[Read part 1 of this here]

When you publish a web page with quality content and that you’ve made the effort to target a specific keyword phrase on, you can expect to get traffic from 3 primary sources. The Search Engines that index your page, External links (backlinks) that your page acquires on other web sites, and any social networks where your page has been submitted.

That alone can lead to decent and consistent traffic numbers to your page. However, it isn’t the whole traffic picture, it is just a piece of the puzzle.

[click image for large view]

Now lets add in several supporting articles (see part 1 for a description of good supporting articles).

If you create a handful of quality articles that each link back to your web page with a “call to action” for readers, and publish those articles in places that have a human readership following and also are trusted by the search engines you can see something amazing happen.

Your articles will be indexed by the search engines, which leads to more traffic for you when people find your articles from search engines, read them and then follow the link through to your page.

Your high quality articles can also get submitted to various social networks, leading more traffic to the articles and finally through the article links to your web page.

In addition, and this isn’t even represented in the basic diagram I made to graphically show how all this comes together, but in addition to what I’ve already said, the web pages on various social networks that list your articles are probably (most are) also being crawled and indexed on search engines, adding another opportunity for searchers to find your articles and your web page.

I hope that makes clear just how useful Article Marketing can be when done properly, and I hope I’ve helped to explain how to target your articles to be the most effective in supporting your SERPs and traffic building efforts.

Article Marketing isn’t a magic bullet, or the end-all-be-all either. Like building backlinks and publishing quality content to your own site pages, Article Marketing is another piece in the puzzle.

But, unlike a lot of other online marketing methods that go into making up the whole puzzle, Article Marketing can be easily mastered by anyone, done at any time and from any place, and doesn’t cost a single penny to do.

One final note about the diagram I’ve included here, is that in the center it says “Your Web Site!”, but really I should have written “Your Web Page!” because what you really want to do is turn every page of your web sites into one of these Wagon Wheel type traffic flow patterns for yourself. So instead of thinking of your site at the center of this picture, think of a hundred copies of this picture in a big circle, representing a hundred pages on your sites, and with your own internal page-to-page linking traffic flowing in all directions from one page to another across that circle. How great is that?

Email this post

I always see people putting down Article Marketing as too ineffective for the time and effort it takes to write them, and until today I just thought they must have written some poor quality stuff, didn’t get results from it, and decided article marketing stunk based on that.

But today while chatting with someone who is desperately trying to make Article Marketing work, and has been for a while now, I realized what his problem was and it hit me that others may be doing the same thing.

It isn’t that he was writing bad articles, on the contrary, he was writing some really good articles, but he wasn’t optimizing them to the specific pages of his web site like he should have been.

Article Marketing can drive very nice, targeted traffic to your site, and can also help to boost your page’s rankings in the search engines, but you have to be smart about it.

Here’s a hypothetical walk-thru of how it can boost a page’s SERPs rankings:

Let’s say we have a web page targeting the keyword phrase “Little Drummer Boy”

We optimize our page by placing the phrase into the page title, the META tags, and 2 or more times in the actual page content.

Now time to write 4 to 6 supporting articles. Start with titles, we want to include the keyword phrase in them so we come up with “The Little Drummer Boy Revisited”, “Lessons to Learn from Little Drummer Boy”, “Children Love The Little Drummer Boy”.

There’s 4 titles, all using the right keyword phrase. Now it is just a matter of writing a good article for each of those titles, making sure to include the keyword phrase (not necessarily the full title again) in the opening and closing paragraphs of the articles; and also in a “call to action” link at the end in the Author’s resource/bio box. For example, your link text could be something like “Learn more about the Little Drummer Boy”.

When search engines find your articles, they’ll be associated with the keyword phrase, and see that the article not only links back to your specific page (not your main web site home page, but the one targeting the Little Drummer Boy), but even uses the keyword phrase in the link anchor text.

Here’s how it all looks to the search engines, showing how the articles act sort of like supporting legs for your page’s keyword targeting:

Part 2 of this will explain further how those same articles would be supportive in driving targeted traffic to your pages from multiple places as well.

Email this post

My daily reading list grows almost daily. There are dozens of blog feeds and sites I browse over my morning coffee each day and I’m constantly adding to the list. That’s a good thing, because a lot of the information is useful and can be applied to my own business ventures, so I certainly suggest others who aspire to make money online should be doing the same.

However, with all of this reading I do from experts and others who have had success, it dawned on me that while everyone has ideas and tips for increasing site traffic (myself included) I’ve never come across anyone writing about the most important thing–which because of my retail background I already knew starting out–so I thought this might be of use to my readers: “It only takes 1 interested visitor to make a sale”.

How simple is that? If you get one person who wants your product or service to your web site you can make a sale. If you get 1000 visitors who aren’t really interested in your product or service, you may still make a sale but you’re wasting lots of time and bandwidth.

Obviously, for those who plan to make the bulk of their revenue from Advertising (from AdSense or YPN for example), then bulk traffic numbers are great. But, if you’re into affiliate sales or selling your own products and services the key isn’t in getting lots of traffic, but rather in getting strictly targeted traffic.

This is why I often dismiss much of the advice and rules that come from SEO experts and such. They’re typically pushing ways of catering to search engines that I believe dilutes the quality of the traffic you gain in using them.

I see it like an archery target. You want that traffic from the center bulls-eye, because it is highly targeted. But a lot of the advice I see out there is usually aiming for the traffic in the outer rings of the target. Visitors who are interested in “related” terms to your products or services, but not necessarily in your specific offerings.

This is fine if you’re willing to accept a lot of wasted time and bandwidth to grab the small number of visitors from that pool who you can convert into sales. I’m personally not, but that’s just me.

I always aim for the bulls-eye traffic. I’ve had folks tell me that it’s too hard to do with competitive niches or terms, I even had a guy tell me once that I’d be lucky to get 100 organic visitors a month from one of my search terms. My response to this attitude is to simply ignore it. I don’t care if something I do only increases my traffic by a small amount, if that traffic is converting at high rates for me. In other words, I’m just as well off making 20 sales from 100 visitors as I am making 20 sales from 1000 visitors.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t care about your search engine rankings, or that you don’t want traffic from those “outer rings of the target”–what I’m saying is that in my opinion an aged site will come by those visitors naturally so it’s a waste of time to target them specifically with marketing efforts, and a much better use of my time is on increasing the bulls-eye traffic I get, even in small amounts.

Email this post

Search engines are vital to driving traffic to most web sites. SEO is the art of making your site (and content) more attractive to the search engines’ bots so they will index more of your pages and rank them higher than other’s pages.

Still, there are a few common buzz-words and items that appear on every webmaster forum and can give the newbie an impression that they’re “must do” or “must have’s”… they’re not.

Here’s a secret, if you build a good site with lots of original content that’s attractive to visitors your pages will climb up through the search engines all by themselves. No need to waste tons of time or money trying to ‘force’ yourself into search engine indexes or higher up in rankings. Devote your time to producing quality content and your money (if you have it to spend) to targeted marketing that just gets the word out about your site to the right people–create brand awareness. (more…)

Email this post