All online business owners want to attract as many targeted visitors to
their websites as possible. Their favorite kind of visitors are the free
ones and the best source of free targeted website traffic is article
marketing. The concept is simple: you write an article, it gets distributed
in ezines and posted on other people's websites where potential customers
will read it and click through on a link to visit your website.
The articles you write will also be used as additional content for your own
website, and this is valuable for SEO purposes as well as for attracting
visitors. Your articles are more than just reading matter for visitors,
though; you could think of article pages as mini-sales pages.
When you are adding content to your website, look at each page you complete
as if you are a visitor entering the site for the first time via that page.
Is there an obvious way for the visitor to find the home page, site map,
contact details etc? You might think it is easy enough to scroll to the
bottom of the page and squint a bit to see the small text hiding against a
camouflaging background, but then you knew it was there all along, your
visitors won't see it because they won't go looking for it.
It is a big mistake to expect visitors to hunt around for links; they won't
bother to work that hard when it is easy to hit their "back" button and find
a more easily navigable website. Place the links where they will be seen
easily by any visitor. It is best to make the links obvious by having a
contrasting background to make them easy to read. You can have all kinds of
fancy roll-over effects for links but these are not essential. The best way
to deal with links is to have them underlined because everybody is
accustomed to underlining indicating a link.
At the very least, you should have a link to the home page but you can also
induce visitors to explore by having a link to your site map or a "you might
also be interested in." menu and providing a bookmark button is good way to
encourage return visits.
Having a search box at the end of an article page is an easy way to earn
some extra money from the page and you can make more money by having some Ad
sense (or similar) advertisements on your article pages.
Another great way to make money from your online article pages is to embed
your affiliate links into the body of the article. This creates a real
"mini-sales page" but it involves a little extra work to create and to keep
up to date. Links embedded in articles offer a natural-looking way to
introduce your long term affiliate programs to visitors. Dead links create a
bad impression, so this type of contextual linking is not something I would
recommend for affiliate products that are liable to be changed or
discontinued at short notice, unless you are very organized and are prepared
to make regular changes.
An easier way of incorporating links into your article text is to use
context advertising links, such as the system provided Amazon. All this
requires is for you to copy and paste a small script into the foot of your
web page. The software will automatically pick out keywords and link them to
relevant products.
Visitors to your website won't all arrive in an orderly fashion via your
main index page, your article pages will be additional entry points from
which you can steer visitors to your home page or sales page, or even make a
sale right there on the article page.
If you have any questions or comments please contact me.
Regards Gerald
Website: http://www.webcraft.ws
E-mail: gerald@webcraft.ws
Twitter: WebcraftGuru
Facebook: Webcraft Guru
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