Promoting your website is crucial to getting people to notice and buy your offers. An increased traffic also means more chance of sign ups. Nonetheless, it can get a little costly if you try to use “paid traffic methods” like PPC (Pay-Per-Click), banner ads on people’s blogs, hiring an advertising agency, and other methods. Luckily, there is a method called article marketing (marketing through written articles) which is relatively free and can be as effective as other paid methods.

Why article marketing?

I know two reasons for this question; one is because the internet is build for the purpose of sharing information. Secondly is because search engines – Google, Yahoo or Bing, love written articles because their bots can only understand written words. The latter reason is very important for you to keep in mind. Your articles being indexed by the search engines means more chance of being found by people that are searching online.

What articles should you write about?

Article marketing is about producing valuable contents related to your business. It can be a current news about your business’ industry or perhaps tips and new ideas on your business’ niche in the form of an article. The goal is to produce original (not copied) and compelling contents that your prospects or target market would want to read. Your articles can either be personal or professional, it depends really on what perspective you want your readers to have on you and your business.

Where do I post my articles?

First and foremost you can post them on your own website, yet of course, people need first to find your site. This is why you must post your articles in different article directories on the web. Article directories are websites that contains hundreds and thousands of articles on various topics. You submit your articles to these sites but make sure to follow their guidelines. Once your articles are approved by these sites, they will appear in the category or categories you specified when you submitted them.

List of popular article directories that accept submissions, for free.

• EzineArticles – ezinearticles.com
• GoArticles – goarticles.com
• Amazines – amazines.com
• ArticleBlast – articleblast.com
• ArticleAlley – articlealley.com

How do my articles will bring visitors to my website?

Your carefully written articles should have words or phrases that are clickable somewhere in it. It can be more than one, just make sure that they are appearing naturally. This clickable words or phrases are called anchor text, once clicked the readers must be directed to your website. To create an anchor text follow the image below:

What’s next?

Grab your live article’s addresses (URL) and share them to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. Join communities on Google+ and share valuable information that is related to your articles and share the URLs.

What if I don’t have the time to write or I don’t have the skills to do it?

Unless it’s your passion then writing articles will be easy for you. Article marketing in reality takes time and if you are like any other business man who value your time and understand the importance of leveraging time then hiring someone to write articles for you is the way to do it.

You can hire online contractors who are experts in writing articles or buy articles from them. These contractors are are called Virtual Assistants. Remember that “time saved is money earned” and by leveraging your time by hiring a Virtual Assistant you are saving your time which you can spend in other more productive activities for your business. If you are interested in hiring a VA feel free to contact me or click here for more details.