Why Use An Article Directory

When you begin your quest for an online income to replace or even ultimately exceed your traditional 9 to 5, you have to consider the ways in which you will be able to market your material. Internet marketing is a tough enough business if you know what you’re doing. Imagine how difficult it will be if you don’t know a thing about the proper way to make money using keywords and strategies like it to earn your living. I can’t imagine what it would be like to only rely on the internet for money to support a family and not treat it like a real business.

Make Sure You Do Your Proper Keyword Research

In no time at all, you would be stuck back in the rat race. There is no way around it, you will have to have a good solid marketing plan to make your venture work. Just like a brick and mortar storefront, your website’s url is your property’s address. With the proper article marketing strategy, your site can attract visitors and customers just like a traditional storefront. This constant flow of visitors or traffic in the parlance of the cyberworld, is what generates your income.

It doesn’t matter if you are wanting to earn your living by being an Google Adsense publisher, an affiliate marketer or have your sites set on some other product or form of monetization. With all of these types of business models, you must attract traffic to reap the rewards. The main problem with most ‘wannabe’ internet marketers or entrepreneurs is that they either have no idea how to do this or they are confused about what it takes to attract people to your site’s address online.

Well, there are several ways to go about this. For one thing, it is recommended that you follow someone who knows what they are talking about. You might consider this a mentor online. This mentor of yours may be an individual online who is doing things that you would like to be doing or it may be a course of some kind that offers to teach you something about the business. There is such a course that many people who make a living online are talking about. It is called The Keyword Academy. It is basically a monthly university class. You can check it all out for practically nothing and see if it makes sense. If so, you can simply pay a small monthly fee to have access to a world of information and resources available to help you meet your online income goals.

Another option, it may be in addition to the mentor program, is to write content for other sites like eHow or one of those types of sites. These sites will pay you some percentage of the income they earn from the articles you have written. In this way, they act like article directories. An article directory is a site that can either have a broad category of topics covered or one that is more specific to a certain industry topic. This could relate directly to your site or be very similar. With the broad range of topics included on sites like EzineArticles, GoArticles and ArticlElements, you can submit your articles for a wide range of viewers to read. Then, if they find the information useful, they will go to your site to learn more by clicking the hypertext link within your article or author resource box.

This is an effective form of online marketing for your site because the search engines like to see that your site has links pointing to it from other sites. The greater the authority of the sites that point to yours, the higher your authority will be as well. The search engines will then rank your site higher in terms of relevance to the users searching for your specific information in the search box area of that particular search engine’s homepage.

Why this is a great way to market your site or business is because it costs nothing to very little to do this, in fact you can outsource content writing to another individual or company for cents per word. For very high quality material, you may spend upwards of 2-3 cents per word. You can even find quality sites that sell their content for 1cent per word of text written. For a typical article, you will want to write content somewhere in the range of 300-400 words for best effect. This number is somewhat arbitrary but it does reflect the fact that this size article is indexed into the search engines more quickly and will even give you some traffic to your site because of it. Some article directory sites set minimums for word count. This number is often 250 words and they can limit the number of outbound links to 1 or 2 depending upon the site. The point of this is that spam sites will often send out dozens of links from a very short article. This is not a natural linking pattern and the search engines will often correctly ‘flag’ this content. You definitely don’t want your content to show as spam, it shouldn’t anyway as long as it is useful to the end searcher.

The point of using an article directory is to gain some authority for your keyword choices and to be able to control this aspect of your business. You wouldn’t want your site to rank high for terms that didn’t relate to your content or you would not see traffic that will like buy from you. If what you want is targeted traffic to your site that comes from the search engines organically finding you because of your content and backlinks, then the use of an article directory will definitely help you in this regard.