subject: The Second Stage Of An Article Campaign To Increase Website Traffic [print this page] You've written an article, now what? You've written an article, now what?
Writing an article is just the first part of article marketing. The hard part is making sure it's good enough to be published and distributing it to the right publishers.
There is some disagreement about whether an article distributed via online article providers like ezine articles is enough to create significant results in terms of traffic to your nominated URL.
Before you begin to think about distribution you need to decide on an article campaign strategy ie: why are you writing articles about topics related to your business? What is the objective here? Are you looking for backlinks, building a brand or seeking more visitors to your website?
If you're writing articles because you want more links to your site you really need to distribute your articles to site owners that have strong 'neighbourhood' links and strong PR in your niche. Preferably you need to find reputable websites that can provide you with backlinks with anchor texts.
Anchor text is made up of the hyperlinked words in copy on a web page ie: the words you click on to get to a link. Anchor text is there to provide your readers with more information about the content of the page they are looking at and that you are linking to. It's really important because it tells the search engine what the page is all about and when used correctly will boost your rankings in search engines.
Be careful about which copy you use as anchor text eg: don't use 'more here' as you will be telling the search engine that the page is talking about 'more here'. Besides you don't want your site ranked in a search for 'more here'.... Anchor text/copy makes it possible for a page to rank in the top ten search results, even on a blog post!
So while you're website might vary in rankings, your posts and articles will keep your brand top of the leader board if you apply a consistent and well thought out campaign to your overall SEO approach. If your overall objective for using articles is to drive traffic to your website then you need to submit your articles to all the usual online distribution services but also to social media sites and reputable bloggers that you have on your database.
It's often worthwhile spending a bit of time getting to know those 'hard copy' publishers with online blogsites and keeping a distribution database that you send articles to over a certain time frame or via a newsletter approach. Try to establish a reputation as a guest blogger as well as this increases your backlinks and improves your online reputation as a content source. Quality of articles in terms of unique content, grammar, targeting and distribution relevancy are all part of this approach.
Building relationships with online publishers will help your distribution quality so it's wise to take note of where your article is being published and build a publishers database and assigning categories to each so that you can send them unique pieces as you write them.
