Free Marketing for Your Home Business

Free Marketing For Your Business

If you have a website you need visitors, but how can you drive traffic to your site without spending big dollars for print ads, online marketing ads or pay per click advertising? One free method of attracting visitors to your site is to create an article. Publishing your own article can be a great way to get more people visiting your site, and there are other benefits too!

Let’s look at how to create an article
If you have a how-to do ‘something’ on your website, then you can write about that. How to articles are very popular and tend to get a good flow of readers. You can also just write something informative or thought-provoking about your subject. Here are some guidelines to help you get started:

• Create a how-to article to show readers how to do something or
• Write an article about the subject that relates to your sites content
• Make your article original (do not copy someone else’s content – search engines will ding you for it!)

Sign-up for a free account at the most popular article sites
Publish your article online using the article site’s submission instructions – IMPORTANT: make sure you add a link in the “author” box.
How does this help you get traffic to your site? You will be placing a link in the authors box (sometimes called resource box). That link should be linking back to your website. Telling readers a little about yourself as an author and then letting them know they can find out more information about the subject that you have written about at your website will get readers to click on your link resulting in a new visitor!

Making your article original is very important. Duplicate content is easily recognized by search engines like Google and can actually harm the ranking of your site. Be creative. Your article only needs to be between 600-900 words in length. Also, do not use programs or websites that ‘blast’ your article out to hundreds of article sites. That just creates duplicate content. For instance, EzineArticles.com is the premier and highest ranking article submission site. They only accept original content and will reject your article if they find the same content either on your website or anywhere else.

Article sites that have very good traffic and good rankings:

EzineArticles.com
GoArticles.com
ArticleDashboard.com
iSnare.com
ArticleCity.com
IdeaMarketers.com
ArticleAlley.com
Amazines.com
…you can find many more. Just search “find article submission websites” and the first few pages of results will give you plenty of options.

5 great reasons to use article submissions to attract visitors

1. Targeted visitors – Even though writing an article will not cost you anything except a little bit of your time, the exposure is very targeted. Your reader/visitor will be searching for the information that you just provided which can result in a ‘warm’ prospect instead of a random visitor that may not be interested in your subject. Warm visitors are best!
2. Get ranked – when you put your link in the author box, you are creating a ‘backlink’ to your website. Backlinks can be very valuable if they are coming in from good and relevant sources. Article sites are great because search engines trust those sites and they are already ranked very highly. Creating a backlink from those sites tells search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. that your site is relevant, interesting and loaded with content that others want to view. This results in higher ranking for your site – for free!
3. More exposure – When you submit your article, you are automatically creating more exposure for your website in search engines. The better you write, and the more you write about your subject (the more articles you submit), the more exposure your website will have. Over time, this really adds up. Very successful website owners use article marketing to drive huge amounts of traffic to their websites, and they get paid handsomely for it when those new visitors buy something or sign-up on their websites as a result!
4. Become an authority – Not everyone writes articles or shares information. Those who do are seen as ‘authorities’ and leaders, and the fact is that people will trust an authority and follow a leader.
5. Add to your personal branding – When you become an author, and put good information about yourself and your website in your author bio and resource box, you are adding to your personal brand. You will be building trust and confidence with your readers which is an excellent way to build your personal brand.

Free is good when it drives quality traffic to your website. Writing articles is not very difficult and over time can really pay off.

We hope you enjoyed this article and that you put it to good use in your business!

  

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