Making Money with Your Blog!

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Article marketing is one of the best ways to generate website traffic and improve your listing positions on the search engines. Articles work in four ways to drive traffic to your site and get you seen on Google.

However, before you begin to think how to use articles, you first have to write them. You have two choices here: write your own or have them ghostwritten for you. It doesn't matter what way you decide to go, since the approach is the same whether or not your article is actually written by you or somebody else, as long as you have the copyright and your name is stated as author.

The choice of subject is important. It should be a topic that is fairly popular, since nobody will be interested in an article written on last year's great idea. Article and website generation software, for example, was very popular up to the first half of last year, but when Google's new contextual analysis algorithm started to downlist web pages that did not hack it regarding content, then the popularity of that method of generating web pages and content articles dropped to nil.

Prior to that, articles on the topic were hot, and then suddenly, almost overnight, they were dropped like hot potatoes and authority websites suddenly became the thing. Your article, then, must be topical and well written. You should make sure that there are no glaring spelling or grammatical errors. It does not have to be perfect, and the occasional slip can be tolerated, but the approach that 'as long it can be understood then it is fine' is certainly not acceptable.

In order for an article to be useful to you in generating traffic and improving your website listings you must submit it to article directories. Submit it to as many as you can because you get a one-way link back to your website from each directory you get it published in. Search engines such as Google regard these links to your site as indicating the popularity of your site, and hence its importance and relevance to the keyword for which it is listed. This helps your page ranking, and also its position in the listings for that keyword.

Article directories also allow you what is known as an 'author's resource box'. This is where you provide some extra information about yourself or your website and provide a link to your site. It appears either in form of a box, or as an extra two or three lines of text at the end of the article. You must make sure that the link is to a page on your website that relates to the topic of the article. If you are writing about rubies, then the link should take a visitor to your web page providing information on rubies, and not emeralds. Otherwise, you could lose your visitor.

If the reader wants more information on the topic of your article, they will click on the link and get it. That is potentially a good source of traffic, assuming that your article is good, provides useful information and the reader wants to find out more. You can word the resource box, or the end of the article, to persuade them to click on that link.

If your article is good, then a reader might like it so much as to copy it to a page on their website, dealing with the same or a related topic, to use as content. This gives you two further benefits. First, visitors to the other website could find your article and click on the link you have provided, so providing you with even more traffic. Secondly, you get another one-way link back to your web page from the other person's web page.

Some links from article directories can be very valuable to you because they are from web pages with a high Google page ranking. Page ranking is a measure of the popularity of your individual web pages calculated from the number of other web pages linking to it, and the page rank of these other pages. A link from a page ranked six is worth a lot more than one from a page ranked two. The page rank is shown on the Google tool bar in the form a green line, with a mouse-over numerical figure ranging from 0 - 10. Google itself has a page rank of eight.

To recap, then, article marketing provides you with direct traffic through readers of your article clicking on your link to find out more on the topic of your article. They can do this either directly from your article resource box, or from the website of anyone who copies the article to use on their site.

You also get traffic through the listing on Google and other search engines that will be enhanced according to how many links back to your website you generate from article directories and other websites using your articles. The higher the page ranking of these directories and websites that link to you, then the more benefit they will bring.

Article marketing is currently very popular, and one of the best ways to generate website traffic and therefore enhance your income.

Generate Website Traffic With Article Marketing was originally published at http://www.affiliatemarketinglife.com