Need Money! Article Marketing

Here is the road map:
- build web site
- get traffic
- earn revenue (ads, sales, subscriptions)
- be happy.

The first part is easy. There are billions of web sites with more added every day.

The second part is hard. Really hard.

Take a look at the sites you have built. How much traffic do you have on a daily basis?

10 visitors? 25? 100?

Most web sites have little (less than 10 visitors a day) if any (whoops! No traffic) traffic.

Getting traffic is the hardest part of building a web site or blog audience.

Forget that stuff about products driving "hundreds of hungry visitors with credit card in hand!" to your site. If all it took were buying an e-book with simple How-To instructions, everyone would be doing it!

There are a number of ways to build traffic to your site, all of which require time and effort.

One of the ways I have been working on building traffic to my sites has been with article marketing. Basically, I write articles (usually past blog posts) and submit them to article web sites.

If you have been under a rock lately, article sites are web site directories with hundreds and thousands of free articles. Web site owners in need of content take these articles and place them on their websites. The author of the article should then receive a link back to the web site listed in their article bio.

Ideally, if one is able to write and submit a large number of articles, then one's web site should see an increase in traffic from article readers.

Further, back links to an article author's site should increase the site's Google Page Rank as a side benefit. (More on what that means in another post!).

About article directories. There are literally hundreds of article directories. Google the term and you will see what I mean.

When I first started, I visited the top ranked directories and started posting one article at a time on each site. Time consuming? You bet!

I received an email from Brad Callen about his Article Submit tool and I downloaded the free version. It works pretty well.

It lists only about 60-80 article directories and allows "nearly" one button article submission to each site. Actually, it takes about two minutes to upload and submit an article to a site using Callen's Article Submit tool.

Some sites take longer than others because they require a user name and password to submit an article. The user name and password have to be set up before using Article Submit which is pain, but once done, it works each time.

The neat thing is the Article Submit tool stores multiple bios for different articles. Last night I submitted four different articles using four different bios (with web site links) using Article Submit. That was cool.

Naturally, Callen has a "Deluxe" version of his Article Submit tool which costs $67.00. I have not sprung for it yet, because I want to see if I really increase my traffic using article marketing.

Have I?

So far I have seen a few hits specifically from articles to two of my sites. But to be fair, most sites will not start publishing your articles for 15-30 days after submission. Which means the articles I submitted last night will probably not see the light of "Internet" day for another two weeks at least.

Giving time for broadcast, I expect I will not see significant traffic for a few months at least.

But there is a light at the end of the tunnel! If you publish enough articles (plan on hundreds) and maintain your web sites, there is a very good chance your sites could generate revenue with you doing less work than now. And that is a good thing!

Hang in there! We will "make money online!".