If you are online and are not already using article directories to promote your website, you are missing out on a free and highly effective marketing option. Article directories are great ways to draw traffic to your site without paying for advertising. However, to get real traffic to your site using an article directory, you must know how to use them correctly.

What Article Directories Are

Before you can use an article directory, you have to know what one is. Article directories are websites where thousands upon thousands of articles on just about any subject are posted. They are generally categorized to make it easier for readers to find information they want. They are also linked together, so a reader reading about “Hawaii travel” will naturally go from article to article on that topic. People can use the articles they find in the directories on their own websites, either for free or for a small fee. Authors pay nothing to submít to article directories.

How Article Directories Benefit Online Businesses

You are probably thinking, “Sure, that’s great. But how does an article directory help me promote my business? Doesn’t giving away free content defeat my purpose as an online business?”

These are great questions. When you submít an article to an article directory, it will contain a bio with a link to your website. Since you are the author of the article, you are allowed to include this information.

This means that anyone who is searching online and comes across the article directory will see a link to your site. Not only that, but the people who use the content on their own websites are required to keep it exactly as it appears in the directory. This means that your link could show up on hundreds of websites.

Article directories are generally large websites. This means that the web spiders are attracted to them. Having your link in these articles is a crucial part of an online linking campaign.

How to Make Your Submissions Effective

If you are going to submít to article directories, you need to do two things. First, you need to learn about proper keyword usage. You need the right percentage of keywords in your article, and they need to appear naturally within the content. This will draw the search engine spiders to the article, thus exposing people to your link at the bottom.

You also need to make your content unique and helpful. If your article is the same as thousands that are already online, other website owners will not want to use it. Also, if the information is not helpful, people will not read the entire article. Your goal is to have them read the entire article so that they will click at the link on the bottom.

Having helpful information in the article also helps the reader view you as an “expert” in the field. This is important, because you want them to have a reason to click on the link. If they are reading useless information, they will have no desire to visit your site. Also, proving that you are knowledgeable about a particular topic will show that whatever product or service you are marketing is worth buying.

What to Do if You Can’t Write

At this point you are probably wondering what you can do because you can’t write. You are an entrepreneur and business owner, not a writer. The good news is that you have options.

You can hire a freelance writer to “ghostwrite” the article for you. Ghostwriting means writing the article in your name. Instead of placing his or her name on the article, the freelancer uses your name and your business link. You will need to pay for this service, but the amount you will pay for a quality article is far less than the amount you would pay for an advertising campaign, and a well-written article placed in the right article directoríes will draw more traffíc to your site than just about any other form of advertising.

Where can you find ghostwriters? There are a variety of online classifieds where you can post your job requirements or search for available writers. You can ask for quotes to help you learn what the going rate for a writer is. Keep in mind that you will pay more if you have detailed information that needs to be researched or if you are working on a tight deadline. You can also hire a content creation company to help you if you require numerous articles that would be too much for one individual writer.

If you do use a ghostwriter, be sure that you proofread the article before submitting it. You may find that the writer did not approach a particular topic as you would have wanted. You can ask the writer to rewrite the material, but posting something that is inaccurate or does not sound well written will detract from your goal of drawing traffic to your site.

Risks of Using an Article Directory

There is only one main risk to using an article directory, and that is that someone will download your content and use it on their site without including the link. You can do some work to check for this, but it is hard to police. However, the occasional unscrupulous website owner who uses your content incorrectly is a risk worth taking for the many users who will give you a link on their site.

Post Much and Often

Once you get the hang of using an article directory, post many articles, and post them often. The more fresh, relevant content that links to your page, the greater traffic you will receive. Be sure to continually research your keywords, because the keywords that people search for constantly change.

Also, submit your articles to a variety of sites. The most popular article directories may not draw a certain demographic of people. The more places that have your article and your link, the better your traffic results will be. Since these sites are free to use, you might as well submit to as many as you can.

Editor’s Note: You can find the Top 50 Article directories ranked by Alexa rating and Google
Pagerank at:

www.vretoolbar.com
www.jackhumphrey.com

The attraction of affiliate marketing is very seductive indeed. When done right the successful affiliate marketer looks like this:

1. He or she has a business based on the hard work of other people who have developed products and markets to purchase these products
2. Has no customer service issues to deal with
3. Runs the business from home with no staff
4. Has an endless supply of income that arrives by virtual autopilot
5. Has completely left the 9 to 5 rate race behind

With such an incredible business model at our disposal, why is that most of the affiliate profits go to the top 2% of affiliate marketers with 98% of affiliates left to pick up the crumbs that fall from the Internet Marketing table? From my extensive research and trial and error over the past 3 years I would have to say the pitfalls that catch the unsuspecting almost like clockwork, arrange themselves like wild beasts on the path way to success and must be avoided if you are going to join that elusive top 2% of successful affiliate marketers taking home the lions share of the extremely generous commission pay checks.

The No#1 Top Reason for Affiliate Failure – Selling The Wrong Products

Now I didn’t list this as the top for any random reason, but for a very specific point that needs to be made here. I also didn’t say attempt to sell but actually sell the wrong products. Firstly you will never be able to succeed in this game if you are trying to sell ice to Eskimos – they don’t need it. Picking the first affiliate offer that comes your way is what most newbie affiliate marketers do and it sets them off in the wrong direction. So no matter how well you market your product you are doomed to be flogging a dead horse. You must do your research first to establish what products the market is actually buying. Choosing the wrong products is the first mistake and the worst as it doesn’t matter if you know how to attract website traffic that is explicitly targeted to the product, if for a number of reasons the traffic either doesn’t convert to sales or the total market is just too small or too tight a niche, you are destined to a trickle of income at best. So wrong product, in the wrong market is the first trap that must be avoided if you are to be successful as an affiliate marketer. The right research tools can lead you to the right products that people are demanding and purchasing.

The No#2 Top Reason for Affiliate Marketing Failure – Not Enough Targeted Visitors

So lets just assume for the moment that you got the first one correct and you did your research and you choose the right products to promote based on proven market performance, indicating that you indeed have something that a hungry crowd are eager to purchase from your promotions. Great! Now for the next trap… You have setup a website or a sales page and you are attempting to drive traffic to the offer and you decide to do one of two things that are common and obvious ways of getting visitors:

1. PPC- pay per click advertising such as Google AdWords
2. SEO- pay per your time and effort to create backlinks to raise your search engine results pages (SERPS)

Most affiliates discover the hard way that PPC is very difficult to master and they lose money hand over fist, then they slow down their campaigns until the cost doesn’t seem too bad but still their sales are usually less. Then there is the other choice of doing some SEO (search engine optimization) work to get your sites listed in the search engine pages high enough to get the traffic that you need to convert into paying customers. This involves a lot of hard work that can takes months and is also a very technical exercise that can backfire on you if you do things the wrong way. If Google thinks that you attempting to game their system they can remove you from their index completely. That means all your hard work can vanish over night! Getting banned from the search engines is a major reason that many affiliates over eager to get up to the top of the first page on Google fail to get the website visitors that they need to succeed. There are right ways and wrong ways of attempting to build traffic, you really need to learn a system and stick to it once you know that it works. Here’s a clue, just think about what websites impresses you and influences you towards either believing something (information site) or buying something (product site). Then make these types of pages.

No#3 Reason for Affiliate Marketing Failure – Not Good At Promoting A Product

Well it is the top third reason where most new marketers fall off the wagon completely. Even if you choose the right products to promoter and get a healthy chunk of website visitors to your sales pages and websites, but once they are there they don’t automatically turn into paying customers. Your conversion rates are too low. Funny that isn’t it? You would think that if you had a great product and there were lots of people looking at it then the sales should come, but no they don’t just happen. Trust is paramount to your success. People will not buy from you unless they trust you. It is a simple fact that is often over looked. Parting with money for goods is called selling and the truth is most people don’t like being sold to. On the other hand people love to buy products that they want as long as they trust the person they are handing their cash to. The art of selling while looking like you are providing useful information is a skill that requires a good deal of professionalism and is best left to the professionals who have a proven track record in this field. A good example of this done well is to not send traffic to your own site but send by direct linking to the merchants page where your customer is going to be confronted with all the very best sales collateral that has the best chance of converting the website visitor into a customer.

No#4 Reason for Affiliate Marketing Failure – Procrastination

With so many choices it is easy to get side tracked and in a state of indecision as to what to do, and then the choice is made by default – do nothing with the promise of getting around to doing it sometime. That sometime never arrives and so the idea of getting a successful affiliate marketing business just keeps disappearing further on down the road to oblivion. The confusion that inevitably arises from an over crowded inbox with the latest and greatest internet marketing tool that you just have to have, is the major contributing factor here. So how does one overcome this inbox distraction? Unsubscribe from all of the bottom dwellers and stick with the best and most highly recommended from a good number of sources to make sure you are choosing correctly. The best guys are the ones that are spoken of highly in the forums where people spill the beans on who is worth listening to and who are the shonks worth staying away from. If you don’t act you will never get past square one.

No#5 Reason for Affiliate Market Failure – Buy Every Product That Comes Along

This one is closely related to the #4 reason of failure. In an over enthusiastic effort to “do something” in newbie affiliate marketer just goes out and buys every product he can get his hands on. The opposite of procrastination but equally as disappointing as doing nothing at all. The notion that if I buy this product I will be instantly successful is a grand lie and you need to understand this if you are to move forward at all. Doing something is not about signing up to the latest and greatest thing only to find after your initial enthusiasm has waned, you have not made any sales and you are off to look for the next latest and greatest thing on offer.

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