Posted: Sat May 28, 2005 3:13 am Post subject: How to Promote your Web Site by Writing Articles
Sharing knowledge on the web can be a very powerful way to establish your online presence and credibility. First, you write a thoughtful and informative article on an topic in your area of expertise. Then you submit it to e-zines to be read by the general public and possibly re-published on other web sites.
Appended to the end of your article is a resource box containing a brief promotional message linking to your web site. Webmasters who wish to reprint your article on their sites are required to include your resource box along with any live links to your site.
For example, an article written by me might have the following resource box:
[INDENT]Article by Oudam Em. Oudam is the webmaster of Web Launch [Self-promotional link deleted. Admin.] , a free resource for web site promotion and search engine optimization. Please visit his site for more free tips and tutorials on building traffic and generating income on your site.[/INDENT]
The benefit that you get from your article is two-fold. First, your article will be read by visitors to the e-zine site. If they find it helpful and interesting, they will likely visit your web site to see what else you had to offer. Second, webmasters who find your article useful to their visitors may re-publish it on their sites, giving your article additional exposure.
Every time your article is re-published on a web site, you gain an additional one-way link to your site through the live link in your resource box. This adds to your link popularity and ultimately increases your search engine rankings. As you can see, the true potential of your article lies in its ability to propagate virally in cyberspace.
For your article to propagate virally, it should appeal to both readers and webmasters alike. Keep in mind that your goal is hold your readers' attention long enough for them to get to the resource box. If your article is boring and uninformative, few people will read it beyond the first or second paragraph.
Below are some pointers to consider when writing an article:
1. Give your article a catchy title.
Your title is the first and often the only thing that visitors see when they skim through a list of articles on an e-zine page. Put some thought into coming up with a title that grabs the reader's attention right away. Words like "Secrets", "Free", and "Successful" tend to attract more attention than others.
2. Your article should not read like an ad.
Most people read articles to find information they can use, not to see a pitch about your products or services. If they see your article as nothing more than a shameless act of self promotion, they'll get turned off and hit the "Back" button right away. Put yourself in the reader's shoes. What benefits do you want to get out of reading an article? Cater to your reader's interests rather than your own.
3. Offer lots of free, useful information.
Following on the last tip, keep in mind that your readers are looking for specific "how-to" instructions to help them achieve a certain goal. Offer lots of tangible information that is immediately useful to them. Do not lead them through hoops just to get to an order form for a $29.95 "Make $50,000 in 30 Days or Your Money Back!" e-book.
4) Avoid gimmicks.
While it may be true that a sucker is born every minute, most internet users are sophisticated enough to tell what's legitimate and what's not. Write with the intention of offering something substantial to the reader. Be honest and forthright. Your article should not cause the reader to think, "What is this guy trying to sell me?"
5) Be succinct.
Get to the point quickly, preferably in the first or second paragraph. Avoid lengthy paragraphs. Use lots of white space to separate your paragraphs to make them easier to read.
6) Your article should not be too short.
Certainly, it's possible to write a good article packed with useful information using just a few hundred words. If your article is too short, however, some webmasters may feel hesitant to reprint it on their sites. They may, instead, borrow your ideas and write their own article, gaining authorship without having to give you credit for your ideas.
How long should your article be? I suggest at least 800 words, preferably longer. Longer articles give webmasters the impression that you have put some thought and effort into your work and, thus, are deserving of publicity on their sites.
7) Use live (clickable) links in your resource box.
Many e-zines permit clickable links in resource boxes. Yet, many authors forgo this privilege by simply spelling out their URLs. Whenever permitted, you should spell out your URL as well as make it clickable (e.g. "http://www.nexcomp.com/weblaunch"). The advantages of a clickable URL are (1) readers can go to your site simply by clicking on it, and (2) more importantly, search engines will be able to record it as a link your web site, adding to your link popularity and search engine rankings.
Avoid hyping in your resource box.
Your resource box, while promotional in nature, should be brief and tasteful. The purpose of your resource box is not to sell your readers something, but to lead them to your website which does the actual selling. Your resource box should contain your name, your company name, a brief description of your products or services, your web site's URL, and a clickable link to your site.
9) Put some thought and effort into your writing.
E-zines have varying standards for accepting articles, and some accept and publish all submissions without any human review at all. However, this does not mean you should write an article just for sake of having it published somewhere. If your article comes off as half-baked, readers may make a similar assumption about you and your business practices.
10) Submit your article to as many e-zines as feasible.
There are dozens of e-zines on the web that welcome submissions from independent authors. Ideally, you'd want your article to be exposed on as many of them as you can. But it takes time to register and submit to each one of them. Therefore, I recommend that you submit to only a handful of the more popular ones.
Below is a list of e-zines along with their Google PageRanks (PR). The higher the PR of an e-zine, the greater its online visibility.
Article by Oudam Em. Oudam is the webmaster of Web Launch [Self-promotional link deleted. Admin.] , a free resource for web site promotion and search engine optimization. Please visit his site for more free tips and tutorials on building traffic and generating income on your site.
[Friendly tip: If posting messages or articles to forums or websites, ALWAYS read the guidelines first or your posts may be deleted. I'm posting this publicly not to embarrass you, but to help educate newcomers to this forum. Allan Gardyne, Admin.] _________________ Increase Website Traffic | Free URL Submission | Link Directory | Free Articles | Free Classifieds
Posted: Sun Jun 26, 2005 9:05 pm Post subject: THANKS A BILL
I have been looking for this thread the past 5 days and I found it. _________________ Send Video Emails. Do LIVE Video Webcasting(Do it FREE or charge a fee). Video IM with 3 Persons. Video Blogging...plus many more features. All-in-One- Service!!
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beware of posting your nice, new, original article to too many free article sites. in some cases all you'll get is a duplicate content penalty because your fresh, new content is now copied onto 300 sites, in its entirety.
bad, bad, bad.
prof. _________________ Complement your SEO strategy with Feedalicious - search engine-friendly randomized RSS content.
The duplicate content filter exists in Google, not all SE's have it; though some may in the future true; but it is a filter; not a penalty; one version of the article will rank well, the others may not show in the results except as "supplementary" It doesnot hurt your site to have articles distributed (be they posted on your site as well or not) so it is not a penalty.
But, keep in mind, article distribution isn't for ranking your articles well; it is to build your credibility, incoming link popularity and even get traffic from the sites your article is posted on.
So there is no "bad" to article distribution when done properly and with the right expectations.
Debs _________________ Learn how to turn keyphrases into quality, well-targeted articles your visitors and SE's will love with Gary Antosh's new ebook "Web Content Made Easy!"
The duplicate content filter exists in Google, not all SE's have it; though some may in the future true; but it is a filter; not a penalty; one version of the article will rank well, the others may not show in the results except as "supplementary" It doesnot hurt your site to have articles distributed (be they posted on your site as well or not) so it is not a penalty.
I used to believe that as well but lately I'm not so sure about that anymore. Google is coming down hard on scraper sites and it looks as if they really penalize for "sharing content". To me it looks as if it doesn't effect your pr but your whole site is "banned" to the "supplementary" results.
The sites for which I used this technique are doing great on Yahoo and MSN but disappeared from Google.. my pr is still in place but I get no traffic anymore.
And in a way I can understand Google?s point of view..... in a way I'm putting those articles out there for the sole purpose of improving my link popularity. That way I can understand that some hard core "Google Guys" frown and see it as spamming.
The problem I have can also be a "sandbox" problem. My link popularity exploded! From 10 reciprocical links to 167 one way in just two or three months for one of my sites.
Anyway with Google for me nothing seems to work as in the textbook. And it?s a strange coincidence that this happens to 6 of my sites, hosted on different IP addresses, at different hosting companies.
Really getting a lot of traffic from Yahoo and MSN but zilch from Google.
Distributing articles won't hurt you if you don't put them on your site; posting distributed articles on your site however is a risk; you need to do it because it's good for your visitors not because you want ranking. A whole site of nothing but distributed articles IMO isn't a good idea as it's unlikely you can get into good directories; Google will dup filter you, etc.
I have distributed several articles with no ill effects; but the jump in links in (as you mention) did sandbox the site for about 2 months afterwards. I also have a couple articles posted from others; these are for the benefit of my visitors, I don't expect them to rank well so there is no "disappointment" there for me But the majority of my site is original content I wrote, and I add to that on a regular basis; so I've done well with Google for the most part.
Since I'm seeing no ill effects at the present time, I think it's a good way to go; however in the future that could change as the algos get more sophisticated. I find it hard to believe that full articles would be penalized however as news sites do it all the time; one site can't reach all people; there needs to be some distribution of content to reach the masses and I think the SE's know and understand this.
Scrapper content however is another story
Debs _________________ Learn how to turn keyphrases into quality, well-targeted articles your visitors and SE's will love with Gary Antosh's new ebook "Web Content Made Easy!"
Yes you have a point. I don't know, in fact I'm just guessing. I'm trying to figure out why I'm doing so poorly on Google. For a few of my sites I'm no1 for several of my keywords on MSN and Yahoo. But on Google directories displaying my sites names are listed well ahead of me.
All of my content is original, but I did post about 50 articles out of the about 1500 pages that I have online for those sites. I have two PR 5 three PR4 and one PR3 site. But nothing in the Google SERPS.
So the duplicate content penalty is the only thing I could think of. Strangly enough Google is spidering my sites like crazy. I will keep on posting articles but only articles that are not or not exactly equal to the ones on my site.
Anyway perhaps it will sort itself out. But the weird thing is that the problem occurs across all sites that have articles (re)published.
Did your sandboxed sites lost their PR or did that stay the same?
The PR stayed the same but the traffic decreased; came back a bit later (say a couple months, don't remember exactly) ... it could have been sandbox (new links causing this), or it could have been an algo update; really hard to say.
But Google doesn't apply a sitewide penalty for duplicate content; they only have a filter for the article itself; so your feelings about the duplicate content don't ring true to me; you could be in the sandbox however because you got so many incoming links so fast; in that case a couple months should see you through it.
Debs _________________ Learn how to turn keyphrases into quality, well-targeted articles your visitors and SE's will love with Gary Antosh's new ebook "Web Content Made Easy!"
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Avoid hyping in your resource box.
But the majority of my site is original content I wrote, and I add to that on a regular basis; so I've done well with Google for the most part.
