One of the most popular ways to market an online business is by writing web articles. Unfortunately because of this growing popularity, many webmasters are discovering that it is getting more difficult to get ezines and directories to publish their work. As a result, this hurts their web traffic and ultimately their bottom-line.
So how can you ensure that your articles will reach the maximum amount of potential web visitors
The secret is to market your articles like you would with every other facet of your online business. It is important to be proactive and build momentum on your articles. Below I list a few simple ways that you can do this:
Submit to Article Directories
The best place to initially submit your articles are to Article Directories. Since many publishers of websites, blogs, and ezines frequent these sites, your article will be quickly exposed to people who have a large amount of traffic.
Contact Article Lists
After submitting to article directories, you should then submit your work to article lists. If you are not familiar with them, article lists are newsletters on Yahoo and Topica that allow you to email your article directly to publishers of web content. When a submission comes from an article list, publishers are more inclined to trust the article and use the material.
Search through Ezine Directories
Once you have submitted your article to directories and mailing lists, you should then focus on contacting individual publishers. The first group you should contact are the publishers of ezines that are related to your topic. You can locate these individuals on ezine directory websites. Most of the time these sites will list contact information and whether the publisher accepts articles. Then all you have to do is email each one and ask them to publish your article.
Contact Individual Websites
Another great place to submit your articles are to the individual websites related to your topic. Since these sites focus on providing valuable information to their readers, you can easily persuade them publish your work. To avoid wasting a lot of unnecessary work, you should only contact sites where the readers would have an interest in the topic of your article.
Email Old Publishers
After writing a few articles, you will notice that they are used by many webmasters and ezine publishers. A great way to quickly get out a new article is to contact them and see if they want to publish your content. Usually these individuals are more likely to use your article, because they have already shown trust in your writing.
Give the Article to your Affiliates
If you run an affiliate program, you can help your affiliates by giving them your articles as a way to help promote your site. When you contact your affiliates, let them know that they can substitute your link with theirs in the resource box of the article. That way, they are given a monetary incentive to use your web article.
Create an Article RSS Feed
If you have enough articles, you can create an RSS Feed that people can use for their website. Then every time you create an article, you post it on your RSS feed and the subscribing websites have new content for their visitors. By utilizing RSS feeds for article distribution, you can easily expose your article to thousands of potential website visitors.
Getting your article to the maximum amount of publishers is an important step to getting an avalanche of web traffic. Instead of writing just one article and sitting back waiting for people to come, it is important to continuously market your web articles. If you make it a point to build on the work of each article, your daily website traffic will steadily increase.
Scott J. Patterson is a self-proclaimed Dunce, yet last month he earned $12,124 from one of his online businesses. To find out how YOU can do the same, download his fr*e ebook- The Secret-Guide to Home Businesses:
Regular readers of my articles will recall that over the past few months I have been putting in place various systems to try and minimize the level of emails and support queries that I receive from my customers. My intention was to reduce my own workload as well as trying to give my customers a faster answer to their most common questions.
The first thing I did was to set up a dedicated Helpdesk which has the answers to many regularly-asked questions as well as the facility for customers to raise a support ticket if they require further assistance. I also made some fairly drastic changes to the way in which my email is handled in order to reduce the amount of spam and junk that I was receiving.
One of the main reasons that I made these changes was because I was due to take my annual holiday and I didnt want a repeat of last years experience! Let me explain....
In 2004 I visited the Maldives which are a group of tiny islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean (when I say tiny, I do mean small - you can walk around the majority of the islands in less than 10 minutes!) Anyway, I was assured that there was Internet access on the island that I was visiting and so I was fairly comfortable about running things from there. In the end, my problem didnt turn out to be the Internet connection (which worked fine albeit somewhat slowly) but the time it was taking me to delete junk mail and deal with the same questions over and over again. I ended up spending at least an hour a day handling emails from a dark little office when I should have been soaking up the sun :-(
So I wanted to make sure things changed this year and I am pleased to report that the above steps worked a treat :-) In a nutshell, the systems that I put in place cut my Internet time each day from over an hour to about 15 minutes!
My advice therefore is that if you have any type of online business you should definitely be looking at ways of automating your customer support and reducing the number of emails that you have to handle. This is the case even if you dont have plans to work away from your office - the time savings are just as valuable to me now that I am back home....
(If you missed the previous newsletters and want to know exactly what I did to achieve the results above, just browse through the recent newsletter archives which you will find at: http://www.thetraderonline.com/arcnews88963.html ).
Ok, now back to the business of making money.....
As always seems to be the case these days, the summer months have shot by and we are in the closing stages of yet another year (and the old favourite phrase, I dont know where the year has gone.... seems to be on the lips of every second person you meet!)
But before you write the year off and start planning for 2006, just remember that the period from October to December 24th is often the busiest time of the year for many businesses - especially those in the retail sector. I have noticed that in the past week alone the number of searches being carried out on my wholesale search engines have shot up as buyers look for new stock to sell during the next couple of months.
The run up to Christmas offers a huge opportunity to make some serious money and if you are working online, you have many advantages that our offline friends do not. For starters, even if you havent actually started an online business, there is still time to cash in - it doesnt take very long to create a simple website and even if you dont have the ability/time/inclination to build your own site, there are numerous other places to sell online such as eBay etc.
The point I am trying to make here is that between now and Christmas Day there is a window of opportunity to earn some money but the only way that this is going to happen is if you actually take some action. It doesnt matter if you dont actually have a physical product to sell - in my experience, the Internet in general seems to get busier towards the Christmas period (certainly my own traffic stats for the past couple of years support this) so even if you are not selling a Christmas-related product, there is, in theory, more opportunity to get a buyer to your website simply by virtue of the fact that there is more surfing activity.
Of course, if you can base a site around a Christmas theme, you probably have an even better chance of cleaning up. I read about a chap who set up a website last year which allowed parents to submit their childrens letters to Father Christmas and in return for a small payment (from memory around $10), the child got a personalized letter through the post from the man himself. I forget the exact figures but this guy made something like $20,000 or $30,000 in the 12 weeks leading up to Christmas and I bet he is going to earn considerably more than that this year!
A simple idea and somewhat seasonal (to say the least!) but a very nice contribution towards his own Xmas expenditure nonetheless. What will you be doing this year to contribute towards YOUR seasonal expenditure....
Copyright 2005 Richard Grady
Richard Grady has been helping ordinary people earn online since 1998. He writes a free newsletter which is published every two weeks. To subscribe (and claim your free gifts), visit: