Home Based Business Success

Nothing occupies the minds of most Internet (and any other) marketers as much as the question of how to increase targeted traffic to their websites. If that traffic happens to be free, so much the better. One of the ways used by marketers to get more targeted traffic is through article marketing. Writing articles and letting others publish them in exchange for a link back to your website is a powerful technique. It's used by experienced and newbie marketers alike.

One of the big benefits to article marketing is that it's free, although it can be a bit time consuming. You'll get traffic driven to your site in two ways through article marketing. People will see your article and then be so compelled by your writing skill and boundless wit that they'll click on your link, eager to discover all they can about you, your product, and your company. The other way that they'll reach your site is through the SEO benefits that all those inbound links confer.

It's well known to all but the newest Internet marketers, and anyone else that  attempts to market products with the help of a website, that one of the main criteria used by the search engines to rank a particular web page is the number and quality of inbound links to the page. From what passes for common knowledge on the web, Google puts more credence on the power of the inbound link than do the lesser search engines, but all seem to use this in their algorithm to some extent. So, all those inbound links let people come directly to your site, but they also help it rank highly in the search engines.

Here are two big mistakes made by Internet marketers and others that use article marketing that will keep you from maximizing both of the benefits you should achieve from article marketing.

The first mistake is to use copy in your resource box that's just not compelling. Although it is supposed to tell about the author, you should really use the resource box to compel visitors to click on your link. Unless you're a pretty interesting individual, your life story just isn't going to do that. Many people use a variation of  “To find out more information on “x”, go to our website URL” That's not much better, although it is a step in the right direction.

A better line would be something along the lines of:

“Discover the secret that's keeping you from whatever, at URL"
or
“Discover how you can easily get miles ahead of your competition (and they'll never know how your did it). Go to URL before we put the secret back in the box."

You need to create curiosity and make your resource box compelling. Make it so that they'll fell as if not clicking on your link will have them really missing out on something important, and don't tell them everything in the ad copy. Remember, you want to create overwhelming curiosity, with a sense of urgency.

The other mistake has to do with the link itself. If you're just using the URL of your website, you're missing the boat on 90% of the SEO benefits offered by article marketing (or any other technique where you get to put a link to your website). People aren't going to search for your website in the search engines. If they already know the web address, they'll just type it in. They'll search for words or terms related to the information they're after. These words or terms are known as keywords, and it's these that you want to rank in the search engines for.

So, how can you help yourself rank for your desired keywords? Well, the way you won't help yourself is to use your website address as your link. The search engines want to see the actual keyword in the link. When you're looking at a link and you see text, but no web address, is an example of what I'm talking about. That text you see is called anchor text, and it's this anchor text that the search engines use when determining what terms to rank your site for. You have to replace your simple web page URL with a link that uses anchor text containing the keywords you want to be found for. When you start using keywords in anchor text instead of just the URL of the web page you'll begin to get the benefit of this powerful, free targeted traffic technique.