Regardless of whether you are new to being a website owner or a seasoned professional you need to know about the one great way to market and advertise your website absolutely free. Yes that is right, a way where you will not have to spend a dime of your own money.
Before you get all excited about this great way of being able to obtain literally thousands of visitors to your website without going into your wallet, you need to know that it will take effort, patience and consistency. Now you are probably thinking, “oh great, I am going to have to contact millions of people, one by one right?”. The answer is no. This technique will require you to dedicate at least one hour of your day, everyday, in order for it to succeed. That technique is known as article marketing.
Article marketing is the process by which you write informative and educational articles related to the content of your website and then submit those articles to various article directories on the Internet. An article directory is a website that allows writers to submit their articles, complete with a link pointing back to their own website, absolutely free.
Why free? Because these directories receive tens of thousands of hits daily, and they need new content on a daily basis on a variety of topics, including yours, to keep their website fresh and new looking. Their visitors need something to read, so they allow you to upload your article. In return they also allow you to put a link to your website at the end of your article in the section that is called the resource box.
The resource box is a small snippet of text that tells the reader of the article, who wrote it, what’s their background and how can the reader get in touch with the article’s writer. An example would be, “Jon Jones is the owner of XYZ balloons. You can get in touch with Mr. Jones by visiting his website at {insert your web address here}”. As you can see the resource box tells the reader who the author is, why they know so much about what they wrote about (in this example balloons), and how you can get in touch with the writer.
If I were to break down into steps the article marketing process it would look like this:
1] Write an article on your website’s subject
2] Add a resource box to the end of the article so the reader can contact the writer
3] Submit this article to various article directories
4] Repeat steps 1 through 3 until you receive the results you were looking for.
It’s as easy as 1 – 2 – 3. You will spend about an hour or so writing and submitting your articles. I recommend submitting just one article everyday. Anymore and it would be overkill and your articles would be competing with one another for people to read to them. A simple Google search for “article directories” will yield plenty of websites to submit your articles to. If you are looking for which ones would yield the best results or get the most visitors then look into Ezine, Article Dashboard, Bukisa or Oboulo.
I have found in my 300 plus articles that I have personally written for various websites that the best articles are ones that are no shorter than 400 words and no greater than 800. Make it too short and no one will take you seriously. Make it too long and most people won’t read it.
You articles should be informative and educational. The reader needs to read your article for a purpose. If you sell balloons, give information as to which balloons are the best for parties or to make water balloons and so on. The more the reader can learn about what ever it is you are writing about, the more likely they will take you seriously and click your website link in your resource box.
You are now equipped to start marketing your website like never before. With these techniques, within 30 days you could be receiving literally thousands of hits.