Article Marketing For Traffic Building

By Author: Philip Allen
Total Articles: 37
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After starting my web businesses many months ago, I had been hearing that to drive traffic and build backlinks, article marketing is the way to go and is a common technique used by webmasters to build their online businesses.
WHAT IS ARTICLE MARKETING? Article marketing involves writing articles in your niche and submitting them to websites specifically geared to articles. This marketing technique is popular because it does 2 things:
Increases Traffic To Your Site.
Increases Backlinks To Your Site.
Let's look at each item in more detail.
1. Increases Traffic: When you submit your article to an article site you will be including your website link somewhere in the article or in the author biography at the end. Then, when the article site publishes your work, people will read it, and some will click on the link, increasing traffic to your site.
2. Increases Backlinks: Common search engine optimization says that in order to get ranked highly, a website needs a lot of links on other websites pointed back to them. These links are called "backlinks." It is known that to rank highly in the search ...
... engines, a website needs hundreds of backlinks (among other things).
Every time an article with your link is published on another site, a backlink is created to your website. This is good for your search engine rankings and thus, should increase your traffic.
ARTICLE MARKETING WEBSITES There are a number of websites that publish articles from various sources, 3 of them are:
EzineArticles
Squidoo
Infobarrel
There are more, however, I have only used the 3 above. Doing a search should uncover many more. Do your research and decide accordingly.
These 3 article sites above each have different amounts of traffic and there are advantages and disadvantages to using each one. Here is a run-down:
1. EzineArticles
This is arguably the most popular and therefore, has a huge volume of traffic. In addition, other websites will pick up and publish your articles from EzineArticles, increasing their readership and thus traffic to your site.
The disadvantage is that your article may appear on other websites, many of which you won't be aware, and some of which may be questionable. Although your traffic may increase, Google and other search engines do not like duplicate content, so instead of helping your search engine results, it may actually hurt. The jury's out on this concept at the moment. Some webmasters praise EzineArticles. Others stay away.
2. Infobarrel
Here is another website to which you can publish articles. The big advantage here is that Infobarrel will display Google AdSense ads on YOUR article pages. Anytime someone reads your article and clicks on an ad, YOU get paid 70% of the ad revenue. Although this sounds like a lot, Google AdSense Ads usually don't pay much, so you'll need to publish hundreds of articles to make any substantial income.
The disadvantage to Infobarrel is they don't allow other websites to re-publish articles on their site. So, once an article is published there, it cannot appear anywhere else. This is good if you buy into the theory that Google monitor these types of things - bad if you're doing it for more traffic from links to your site in the articles.
3. Squidoo
Although Squidoo publishes articles, called (Lenses) on their site, they are looking for authors who publish regularly in a niche and can essentially create mini niche sites within the big Squidoo site.
Again, there are pluses and minuses to this method. You could easily be considered an expert in your field and thus, be given good credibility from a credible website.
In addition, you can also make money on Squidoo by placing Google AdSense ads within your articles AND placing affiliate links directly within your articles from Amazon and other affiliate programs. You get paid anytime anyone reads your article, clicks on an affiliate link and purchases something.
Squidoo is like Infobarrel in that they want original articles, not published anywhere else. They do not allow other websites to publish articles found on their site.
So, as you can see, there are trade-offs to using each site.

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