Traffic Generation Challenge 4: Article Marketing & Forums

Posted by Sant Qiu in : Traffic Generation on October 29, 2007 , trackback

This is the fourth part of my “Traffic Generation Challenge” where I document my efforts of driving massive to this brand new blog from scratch, with little technical knowledge.

Frankly I have been busy with other project commitments that I’ll be launching in the next couple of weeks, however, visitors to my blog keep increasing consistently. My blog ranking has also improved steadily.

This result probably reflects more accurately of someone who is starting out blogging part-time, compared to those who are doing this full-time. And if you’re doing this full-time, imagine how much better you can do. Interestingly, as my ranking climbs up, the jump in ranking is not as dramatic as when I was just starting. This is because now the ‘competition’ is getting stiffer. And as my blog goes up higher in ranking, I foresee this trend to continue.

There are still 2 days left before the end of the month, when I will tally the improvement that I’ve achieved within the past 20 days of the “Traffic Generation Challenge”.

The next step in the process is to do some article marketing and commenting in relevant, highly-ranked, forums and blogs.

Article marketing is one of the best ways I know to drive relevant and targeted traffic to your blog. Article marketing gives you a few benefits:

Build your brand as an expert
Expose your content to thousands of people
Create great linkbacks
Helps with search engine rankings
Attract visitors to your blog/site
Perpetual nature (I love this)
And many other great benefits

You should do article marketing as earlier as you can. I’ve just started doing it for my brand new blog, and frankly this is a little too late because sometimes article directories take a few days to approve your articles. The earlier you do this, the earlier you can enjoy those benefits mentioned above. What’s even better is that a great article can have a multiplier (exponential) effect rather than just linear increment of visitors.

So the key to article marketing is to write content rich, great article that’s relevant to your target market. Here are some key points to pay attention to when doing article marketing:

Write great content for your specific target market (something they will find valuable)
Use relevant keywords in your article title and a few times in the body copy
Be focused and write on a few specific related topics in-depth instead of writing a lot of variety of topics
In the author’s resource box (a box to write a short profile of yourself) include an offer to encourage readers to go to your blog/site
You can use the posts you wrote in your blog and submit them as articles (you might need to fine tune them a bit) so you can leverage on the work you’ve done before.

Then you need to submit your articles to as many article directories as you can. Article directories will blast you articles to literally thousands of websites and publishers across the Internet. Most of them for FREE! This will definitely create great exposure to your blog/site.

Tip: Make sure the article directories have better traffic and rankings than your site.

Some of the article directories I use include the following:

Another tool to drive relevant, targeted traffic to your site is to visit relevant forums and blogs that have higher traffic and ranking than your new blog/site. Start contributing to those sites and provide good content there as well. Comment on other people’s posts by praising, providing additional value or asking question. Be careful not to become a nuisance as that can back fire on you.

The great thing about this is that you are already talking to people that are targeted as they are in the relevant forums and blogs. Some forums allows you to include your profile and special offer too. Make sure you take advantage of this.

2 more days to the final results of this blog! Look out for it!

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