The content of your articles should be directed to the most basic elements of your product or service. Whenever possible, try to write ìhow toî or ìintroduction toî articles. Topics like these will garner the biggest interest and be picked up by other sites. Articles that cover finer points of a subject work as well, but you should expect a smaller readership.

Article Tone

Your articles should be packed with information, not sales pitches. When writing articles, one tends to concentrate on how to get potential readers to visit your site. This approach is a mistake. You have to think of both the readers AND webmasters that will be looking for articles.

Image you are a Webmaster that needs content for your site. You go to one of the article directories looking for material to add to your site. Are you going to select articles that are sales pitches designed to take your visitors to another site? No. You are going to select articles that provide your visitors with some valuable information. Donít write sales pitches!

Links

Articles are a great way to quickly build the link counts for sites. The search engines universally appear to like them, a rare event these days. So, whatís the best strategy for using links in your articles?

The best linking strategy for articles involves putting not more than two links in your byline. This is admittedly a personal preference, but I find more than two links looks ìclunkyî and many depositories wonít allow any more than two.

Regardless, the two links in the byline of your articles should go to two distinct pages of your site. The first might be to your home page, while the second goes to a page that is related to the subject of the article. With each new article, you should change the links to new pages. This allows you to build link popularity for both your home page and internal pages of your site. I have found Google, in particular, heavily favors sites that multiple pages with high link counts.

HTML v. Text Links

With some depositories, you have the opportunity to place html code in your bylines. This, of course, lets you avoid typing out the URLs for your site pages, but should you? I would encourage you to type out the URLS for one reason. It is important to make it as easy as possible for Webmasters to republish your article on their site. Donít make them figure out the domains of your hyperlinked text, particularly sub-domains.

In Closing

I have used article campaigns to market many sites. As long as you go about it correctly, you should be able to do the same thing for your site.

One of the best ways of gaining additional traffic is to build up the number of backward links you have pointing to your website. The best form of link is a one-way link, where a website adds a link to your site but does not get one back from you. There are a number of ways of obtaining these type of links including:

Writing articles. Writing articles like this one has many benefits. Other webmasters may add the article to their blog or website and this creates you a one-way link. The people reading the article are also potential visitors to your site.

Purchasing a text-link advert on a quality site. If the site in question has a high page rank value, this is then passed onto your site. The advert itself just like any advert can also attract people to your site.

Joining in debates in various forums. I enjoy reading and contributing to forums. Not only do I learn a great deal, I am also able to get links back to my sites when I make a comment.

Submitting your site to directories.

Making comments on other peoples blogs. This is my least favourite of all of these examples as it can be seen as spam. Other people however do think it can prove to beneficial. I must say that I stay away from anything that could be seen as spam.

Where possible the website which includes a link to your site needs to be in the same industry as your own website. These backward links have a much higher value in the eyes of the search engines.

I have to admit that it is extremely hard to obtain these type of links especially on a one-way basis.

What we therefore need is a solution and here it is. I believe it is a good idea to build a network of sites on the same theme as the main website. Each of the sites in the network has a link pointing to the main site and after promoting each of the sites, you will then have a number of themed and powerful one-way backward links which will make the original site like an authority in its own field.

If you are struggling to find content you could use other peoples articles to help you. It is a good idea to have each of the sites in the network on a different server. This however can be very expensive and therefore for a smaller business may not be best advice.

To help fund the cost of the network you could add google adsense onto all of the new sites. This may not bring in huge amounts of money but could go some way to helping with hosting and domain renewal costs.

In the future this network could be worth thousands of pounds if you have spent enough time promoting each site. At this stage you have the option of selling the network and relaxing or enjoying the benefits yourself that it will no doubt bring.

I believe the writing of quality articles for re-print and the building of themed network websites is the future of the internet for people who want to be successful webmasters. Good luck.