Creating Incoming Links (off-page factors)...Continued
The power of linking through articles
Everyone talks about writing articles as a means of generating traffic, not as a means of building substantial, high quality one-way links to your website.
The main benefit of writing articles is that you get to include a link to your website inside the author's bio, or resource, box. So, if your article is published in a number of directories it has the potential to generate some targeted traffic.
The truth is, writing articles will not generate you a flood of traffic as you may have been led to believe. Sure, you'll get a trickle here and there, but it's usually nothing significant (unless you're a world-renowned writer, or you get your article printed in an ezine or newsletter with a very large email list).
Think of it this way. Your article first needs to be read (the conversion will depend on how appealing the title of the article is), and of those people that read your article, maybe around 1-3% will click the link in the author's resource box. So, you would need at least 1000 people to read you article to get somewhere between 10 and 30 people to visit your site, which is not much to get excited about. And believe me, it will take a while before 1000 people read most of the articles published in the article directories.
So, in order to get enough traffic to your site via article writing that you can start getting affiliate sales or subscriptions to your mailing list, you will need a few hundred visitors. And to get this number of visitors you will need about 10,000 people to view your article.
Now, if you can write a ton of articles (3-5 per day), this may be a reasonable course for you to follow. Over time you CAN generate a decent amount of traffic this way. But for most people, writing this many articles is not realistic.
Even though the traffic an article may generate is good, there is a more powerful reason for writing articles.
If you write an article, you always include a link back to your website within the author's resource box. This provides you with a one-way link back to your site. And you have complete control over the link's text and where it points.
You can submit your article to a number of article directories. EzineArticles, GoArticles, and ArticlesBase are good articles directories and are regularly indexed by the search engines. You can also find a number of other directories by searching on your favorite search engine. There are literally hundreds out there.
Once you've submitted your article to a number of directories and it gets listed on their site (this can take some time depending on the directory), you will have a number of one-way links to your site, which the search engines like. But wait, it gets better.
Most article directories have an option that lets you give permission to other people to let them publish your article on their website, as long as they don't make any modifications to it; and this includes the link back to your site. Webmasters love to publish articles because it gives them additional content to add to their website.
This means that the article you submitted to several article directories can now appear on an endless number of other sites. If your article is well written and provides some valuable information that people find useful and search for on the Internet, you will see it being published over and over. Plus, chances are if someone is publishing your article on their site, their site is related to your niche somehow, which gives a higher value to the link by the search engine spiders.
So now you can have tens or hundreds of one-way links pointing to your website, just for writing a single article. This is the true power of writing articles; it will increase your sites rankings in the search engines and generate you a ton of organic traffic.
And remember about needing 10,000 people to read your articles in order to generate enough traffic to your site to make a significant difference? Well, if you've written enough articles and each of them is published on a number of other websites, getting the traffic through the articles is a lot more realistic.
