One of the best sources of traffic and certainly one of my money-getting online robots is nothing less and nothing more than article marketing. It’s easy, free and uber effective…

I don’t recall how old the picture on the right is, but if I remember right it was about three or four weeks after I started writing articles to drive traffic to my sites. It has grown since then, but that’s what you can expect if you write good quality articles. So here’s more of less the same process I go through when doing article marketing and what I do to increase the number of leads I get from this source… free leads that is…

Step 1. Head over to ezinearticles.com and open up an account. If there is only one ezine publisher you use, make it ezinearticles.com. They are by far the best when it comes to getting high rankings and traffic. They also have a good training program (free) via email and I’m going to recommend you take it.

Now, the first thing you want to do is write a quick bio and upload a picture. People like to know who’s on the other side of the screen and it gets them to look at your profile. So here’s the first tip… include a website on your profile that leads people to a proven sales message, whether that is a squeeze page or your blog if you’ve optimized it to get opt-ins. If you look at the picture above, I have more profile views than I do URL clicks. URL clicks are the clicks I get from links within the articles. It doesn’t count the people who click on my website when viewing my profile.

That’s why it’s important you add a picture and bio to your profile, not to mention (and I’m not one hundred percent sure on this) that having a bio increases your chances of getting your articles published which really helps you drive traffic at no extra cost .

Step 2. Create a resource box. This is your signature line which goes at the end of each article you publish. The goal of writing articles is to get the right people to click on the link on your resource box.

If you write crappy articles people will not scroll down and click on your link. If you write a good quality article, they will read and click on your link. I would rather type out a high quality article than 10 crappy ones.

You’ll get a quick surge of traffic with tons of low quality articles, but high quality articles will have staying power and drive you more traffic in the long run.

Here’s the next tip. Your signature line is or should be treated like a paid advertisement… meaning you should demand results from it just like you would a Google AdWords ad. The message in your signature line should be compelling to get people to click on it. Since it should be treated like an ad, the fastest way to find a good signature line is to set up a Google AdWords campaign targeting keywords which your prospects would type and test different messages. When you find one that gets a good Click Through Rate (which is the measure of how often people click on your ad vs the times it was shown), take the message and use it as the copy for your resource box.

You essentially have a proven sales message and you are getting free traffic going through it… nice!

Step 3. Craft your articles with your prospect in mind. If they clicked on your article it was possibly because of the title you wrote, therefore fulfill the promise you made in the title. If you don’t, people will simply click on the back button and will never see your resource box, which is the whole purpose of article marketing. On the same note, keep your article short, but of high quality.

The topic should be highly relevant to what your prospect is looking for and trust me there are tons and tons of untapped niches in your industry. Let’s say you teach weight loss and diets… most people would go for the obvious and try to write articles on how to lose weight or what to eat to lose weight… but there is are many untapped niches like what to eat when eating out to lose weight…

Step 4. Multiply your readership by writing compelling titles to your articles. Great copywriting masters like John Caples, Claude C. Hopkins, and David Ogilvy have stated that headlines are read 10 times as often as the article body. Now let’s combine that knowledge with some of the best knowledge we’ve gained in the last few years thanks to Google AdWords… I don’t know if you realize this, but when you write an ad in Google and you have a benefit and a feature, your ad will get more clicks if the benefit is stated before the feature…

So instead of writing a title like “5 Step Guide To Article Marketing To Get Free Web Traffic”…. take the benefit and state it first… “Free Web Traffic – 5 Step Guide To Article Marketing”

Why?

Because the benefit is what matters most to your reader and as soon as they read it, they are hooked…

Step 5. Multiply your efforts. Once you see the power of article marketing and how much free traffic you can generate from it, you’ll begin to see a goldmine in front of you. The best part is that good content is created once and works indefinitely for you. Just like ezinearticles there are dozens of directories where you can submit, although this is by far the best. You can check out isnare.com and get your article submitted to tons of sites at a time… another resource which I recommend and personally use is trafficgeyser, which if you allow me to throw in a six word blatant plug in a thousand word pure content blog post… check out my affiliate link on the right side of the blog that says “Get 1st Page Rankings In Hours”…

Any comments and suggestions are always welcome and don’t forget to rate this post as well as share it with your social network (Twitter, Facebook, etc.)… they’ll love you for it…

Tags: article marketing tips, articles marketing success stories, using articles to drive traffic to website, using articles to generate leads, web traffic article marketing