I have been fortunate enough to
speak to many website owners through various message boards,
social networks and live conferences. The one thing they all
tell me is they wish they could get more visitors to their
website without spending loads of money on advertising,
marketing and pay per click search engine websites.
With today's tough economy all
businesses are trying to find creative ways to cut costs.
However most website owners feel that if they cut costs in
advertising or marketing then how will their sites get any
customers? It is that old, cut off your nose to spite your face,
syndrome.
What if there was a way as a
website owner that you could literally double your visitors
within 30 days and it won't cost you a dime of your money? What
if I also told you that it will take about an hour a day of your
time to do this? You would probably think I am crazy. Well,
regardless of what my wife says, I am not crazy (yes articles
are allowed humor).
Before I give you the low down
on this technique to double your website visitors I have to say
this. If you have a poorly designed website, one that looks
graphically terrible, or one that is hard to navigate, or if you
have a website that pertains to a topic that no one has interest
in, all of the best advertising and marketing in the world won't
help you get visitors. You need to have a website that is useful
and aesthetically pleasing to the website visitor; otherwise
they will leave just as fast as they came.
So if your website meets the
criteria of a site that is useful (as described above) then you
are ready to double your website visitors within 30 days.
There is one full proof
technique that you can implement right now and that is article
marketing. Article marketing is the process by which you will
write an informational and educational article related to the
content of your website, and then submit this article to various
article directories. I will talk more on article directories in
a moment.
There are three basic steps to
article marketing. Step one is to write the article. Your
article you should be no less than 450 words and no greater than
800. Too short and no on will take it serious, too long and no
one will read the whole thing. Your article should be
informational and educational. In other words the reader of the
article should be able to walk away when they are done reading
it with some new information on the topic that the article is
about.
For example, let's say your
website sells bicycle equipment. You could write an article
about the best bicycle helmets, what makes them the best, the
material about the helmet and so on.
Now that you have an idea of
what type of articles you should be writing, the next step is to
give the reader of the article the means to visit your website
or get in touch with you. Using our example above, let's say
that a reader has a question about something you wrote in
regards to a particular helmet. How would they every get in
touch with you since the article itself does not have a link to
your website. You are in luck. In steps the resource box.
The resource box is the area
that article directories allow writers to enter in some
information so readers can in touch with the writer. A good
example of a resource box would be, "John Johns is the owner of
XYZ Bicycle Equipment. You can learn more about XYZ by visiting
their website at {insert your web address here}."
Notice that the resource box
tells the reader who wrote the article, and how they can get in
touch with the writer. You will obviously tailor your resource
box to match your own needs.
So you have this great article
complete with an informative resource box and are wondering what
in the heck you do with it. Remember earlier I mentioned
something called article directories? Well now is the time to
get to know them. The reason being is you have to do something
with your article and low and behold article directories give
you an outlet for it.
An article directory is a
website that allows writers to submit their articles for free to
their database organized by various categories and
subcategories. For example if you wrote an article on good
quality proteins for healthy meals, you would submit your
article to the health & fitness category then select the
nutrition subcategory.
Article directories receive
tens of thousands of hits daily from people looking to read the
information writers like you are providing. They are also a
resource for bloggers and other website owners that are looking
for content, more on that in a moment. When people visit these
article directories usually through search results they are
taken immediately to your article, where the visitor will read
it and hopefully click the link in your resource box that takes
you to your website.
Better than just a single
person reading your article, article directories are a great
source for bloggers and website owners looking for content,
because they provide tools that convert your article into
various formats so that your article can be syndicated.
Syndication is the ultimate
goal of any article that you write. What it means is that others
are taking your article and posting it on their own websites
with your resource box that includes a link to your website.
Imagine getting one article syndicated on a dozen websites, all
of which receive 5000 to 10000 hits daily. That's an additional
60,000 to 120,000 people being exposed to your website link and
of course your expertise.
To find a listing of article
directories just go to Google and type in the words "article
directory". There are literally thousands of them. You want to
concentrate on the most popular ones as they will give your
article the most exposure.
That is the process. Write the
article, add in the resource box, submit the article to various
article directories and you are done. Repeat this process on a
daily basis and within 30 days you should have no problem
doubling the number of visitors to your website. Once they
arrive to your website, the rest is up to you. Good Luck!
