Article Marketing - Exchanging Content For Traffic

If you're willing to exchange high quality content for traffic, there are a number of different traffic strategies that you can use to propel your promotional campaigns, and ultimately, flood your website with qualified visitors.

One of these strategies involves article marketing. With article marketing, you simply create keyword-rich content, submit it into the popular article directories and wait for traffic to start flooding your site.

The downside to article marketing is that it does involve a bit of time, especially if you plan to create the majority of your content yourself.

However, there is one misconception to article marketing that has prevented many new marketers from exploring its incredible potential to deliver targeted traffic.

Many entrepreneurs believe that it's all in the QUANTITY of the articles you submit rather than the quality. In truth, while the more articles you have in circulation, the more traffic you'll receive, focusing first on creating rich, quality and relevant content for your niche will help you generate TARGETED visitors.

So, while you may have less traffic, the traffic you do receive will be genuinely interested in what you have to offer.

To create your first article marketing campaign, you should have 5-10 quality articles created.

Your articles don't have to be longer than 300 words in length, but make sure that you have chosen a keyword-rich title for each article that you plan to submit into the article directories. The titles you use with your articles will ultimately determine the exposure you'll receive as both the major search engines like Google.com and Yahoo.com, as well as the article directories themselves, with categorize and rank your article content based on the keywords found within your titles.

You also want to make sure that you repeat your primary keyword in the first few lines of each article that you create. This will help you gain exposure within the search engines, who will pull and publish a portion of your article when someone enters related keywords into the search engines.

And there is also another important factor to keep in mind:

Many of the article directories will not accept duplicated content, which means that you will want to submit your original material into these directories first, wait for approval - and then submit the content into other directories.

The giant of all article directories online is http://www.EzineArticles.com , so you'll want to focus your attention on submitting content into this directory first, followed by other directories, in the following order:

http://www.EzineArticles.com

http://www.Buzzle.com

http://www.SearchWarp.com

http://www.ArticlesBase.com

http://www.SelfGrowth.com

http://www.GoArticles.com

http://www.ArticleAlley.com

http://www.Amazines.com

http://www.Web-Source.net

Also keep in mind that not only will you generate traffic from direct visitors who read your articles, but if webmasters choose to republish your content on their websites, you will also gain additional exposure from THEIR visitors, as well!

Now, one of the most critical components of a successful article marketing campaign is in your "Author's Resource Box", which is a short author bio attached to all of your articles.

This is where you will include a call to action, prompting readers to click your link and visit your website. You need to think of your author's resource box as you would a short commercial, highlighting the benefits of visiting your site and showcasing an incentive offer, which will motivate readers into taking action.

One of the most common ways of creating a compelling incentive offer is by developing a stand-alone product that you offer for free to those who visit your site.

Not only will this help to drive targeted traffic to your website, but you can set up your incentive offer to be delivered to those who subscribe to your mailing list.

Incentive offers can include many different things such as:

• Free reports, sent to subscribers immediately upon subscribing.

• Free ebooks, either full length or "leaked chapters" of a paid product.

• Free video tutorials or guides that help your readers in some way.

• Free newsletters, or eCourses that offer training sent out by weekly emails.

Your incentive offer can be nearly anything you feel is relevant towards what your intended audience would be interested in. You can create it yourself, outsource it to qualified freelancers or use existing private label content to develop a quality offer, it's entirely up to you.

Set up your squeeze page so that it showcases your incentive, and include an opt-in box (generated by an autoresponder provider like http://www.Aweber.com ), so you can begin collecting leads. This way, you will always be able to follow up with potential customers later on, ensuring that your article marketing campaigns are helping you directly build your business.

Finally, be careful choosing relevant keywords within your articles.

Keywords are what will power up your article marketing campaigns and you need to make sure that they are all highly optimized and focused around the questions and concerns that your target audience have.

Think about what your prospective audience base would likely search for, what they are entering into the search engines, and what they are most interested in. Then, include those keywords in your article title and content itself.

Summary:

You can optimize your articles a number of different ways, including:

1) Integrating keywords into the title of the article

2) Integrating keywords into the body of your article content

3) Using anchor text in your external links