Web Traffic Lesson 1: writing and distributing articles

You�ve probably already heard it and read about it many times: writing and distributing articles is one of the best free traffic generating techniques on the internet today and it�s here to stay for a long time.

So let�s recap quickly the benefits you get from writing articles:

1) Interested visitors: when your article gets featured in newsletters, some people who read it will want to get more info from you and visit your website.

2) Targeted links from authority sites: Many article directories are authority sites with lots of backlinks and tons of traffic. Each article you submit resides on its own page and in the resource box there�s at least one link back to your site.

3) More links from other sites: many newsletter publishers archive their past issues on their websites, thus if your article is included, you get another link. Also, there are many people who use articles to build more content pages for their sites. Everytime someone uses your article you get another link. This way your webpages� rankings in the search engines will automatically increase over time.

In this lesson you will learn:

1. how to come up with an idea for an article
2. how to write and format an article
3. how to write your resource box
4. what you can do to avoid a dublicate content penalty
5. where and how to submit your articles

How to come up with an idea for an article

My favorite way for finding an article topic is to think about a question or problem and answer it / solve it. If you don�t know what kind of questions people in your market niche are having, think about the questions / problems you yourself had once been facing. Now that you know the answers / solutions, you can easily write about them.

You could also browse through the headlines in forums and discussion boards to find questions. And you could use the free trial of Wordtracker to find keywords relating to questions, problems and the information people are looking for in your niche.

I highly recommend you create your own “article ideas repertoire”. What the heck is an “idea repertoire” ? Well, have you ever had a sudden inspiration ? I�m sure you have. Quite often, the best ideas for articles, web copy, promotions or new products just popup in my mind in all kinds of everyday situations (while shopping, mowing the lawm or whatever else …).

Formerly, I used to think: “great idea - gonna note this down when I�m back home”. Big mistake. These sudden inspirations (some call them brain waves), we often forget after a few minutes. If you don�t grab them at the very moment they come, they�re gone forever.

Therefore I recommend that you always have at least a piece of paper and a pencil with you and immediately note down your ideas. Create a text file on your computer and if you are near to it, add your idea to this file right away for later use. Otherwise, note it down on a piece of paper and then transfer it to your text file once you are back home. There are also those USB sticks with an built-in MP3 player and a digital voice recorder. That�s a pretty handy device, because you can simply talk your sudden inspiration on it.

Soon, you will have a lot of ideas stored in your text file which becomes your repertoire and when you are stuck, the first place to go is your very own article ideas repertoire.

How to write and format an article

As an article author you are faced with different format requirements when submitting your articles to various places on the internet. Most article directories require that your articles may not contain hard line breaks within paragraphs. It�s because every line break (i.e. everywhere you hit the enter key while writing your article) will be automatically transformed into the HTML tag <BR> when you submit your article. Thus, line breaks within paragraphs would mess up your article�s text flow on a webpage.

In other occasions, usually when you submit your articles to article announcement lists and directly to ezine publishers, you need to limit your text to a certain number of characters per line (55, 60, 70). In other words, you must include line breaks within paragraphs (hit the enter key after a maximum number of characters).

I highly recommend that you use TextPad to write your articles. It�s a shareware software tool that you can download for free at www.TextPad.com and evaluate for as long as you like.

TextPad makes it very easy to write and correctly format your articles. I use it everyday and wouldn�t want to be without. I�ll be doing a short video tutorial about article formatting with TextPad later this month and include a link here.

The content of your article:

Your article should start with an introduction to the topic. What�s your article about, what will people get from it, what�s the question / problem your article deals with ?

Next comes a sequence of short paragraphs which either build up on each other, like a step-by-step solution to a problem or simply list and describe several different tips, answers, solutions, benefits, features, whatever … (you�ve probably already seen this type of article very often).

Another way to write an article would be to tell kind of a personal story which ends in a moral. To get an idea about how other people are writing articles, simply visit an article directory and read a few articles written by other authors in your niche.

Proofread your article before you publish it to avoid spelling and grammatical errors. You should also read it out loud to see if the text flow is good. Don�t make people stumble over your words. After all, you want to make sure that your article is well written in order to get picked up by publishers of the big newsletters.

Finally, some more points to consider:

1) Don�t make your article sound like an ad and don�t include too many links, especially not affiliate links. Your article might get rejected and never published anywhere.

2) Include valuable, useful information that really helps people, not just some kind of blather.

3) To make your articles easy to read, always break up your article in short paragraphs.

4) Some ezine article directories allow you to use basic HTML tags inside your articles. That�s great if you like to create subheadings in bold text.

5) If you must include links to important resources inside your article, write only the URL on a separate line. Most ezine article directories will automatically link it. That�s as far as concerns the article body.

How to write your resource box

The main purpose of your article�s resource box is to incentivate readers to visit your site. Hence, you want to use wording that makes them want to get more and maybe offer them a gift that they can get on your site.

Many authors just write boring resource boxes, talking about themselves, like this:

“The author is an expert in skin care. He writes articles on skin care and treatment and also on different topics like personal development, holidays and careers. Visit his website to get more information on skin care.”

See, there�s no real incentive for people to visit the author�s site. There�s not even a call to action to motivate people to visit right now. Better resource boxes would be:

“Discover the 5 secrets to a beautiful and healthy skin. Visit “skincaresecretswebsite” today and get a free copy of our skin care guide.”

“John Doe, an expert in skin care, shares a wealth of information on his website “skincaresecrestswebsite”. If you want to know how to protect your skin and make it more beautiful, download our free skin care guide today.”

Always write your resource box related to the topic of your article. If you have a general skin care related website for example and your article is about cystic acne, you wouldn�t use the above resource boxes. Instead, you would invite readers to visit your site to learn more about how to get rid of their cystic acne.

Try to include two links into your resource box. One to your website�s homepage and another link to an internal page which is more targeted to the specific article.

The worst thing I have seen is an author of an acne article who linked back to his web development related site in the resource box - LOL.

Another important tip: use HTML anchor tags where you are allowed to use HTML inside your resource box. Not every article directory script works equally. Only those article directories which don�t allow HTML use to automatically transform URLs into hyperlinks, others don�t. I�m running an article directory myself and I see many authors simply typing their website URLs in the resource boxes, which then appear as normal text. In order to create an active link, you need to use HTML code.

That�s actually an advantage because you can create hyperlinks with keywords in the anchor text. On the other hand, you need to be very careful with this. You should always try to include one text link in your resource box as well as at least one normal URL.

Why ? Because your article can be downloaded as HTML version and text version (for ezines) and when you include only text links to your website, readers won�t be able to visit your site when they see your article published in a text only newsletter.

Confused ? Just take a look at these examples of resources boxes and how they are rendered in the two different versions (HTML and text) of your article. Then you�ll understand better.

Resource box 1 - only text links.

In the HTML version of the article, this would look great:

But in the text version, which is frequently used in newsletters, nobody would know where to go:

Hence, I recommend you add at least one URL to your resource box like in the second example below:

HTML version:

Text version:

See the difference ? I see a lot of people who don�t know this and royally screw up their resource boxes.

Avoiding dublicate content penalties

A dublicate content penalty is usually applied to websites or webpages that have largely the exact same content as pages on other websites. It doesn�t mean that your entire website will get banned from a search engine, but the webpages in question would at least receive lower rankings or maybe even removed from the index.

Therefore I recommend that you do not publish those articles that you submit to article directories and ezine publishers on your own website. You won�t get into trouble if 1000 of other webpages featuring your article link back to you as long as you don�t have the exact same article on your site.

If you want to distribute articles that you have already written and published on your site, you could rewrite them first. There are dozens of different ways to tell the same story. Or if your article includes a list of tips, you could simply change the order in which these tips appear.

Submitting your articles to directories

Now that you�ve written your article, the next step is to get it out there. The easiest and fastest way is to submit it to popular free article directories. There are actually only a few directories where publishers look out for articles for their websites and newsletters. So in order to keep this simple, let�s focus only on these high traffic and high PR article directories.

Visit the directories listed below and register for a writer�s account (except ArticleCity and NetterWeb - they don�t require user registration). I also suggest that you create a new folder in your favorites list and bookmark these sites.

EzineArticles
GoArticles
ArticleAlley
ArticleCity (submission form)
IdeaMarketers
ArticlesOn
EasyArticles
ArticleDashboard
ValuableContent
ArticleDepot (UK)
NetterWeb (submission form)

Before you sumbit an article, get comfortable with the submission guidelines of these directories. Your first article submission might take some time, but soon you get comfortable with the process and it will be a snap.

If you need more details on the submission process, let me know and I�ll add it to this lesson.