Chapter 2: Getting Traffic to Your Website 

Section 8: Article Creation and Submission 

Article creation and submission is very powerful, and should absolutely be part of your link creation strategy. The reason is that it is an extremely leveraged activity: one good article submitted to a few article directories can be picked up by hundreds of sites. This can result in hundreds of links, as well as positioning you as an expert in a particular activity, or at least "pre-selling" you or a product or service to visitors. This is the most likely link building strategy to produce human visitors, as well as greatly increasing your search engine results.

Now, you should absolutely not feel that you have to do all of the writing here yourself. You can outsource some or much of this work to writers at www.elance.com or www.guru.com, or even use a monthly service like www.nichearticleclub.com, where you get 30 articles per month for $20 (one article from elance should generally cost $10 to $15.) In all cases, make sure that the article is optimized for your chosen keyword(s) (but not over-optimized to the point of not sounding natural), and personalize each one. You can also reuse articles but changing the headline, and modifying a bit (20% or so) of the body. Articles should be roughly 400 to 600 words or so, or 1 to 2 pages.

(NOTE: When outsourcing your article writing, you should give each writer just one article assignment. Only once you are happy with thier work should you give a multiple job assignment to.)

What you’ll want to do is have a target keyword or two picked out to gain a good ranking for. Write (or outsource) a few articles that can use the keyword(s) in the title, and include a link back to your page in the resource box. When you submit this article to a few submission services, that is the link back to your site. Anyone is free to use that article on their site, as long as they include the resource box, and consequently a link back to you. As that eventually gets picked up by hundreds of sites, that equates to hundreds of links back to you!

Make sure that the page the article links back to is optimized for the keywords chosen, continues the theme and concepts of the article(s), and has an opt-in form for visitors so that you can get them into your marketing pipeline. It is important to have a well-defined plan for all of this from the get-go, so that your efforts are precise and focused, and you are achieving a specific goal with each article.

You need to keep a few other points in mind here too. First, post the article to your own website. Only submit that to article directories about a week later. Sometimes, search engines will block other sites from their rankings that have duplicate content, so it is important to have the content on your site first.

Next, don’t overdo it. Don’t submit 50 articles all at once, or the links generated will be scrutinized by the search engines and may not count. Article submission services are careful to avoid being spammed too, so they won’t look kindly on too many submissions all at once. A few per week per submission service is all that you should do.

As far as article submission services, there are many. I’ll give you 40 right here. The top 5 listed are the most popular, but there are many services that you can submit to. Here they are:

Ok, now that you have a solid article creation and submission plan in place, we will move on to another powerful link building method: press releases …