Article Programs

Why write web articles? Why place web articles on your websites? Interestingly enough, the answer to both questions is the same – to drive traffic! Unique, relevant, targeted, interested traffic – and as much of it as possible – is object of every internet marketer’s every efforts, second only to that coveted sale.

Targeted and interested traffic is the pool of prospective customers from which the bulk of your online (or online-instigated) sales will come. As you will undoubtedly find, there are numerous ways to generate unique and repeat hits to your websites from visitors that have already displayed an interest in what you’re offering – many of them, extraordinarily expensive.

Keyword-rich, content based articles have proven to be one of the most effective methods for driving this primo breed of traffic to your site – whether you happen to be the articles’ author or publisher or both. And to your delight, it can be completely free!

Let’s say you run a website that sells birdhouses. You can write articles on building birdhouses, matching the right birdhouses to the right kinds of birds, filling your birdhouses with the right feed to attract the birds you most want in your yard, optimum placement of birdhouses for best results, keeping squirrels away from your birdhouses, using birdhouses to practice amateur bird photography, identifying species of birds feeding at your birdhouses, and on and on. You get the idea.

Now that you have these articles, you will quickly find that there are a ton of websites that will gladly publish your article for free on their site. You don’t charge them. They don’t charge you. But, the free placement on their site exposes you to all their visitors – visitors who are looking for more information on just the things you know most about. Your keyword rich article will be embedded with links back to your own site where you can peddle your birdhouses.

So that’s one way to get the right kind of traffic. Here’s another.

Let’s say you run a website that sells birdhouses. You can publish on your site – at no cost to you – articles on choosing birdfood written by and linking to a farm animal feed store, articles on the best kinds of wood for the best kinds of birdhouse climates written by a lumber store, articles on bird photography by a wildlife club or a camera store, articles on wildlife preservation from National Geographic and other related magazines…again, you get the idea.

By publishing these keyword rich articles you accomplish a couple of traffic generating things. You get your site indexed more often in search engines and thus steadily climb the ranks in the very categories that you need. And you present an increased value to your site visitors, encouraging every unique visitor to become a repeat visitor.

As an added bonus, you can set yourself up as an affiliate of the sites run by the authors of the articles you publish, and earn an extra, passive revenue stream.

Now that you’re convinced that both writing and publishing web articles is a necessity for you, let’s discuss the product reviewed in this section of our website.

They fall into two categories:

Article submitters – designed for providers of content seeking publication on as many relevant sites as possible
Article finders – designed for web publishers seeking to place relevant content on their sites

Whether software packages designed to automate the whole process or ebooks and tutorials on how to do the work yourself, article submitters will help you identify the most widely used article directories, submission sites, ezines, and other relevant websites interested in publishing your free content.

They will also aid you in constructing the absolute most effective web content possible. Just because you know how to write, don’t assume you know how to write articles for generating traffic over the web. And conversely (or is it inversely?) just because you don’t know the first thing about constructing a sentence, it doesn’t mean you can easily create articles that drive hordes of qualified traffic to your site.

Plus, you can always hire others to write articles for you. Many of the products and services reviewed herein will show you how to access these valuable and convenient resources as well.

Software packages that automate the tedious submission process are a great convenience. All you need to do with these programs is enter in your article and biographic information once. The program then automatically seeks out sites that meet your specifications and fills out the web submission forms on your behalf.

These programs usually keep track of what articles have been submitted where, what has been accepted, and whether it’s been published properly. Some will notify you when new publication opportunities arise and even send out an automatic submission.

One of the products reviewed herein, Article Marketer, is a web-based submission service. The essential difference here is that you benefit from personal assistance by a team of qualified experts in writing, editing, submitting, and tracking your articles, however you must pay a monthly fee to keep using it. With a software product, you buy it once, you own it forever, but you run it yourself.

Moving on, you may think of article finders (or larger programs with an article finding feature) as specialized search engines for finding keyword-rich web content relevant to your products and services and free for publication. The best of these programs are tapped into the widest array of the most popular article directories, submission sites, etc. and provide the most intuitive interfaces for zeroing in on those articles that will bring your websites the greatest success.