ll have one of the best free methods for generating quality, targeted traffic that you can turn on any time you want!
Jonathan,
You’re so right. Article marketing does provide free traffic, but my experience is that it’s a stream rather than a river. It takes consistent work over a long period to start gettting a cumulative effect.
Still if the articles are good and provide new information, it can help to establish expert status.
I write all my articles myself. I’ve never used a program, but I just tried something new yesterday that may interest your readers. I did a keyword search for latent semantic words (LSI) around a high traffic keyword, organized them into categories and used the categories as the main points for an article. In fact, it was long enough that I made it two parts and distributed as two articles.
I’ll be posting them to my site later today if your readers would like to see them. I’ll even post the keyword list.
htpp://strategicmarketsegmentation.com/blog/business-profitability-1
htpp://strategicmarketsegmentation.com/blog/business-profitability-2
htpp://strategicmarketsegmentation.com/blog/business-profitability-list
P.S. I’m always pleased to find another Boomer daring the Internet business.
It may be a stream at first but, over time, it develops into a flood!
What is best about article marketing is that your articles never go away; they are always out there bringing backlinks and traffic to your site or blog.
Even better, if you write your articles correctly, and Article Domination shows you exactly how, your ‘authority figure’ articles will make you sales, even affiliate sales, very quickly.
For example, after running through the Article Domination ecourse I put out one article pointing to an affiliate link on my blog and am currently making, on average, one affiliate sale a day within 5 days of publication.
That’s what I call a result!