All online business owners want to attract as many targeted
visitors to their websites as possible. Their favourite
kind of visitors are the free ones and the best source of
free targeted website traffic is article marketing. The
concept is simple: you write an article, it gets
distributed in ezines and posted on other people's websites
where potential customers will read it and click through on
a link to visit your website.
The articles you write will also be used as additional
content for your own website, and this is valuable for SEO
purposes as well as for attracting visitors. Your articles
are more than just reading matter for visitors, though; you
could think of article pages as mini-sales pages.
When you are adding content to your website, look at each
page you complete as if you are a visitor entering the site
for the first time via that page. Is there an obvious way
for the visitor to find the home page, site map, contact
details etc? You might think it is easy enough to scroll
to the bottom of the page and squint a bit to see the small
text hiding against a camouflaging background, but then you
knew it was there all along, your visitors won't see it
because they won't go looking for it.
It is a big mistake to expect visitors to hunt around for
links; they won't bother to work that hard when it is easy
to hit their "back" button and find a more easily navigable
website. Place the links where they will be seen easily by
any visitor. It is best to make the links obvious by
having a contrasting background to make them easy to read.
You can have all kinds of fancy roll-over effects for links
but these are not essential. The best way to deal with
links is to have them underlined because everybody is
accustomed to underlining indicating a link.
At the very least, you should have a link to the home page
but you can also induce visitors to explore by having a
link to your site map or a "you might also be interested
in..." menu and providing a bookmark button is good way to
encourage return visits.
Having a search box at the end of an article page is an
easy way to earn some extra money from the page and you can
make more money by having some Ad sense (or similar)
advertisements on your article pages.
Another great way to make money from your online article
pages is to embed your affiliate links into the body of the
article. This creates a real "mini-sales page" but it
involves a little extra work to create and to keep up to
date. Links embedded in articles offer a natural-looking
way to introduce your long term affiliate programs to
visitors. Dead links create a bad impression, so this
type of contextual linking is not something I would
recommend for affiliate products that are liable to be
changed or discontinued at short notice, unless you are
very organised and are prepared to make regular changes.
An easier way of incorporating links into your article text
is to use context advertising links, such as the system
provided Amazon. All this requires is for you to copy and
paste a small script into the foot of your web page. The
software will automatically pick out keywords and link them
to relevant products.
Visitors to your website won't all arrive in an orderly
fashion via your main index page, your article pages will
be additional entry points from which you can steer
visitors to your home page or sales page, or even make a
sale right there on the article page.
----------------------------------------------------
Elaine Currie is the owner of the Free Work At Home
Directory at http://www.huntingvenus.com and author of the
book Ezine Article Writing - 10 Steps To Success. You can
download the book free of charge at:
http://www.huntingvenus.com/free_ezine_articles_writing_eboo
k.shtml
No comments:
Post a Comment