Colom Newbie

Writing and submitting articles to article banks has been proven to be one of the most effective of all traffic generating techniques. You may not actually generate any real traffic for your website in the next few days by learning to write and submit articles but this technique will serve you very well and it is worth the effort to learn how to do it and use it to your fullest advantage. You may think that you have no writing ability at all but you are probably wrong. You might not be ready to write the Great American Novel but you can write articles about the topic of your website and about the products that you are selling. You just need to know the rules for making them effective. The first and most important few words of your article are in the title or the headline. The title MUST contain the key words that relate to the topic of your website and to the products that you sell. This is the first thing that other website owners or E-zine publishers will look at when they are deciding whether to reproduce your article on their websites or in the publications because they know that the key words are what search engines use to determine the results of searches.

* Note: The search engines are the method by which people find products or information that they are looking for on the Internet. To find those products or that information, they type key words into the search boxes of the search engines. For example; they might type in fish bait or fishing lures. The results that the search engines provide are based on the key words that the searcher uses.

Another thing of importance regarding the headline or title of the article is that it MUST draw attention. Using something simple like Car Parts won't do. Your title MUST be interesting enough to grab the reader's attention and keep him reading. "Car Parts for Your Mercedes"...well, that isn't really great either. How about, "Car Parts for your SL-600" or "Car Parts For Your SL That The Women Can't Resist"? These last two headlines should encourage someone looking for parts their Mercedes to continue reading the article.

The second most important few words in your article are in the first line of the first paragraph. Internet surfers have a notoriously short attention span and rarely actually read anything word for word unless it is information that they believe will serve their needs, solve a problem or make life better in general for them. So...the title...and the first line are the bait and the hook that you use to entice a reader to actually read the article. The first line needs to contain the key words, as well, and it also need to be attention getting. The fish were begging for more of this fish bait after my first cast! If you were a fisherman, you would keep reading.

The article banks want short articles. Brief, in fact! The longest an article should be is 400 words but closer to 300 is better. You can get carried away and end up with an article that is 1000 words or more when discussing a subject in which you are interested and know a lot about. If you wind up with a long wordy article just break it down into three or four short articles.

Keep in mind that short attention span we discussed earlier and use short sentences and paragraphs. And don't use big words or run-on sentences. Make your article pleasing to the eye and it will be read.

Excess punctuation shows a lack of respect for the reader. Especially exclamation points - one can be used to show excitement or importance but any more are just plain rude.

The resource box at the end of your article is the most important part to you. E-zine publishers or website owners who download and reproduce your article are required to include your resource box. For best results this box must contain your full name, contact information and, above all, a link to your website. This link is what is going to help increase traffic for you.

Warning! Your link should NOT word wrap! It must be complete, http://www.whatever.com. Not all email programs that are used by E-zine editors to send out their newsletters and E-zines support word-wrapped links so you can defeat the whole purpose of writing the article by word-wrapping your website url.

Submitting Articles: Article banks and article repositories are easily found on the Internet by a simple search using your favorite search engine. Once you have located them you must follow their guidelines to submit your articles.

You will likely be told that you can use software that is available to automatically submit your articles to banks and repositories...and in fact, there is such software. But the problem is that most of the larger banks and repositories do not accept automatic submissions. While the software does in fact save you time when submitting to the smaller sites, it doesn't help you much with the bigger sites.

Yes, submitting articles is time consuming and tedious (not to mention boring) work but it is work that can provide your site with a lot of targeted traffic. Each person who reads an article that you have written will also be exposed to the link to your site. If the article is good and if it provides good information, these people will visit your site. They may buy what you are selling or they may opt-in to your mailing list... or maybe they will do both. By the way, there are services that will do article submissions for you. Of course this is a paid service.

Another solution which I use is Unique Article Wizard. UAW submits unique articles to hundreds of article publishers at the click of a mouse. Spend a couple hours writing your article, click Publish and watch the traffic grow to your site.