Article Marketing - A Free and Effective Way to Drive Traffic to Your Site

Recently, I have been studying the many ways to increase traffic to my site. A few of the methods that I have been researching are:

• Reciprocal Linking


• Submission of site to web directories


• Article Submissions
  

Reciprocal Linking
Simply put, this a process whereby you ask other website owners to place a link to your site on their site, while you reciprocate by placing a link to their site on yours. Hence, the term “reciprocal linking”. My first impressions are:

• Time consuming and awkward - Who do you ask? Why would someone with a successful site want to place a link to my site on their site? All in all, this seems like an effective traffic increasing process, once you ALREADY have some established traffic on your site (otherwise, what's the incentive for the other guy?). But, I guess it's easy enough to send a nice, polite email to a webmaster asking them to do this. Easy is good.


• Takes awhile to see any traffic or PR improvement - Let's face it, reciprocal linking is something that would take quite awhile to see any results on, unless you were fortunate enough to get your site linked on some huge site, that is related to your business or offering.
  

Having said that, the experts that I have spoken to say this is still a very effective method of driving traffic to your site. So, I will definitely be pursuing it, but more of as an “on the side” type of effort.

Submission of site to web directories
This one is a bit more interesting, and I have actually heard good things about doing this. However, you would really want to do your research on this one. There is no benefit from having your site listed in a directory that has NOTHING to do with your product or website. In fact, I have also heard about some sites getting blacklisted, due to the fact that they had some sketchy sites linked to theirs. I guess it pays to check once in awhile to see who is linked to you (it's possible to do this).

Also, not all directories are FREE. So, do your research carefully.

Article Submissions
I actually submitted an article to one of the major article directories this week. Thanks for my careful research, a search conducted on Google using that particular search term shows that I have 2 results in the Top 5 (one for the article, and one for a blog that I created, related to that article). A search conducted on the article directory site using the same keyword, yielded a similar result. The point is, do your research carefully on keywords, and make sure you use them properly. I look forward to the increased traffic that will be coming to my site from that article.

For details on the tips that I touched upon above, I'd recommend you checking out Wealthy Affiliate. It really is a comprehensive and powerful site, chock full of information, research tools, forums (that are actually very active!), etc. Perfect for the new to experienced internet marketer. In fact, if I had to recommend ONE site to rely on to get you stared in the internet marketing / affiliate marketing business, that'd be it.

Welp, time to write some more articles. :-)