I have been writing articles and submitting them to various article directories for around a year now. When I started I felt very fresh and had plenty to write about. After a few months however, I started to get what is known as writers block. I could not think of anything else to write about. In this article I give advice about how to react when this happens, advice which I hope will help you to continue to write quality and original articles.

My name is Steve Hill and my line of business is as a speech coach. I developed a stutter when I was four years of age and it continued to affect my life for the next eighteen years. I have managed to overcome this speech impediment and as a career I now help other people to achieve fluency. I feel I know quite a lot about the subject and found it quite easy and enjoyable to write about all aspects of stuttering.

After a while I could not think of anything new to write about stuttering, which would be of value to people and made the mistake or re-writing some of the articles using different words. I must admit I was unaware that this was against the rules but now realise that each article needs to have original content, which I accept and understand.

I then wrote about some of the experiences from my own life, like how I coped when my now ex-girlfriend left me and even stories about my dog! A number of people have read these articles and have sent me some very nice e-mails stating how much they have enjoyed them.

One morning I woke up with very good intentions, I was planning on writing three or four new articles. I turned on the computer and basically sat there. Come on write something, I tried to tell myself. The problem was that I could not think of anything to write about. I decided to go back to bed. I seem to be able to think clearer from my bed, a bit weird I know.

I decided that I was not only going to write about my own life and experiences but I would also write about my family and friends. Other areas I could write about would be:

How to promote a website

Web design

Self confidence

Travel

World affairs

Sport

Exercise

Weight loss

Stress management

Anger management

Business

These are all areas I have a great interest in and even though they are not my main line of business, the articles should be of interest to people. Most of the topics which I have listed are things which I or people I know, have had experiences with. For example a lot of people who stutter including myself in the past, have issues with their self-confidence.

Weight loss is subject which is close to my heart as I have had many problems in controlling my own weight. I also run my own business and therefore have had to learn aspects about how to do this.

I also love playing and watching sport. This was therefore something else which I then concentrated on and I have now written articles on snooker and football.

To gain inspiration and to help me to write my articles, I read a lot of books and newspapers and I also like to watch the news and current affairs programs on the television.

I hope this article has been of help to you and please feel free to read and re-print more of the articles I have written.

One way of promoting your website and product can be achieved for free. As an additional bonus, this “free” method can boost your sites and sales, doubling and even tripling your income.

Articles. One of the easiest ways to promote your website in order to generate traffic and increase your earnings.

How does this work?

Write articles relating to your website and submit them to “free content” submission sites. Easy to do, takes little time and can increase your website traffic, sales and of course, your income.

How can article writing boost traffic and income?

The article on the free content site contains a link to your own website. Readers, after reading your articles, may choose to click on the link and pay you an unexpected visit. Having them on the free content sites is also making these articles available to other webmasters who may wish to publish that article on their site.

If they do, your article will include a link back to your site. And anyone who reads the article on that site can still click on the link to visit your site.

As the list of your published articles grow larger, and more and more of them are appearing on different websites, the total number of links to your site increases also. Major search engines are placing a lot of significance on incoming links to websites so they can determine the importance of a certain site.

The more incoming links the website has, the more importance search engines attaches to it. This will then increase your website’s placement in the search results.

If you site is into promoting a product or service, the links that your articles have achieved will mean more potential customers for you. Even if visitors only browse through, you never know if they might be in need of what you are offering in the future.

There are also those who already have specific things they need on their mind but cannot decide yet between the many choices online. Chances are, they may stumble upon one of your articles, gets interested by the contents you wrote, go to your site and became enticed by your promotions. See how easy that is?

Search engines do not just index the websites, they also index published articles. They also index any article that is written about your own website’s topic. So once someone searches for that same topic, the list of results will have your site or may even show the articles that you have written.

And to think, no effort on your part was used to bring them to your site. Just your published articles and the search engines.

It is no wonder why many webmasters are suddenly reviving their old writing styles and taking time to write more articles about their site than doing other means of promotion.

Getting their site known is easier if they have articles increasing their links and traffic and making it accessible for visitors searching the internet. Since many people are now taking their buying needs online, having your site on the search engines through your articles is one way of letting them know about you and your business.

The good thing with articles is that you can write about things that people would want to know about. This can be achieved in the lightest mood but professional manner, with a little not-so-obvious sales pitch added.

If you think about it, only a few minutes of your time is spent on writing one article and submitting to free content site. In the shortest span of time also, those are distributed to more sites than you can think of. Even before you know what is happening, you are getting more visitors than you previously had.

If you think you are wasting your time writing these articles, fast forward to the time when you will see them printed and wide-spread on the internet. Not to mention the sudden attention and interest that people are giving your website and your products or services.

Try writing some articles and you will be assured of the sudden surge in site traffic, link popularity and interest. Before you know it, you will be doubling and even tripling your earnings.

Nothing like getting benefits for something you got for free.

Blogs

One of the best ways of creating links in a way so that your site is through the publication of comments on blogs. Simply add the URL of your site by posting comments on blogs and soon you will build a number of many good one-way links to your site.

Forums

Posting in forums is also a great way to build backlinks. However, do not post your URL directly into the discussion forums or the spam busters would take you banned and removed from the forum. The best way is through your signature. Include the URL of your site in your signature and then when posting a comment in the forum you are leaving a link to your site along with your post.

Social Networks

From the evolution of Web 2.0, social networking sites like MySpace, Friendster, Tag World, etc. … are the hot spots of the Internet today. Millions of people visit these sites daily to make friends or to promote their products or services. You may also register on those sites and post links to your site along with the comments you make in your friend’s profile. This way you can create a large number of backlinks for your site.

Social Bookmarks

Social bookmarking is another area where you can create a technique to link to your site. Just bookmark sites like Delicious and if your site is interesting enough, others will add your site to their list of favorite sites, and soon you will meet a large number of one-way links to your site.

Articles

You can write articles on various topics and publish them on article sites, and include the URL of your site in the resource box or the biographical section of the author. There are many directories publishing articles from various authors, along with information that provides biographical facts about the author. Such info may contain a link to your site. If your article is informative and intriguing, soon it will be published on many other sites and newsletters. This way you will have a large number of backlinks pointing to your site.

Link Exchange

Although it is a very old method for building traffic and backlinks, link exchange still works. Link exchange with quality and relevant sites and you will get a higher ranking and more traffic.

 Backlinks Building is a crucial factor for a website to increase its popularity

Google is the first search engine to link to the websites with the estimation of a vote rate. The links must also be relevant to the content of the website. The popularity of a site by another name as “Page Rank,” decides the quantity and quality of backlinks. The keywords used in the hyperlinks (anchor text) are crucial to determine the position of a website in the SERP in addition to page optimization.

The important question now before us is how to build backlinks. Do not think of participating in “link farms” to rebuild links! This is a black hat technique, created solely for the purpose of building backlinks for spam blogs and websites.

So what is next? It’s the reciprocal link. The backlinks received from other sites should be relevant to your content. Besides this, there is no guarantee that they will keep your links.

Google and other search engines like the so-called ‘natural links’ sites. The content has to be relevant to the “keyword search.”

The big question before us now is how to gain natural links? Websites that link to us if we have quality content appear on our website. This is called link exchange technique. Distributing your content in the form of an article, the best places to submit your articles are Share This, GoArticles, ISNAR, Ezine Articles and others.

Apart from the directory “backlinks building” another technique to build quality backlinks, is DMOZ. You can for example submit your website for “social bookmarks like Digg, Furl, del.icio.us, searchles, etc. Therefore, there are many ways to get people to notice your site without paying anything.

Craigslist for instance, is a free classifieds service, where you can submit your site and reap all the benefits in literary no time. Participating in “Google Groups” and “Yahoo Answers,” trying to help people rather than indulging yourself in a shameless self-promotion, will help you a lot!

You can also create pages in “Wikipedia”. Using this technique with caution, not to introduce methods of promotion, providing good, valuable information, will prevent your page a deletion from Wikipedia. Do not let people know that you are promoting your site through “Wikipedia”! Also, make use of Squidoo.com and MySpace.com; create a resource of good, unique content and link to your site – you will see the results!

Most internet sites receive about 75% of visitors from search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN. Google is the worldwide market leader in the search engine market. Because of this fact it is very important for every webmaster in the world to archive good rankings in Google’s search engine result pages (SERPs).

The most efficient way to archive good ranking in search engine result pages is to collect a lot of inbound links from authority sites for a specific niche. For a lot of webmasters selling links was quite a profitable way to make some cash. The monthly price of a link is mainly based on the Page Rank of the site selling the link. The Page Rank is assigned by Google and is visible in the Google Toolbar. Recently Google penalized most link selling sites. Many of those sites lost some of their Page Rank. This is the reason why selling links is mich more difficult nowadays or you will get much less money for links.

So for Google selling links is against their guidelines – link exchanges are against their webmaster guidelines as well. Though, Google suggests to collect many quality inbound links in order to archive better rankings in the search engine result pages.

May well known web directories lost most of their Page Rank as well. A lot of directories were penalized so most of them are useless for link campaings.

One of the rare opportunities for webmaster to get good quality inbound links is an article directory. You have to write articles and submit them to a directory. It’s very important that you write unique content, because Google also reduced the Page Rank für many duplicate content pages. It’s more likely to get a good inbound link from an article directory if you submit unique content.

Select Only The Best Directories And Ezines

Writing and marketing articles online is probably the most effective, most cost-effective way to publicize your website, and promote your products and services online. The Web is a printing press with an insatiable appetite for articles written by experts. There are literally millions of websites and ezines that are begging for good articles. They want people to submit good articles to them. They even search sites on the web for permission to use articles.

So, how do you know which sites to select?

Through my years of experience, and many conversations with the top Internet Marketers, in order to have the greatest impact, you need to use a 3-tiered article marketing approach targeting:

1. The major article directories like Ezinearticles.com, Goarticles.com, Ideamarketers.com and Articledashboard.com
2. Smaller niche directory sites that are related to your content
3. Niche ezine and website publishers who need and want quality related content that will add value to their website or email newsletter audience

My consulting clients ask me many times, “ What is the best way to find ezines and websites that are the most read so my article gets the most exposure?” That should not be the first question you ask yourself. Yes, you do want to find websites that are highly visited and ezines that are the most read – but more importantly, you want to focus on finding websites and ezine publishers within your specific niche that have strong emotional connections to their audience.

Most likely, you are already visiting their websites or subscribing to their ezines. If you don’t know who has a great ezine related to your industry niche, there are plenty of ezine directories like bestezines.com on the net that can guide you.

Other strategies include:

- Research your competitors – where are there articles being published?

- Perform a Google search. Just type in your industry or article topic followed by the words article submission. That’s how I helped our client’s book jump to the #2 spot on the NY Times Best Sellers List. I typed into Google, “health article submissions”, “medical article submissions”, and “thyroid dysfunctions article submissions” and discovered (among many other sites) the contact information for an About.com editor – one of the top 50 sites on the net today. After receiving the submission, the editor blasted an email book promotion to her entire list, giving Mark Hyman MD 1500 additional opt-in subscribers and much higher sales in just one day.

- Think about which organizations, your audience may belong to. If you’re a sales lead expert, like our client, Mac McIntosh, then the chances of your audience belonging to an organization such as the American Marketing Association are very, very high. With more than 200,000 registered users and more than 2 million visits each year from a wide range of influential decision makers, Mac McIntosh’s soon to be published article on the American Marketing Association’s website will provide him with an excellent opportunity to connect with the marketing community.

- And, don’t forget to check sites for magazines within your niche. More and more publications, are looking for fresh, new content for their website, to drive traffic up in order to sell more print magazines in the long run. This constant updating of articles found only on the website and not in their print publications means more opportunities for writers and experts. An article written by you published on sites like Entrepreneur Magazine and Mothering Magazine will give your company the vast amount of exposure and credibility it needs.

Follow these strategies and you will have a sound article marketing campaign.

Have you ever searched for anything on the Web? Chances are you have. Do you tend to click on sites that appear at the top most of the page or on the first page, in general? More often than not, you do. This is because we are assured that the first few sites that come out on the first page of your search engine contains the bulk of what you are looking for.

Much is the same for Article Marketing. Many of the consumers looking for articles know that those sites that appear first are the quality sites. Let’s break down “quality sites”? Quality sites are those who have received a high score and thus have been given a high page rank by Search Engine Optimizers. Quality sites are also those who generate a hefty amount of traffic over a period of time. As more people have seen your articles, the better the review for your article market.

Let’s not deny the fact that when people observe that you have a large amount of accounted for visits for your article, the interest of the people rises. As interest is raised, traffic is generated. If you have more to offer to these consumers and if you are able to maintain this interest, then like the snowball technique, people’s referral to your site will just go on and on. But how is this done? If you are starting out, you may not know just where to begin in order to reach that level of exposure you are aiming for. How does an ordinary site become a quality site?

When an ordinary site becomes a quality site, a number of factors have to be considered. First, you have to have a catchy phrase as your title. Make sure though, that the content of your article can be summarized in that one catchy phrase and serve as your title. In this manner, your consumers won’t have to tire themselves of browsing over the length of your article just to see the point you’re trying to make. Consumers want quick results, and having a catchy and informative title will do the trick.

Second, is to generate the necessary amount of traffic. Who would’ve thought that traffic would ever be appreciated? Apparently, in Article Marketing, it highly is. Generating traffic can be easy but it would take several steps. The first step is to distribute your articles. The easiest method is by handing them over to several article directories. These article directories, easily accessible on the web, would be able to give your article as much exposure as possible. Yet, another way for you to accumulate traffic is by having link partners. These link partners would not hesitate to publish your work if they see that they can benefit from it as well. If they assess that your articles have the content that can attract consumers, then they will accept the opportunity. This is because, if the readers of your article enjoyed the content, it is likely that they will also visit the links available on your article. These visits will benefit those link partners.

Another approach to making sure your articles are distributed is by joining several forum sites. These sites have to have some relation to what you’re trying to pitch in your article, because if the forum notices the relativity of your content, then they may just allow you to publish your articles on their sites.

Distributing your articles as newsletters may also serve you well. But in order for you to issue these as newsletters, you have to have worked up an email list worth sending newsletters to and an email list consisting of audiences who would be interested by the content of your article.

Make sure that your articles are distributed to as many publishers as possible. This may serve as another approach to generating traffic. If you send them to only one publisher and wait for the results, your waiting may have ended in vain. So take the initiative and distribute them yourself. The higher responses you have from these publishers, the better chances you have of producing traffic.

Lastly, in distributing articles, specific audiences have to be targeted. If you know who your audience is, you would have a better chance of formulating an article that would hold your audience’s interest. Be aware of your audiences’ accessibility to the Web, as well. If most of your articles are targeted to audiences who have few connections to the Internet, you won’t be generating that much traffic and hence you won’t be seen from the immense competition in the domain.

These are generally the ideas that can be used to assure the exposure of your article to a number of consumers. At the same time, you won’t have to worry of the costs because most of the methods mentioned, offer free advertising. If some of the means you have employed to distribute your articles may require some cash, just think of it as an investment. In Article Marketing, as long as you stay with the idea, you will be raking in profits in time.

It’s obvious that the benefits of submitting your own articles to various different article directories are simply amazing.

You get free publicity.
You don’t pay for advertising.
You can have your own articles as a viral marketing tool.

And, much much more.

But, wait a minute.

“I can’t write. How can I submit my articles if I don’t even have one written?”

If this does not describe you and you’re already writing good articles on your own, then what are you waiting for?

Start publishing your own articles now.

If you belong to this “can’t write a single word” category, then stay with me here.

I don’t blame you for it but I believe this is a problem that can be fixed. I used to have no idea to write at all, but I knew my problem was because I was trying to write about something I didn’t know.

It’s a bit confusing but let me rephrase. Find something that you know a great deal about and if you are passionate enough about the topic, your juice will flow like water. Your head will generate more ideas than your writing speed can catch up.

For further help on writing an article, here are a few tips.

1. Enumerate your points, like what I’m doing now. A 500-word article can have 7 or 10 short points in it.

2. Look at some other articles of the same interest. Model (not copy) the writing skills of others.

3. Write your articles like writing stories. Writing your own experience sometimes help.

4. Write like you talk. Forget about grammar in your first round of writing. Go back to the article and fix your mistakes once the article is finished.

5. Write, write and write. Nothing helps more than practice. Your first article won’t be good, but the second one will be better. The hundredth article will be much better than the 50th. So, write more.

Still stuck with writer’s block? Then, I suggest two ways to get around.

1. Hire ghostwriters to write exclusively for you.

Ghostwriters are authors who will write on your behalf on any topics that you assign them. They’ll charge you for their service.

When the articles are complete, they are yours to keep. You can claim the authorship of the articles, put your name on these articles and often, claim the copyrights of the articles too.

Many Internet marketers are doing it simply because they don’t have time to write or they don’t have any expertise on the topics that they want to write.

2. Join private label article membership clubs.

For less than thirty dollars a month, you can get tons of contents which you can private label them with your own name.

But, be very careful because article directory owners don’t like duplicate contents in their databases. Make sure you modify the content of each article before you submit them to any article directory. You don’t want your name to get banned by these article directories.

On a special note, majority of private label rights operators put a cap on their membership sites. As soon as they have enough members, you won’t be allowed to join them until the existing members cancel their membership.

The two methods of creating your own articles above are definitely meant to help you get going. After having your articles in your hand, like most people say, the world is your oyster.

Since the beginning, you’ve been told that “Content Is King” but there are so many website owners – who have been trying to win the search engine battles – ignore the rules and try to be ‘smart’. They used software and tools to trick the search engines to get their websites indexed highly but only to find out that their websites were banned a month later.

Don’t get me wrong! There are actually some legitimate tools that can help you get your websites ranked higher. People pay a hundred dollars or more just to own them. That is fine as long as it works and does not violate the criteria search engines are looking for on a website.

But why are they doing it?

For an obvious reason, I guess – to get as much traffic possible to their websites, which in turn produces more revenue to the website owners.

And then, there are really smart marketers who go by the “Content Is King” rules and are really winning the search engine games day by day. These marketers use words to turn into traffic. With a single 500-word article, within time, they can create hundreds of backlinks to their websites – resulting in more web traffic, more sales, and more profits. Then, they write one more article, and some more.

That’s right – we call them article marketers. You can see their names when you search a keyword and their articles appear on the main page of the search engine. You click on the links and their articles come up.

Now let me tell you a little secret. These marketers don’t write these articles and post them only on their websites.

First, they write these articles and at the same time allow others to reprint them for free. That makes you able to forward these articles to other people and these other people can also forward to more people provided the content of the articles are not changed or modified. In short, these articles are viral.

Second, they submit these articles to various article directories and online publishers to get maximum exposure. The more publishers they can find, the more audience they can reach. Thus, the more sales they can make.

Think about it. If the pros are doing it and they are getting tons of traffic and sales, then you too can have the same privilege – only if you follow their steps.

Wouldn’t you want to generate sales without having to pay a single red cent?

If the answer is a resounding ‘yes’, then consider article marketing seriously.

I quickly learned that writing articles and submitting them to online publications was a great way to attract new readers and gain experience as a freelance writer.

I have been fortunate to have several of my articles published on high trafficked websites and have made some wonderful new friends as a result of submitting my articles to these free ezines.

Here’s the resource box I include at the end of my articles:

Rose DesRochers is a published poet and freelance writer. Rose has been writing poetry for more than 20 years. She is also the founder of http://www.todays-woman.net, a supportive online writing community for men and women over 18. She is also the Assistant Administrator of http://www.invision-graphics.com.

What you are giving is your permission for the publisher to publish your article in exchange for a byline at the end of the article. The byline is about four lines of text about yourself, including a link to your website.

Whenever I write an article, I first publish it on my own website and then submit it to ezines. Ezines will not take the time to edit your article, so make sure that you proofread it before submitting it. You may want to have someone else go over your article for errors before submission.

Here are some ezines where you can publish your articles.

articledashboard.com
isnare.com
articleblast.com
boazepublishing.biz
articlecity.com
goarticles.com

You may also wish to search through ezinesearch.com for publications that will be interested in the genre of articles that you write.

Websites are constantly looking for free content to re-publish. Many webmasters search article directories such as articledashboard.com in search of content to publish on their websites. The number of ezines online is growing everyday. I’m constantly receiving invitations to submit articles to new ezines.

Writing and submitting free articles is a great way to gain exposure and increase your income when people want to hire you to write content for their websites.

It won’t be long and you will be recognized as an expert in your field.

Whether you are new to blogging or not we always want more ideas to drive readers to your blog pages. Marketing your blog the right way will give you the results that you are looking for. You are going to find that you can not just make a blog, post in it a couple of times, and then expect for the world to find you. That just will not happen how much you wish for it. However, you can market your blog effectively, and get the results that you are looking for.

To begin blog marketing you first need a blog. The next step is to ensure that your blog is updated frequently. Post content in your blog regularly for the best results. Some will post once a day and others once a week. Whichever it is, be consistent with it and know that it will pay off to continue posting as you should. This is a great way to get started with blog marketing. You wont have a blog to market if you do not post in it regularly.

While most free blogs all look the same, you can make sure that your blog design stands out. You don’t want your blog to look and feel like everyone else’s, so make it different. Having your own look is a huge plus in the blog marketing world. You will find that most blogs all look the same and you can have your own look by just using HTML and adjusting the code to suit your taste. You are going to see that this will truly make a difference with your blog as well as your readers. Try to get a theme that is going to match the market that you are promoting in your blog. Doing so will make it look even more professional. You don’t want your readers to confuse your blog with others do you? If this is something that you are concerned about, you will definitely want to make sure that you change yours to make more personable. However, if you are not worried about it or concerned about it in the least, you can leave the design as one of the free templates that you see so frequently used.

Something else that will help you with your blog marketing is exchanging links with authority blogs and websites that are in your same market is another great way to get the word out about your blog. The authority sites are going to have a higher page rank, and will also be listed high in Google’s search results. So do some searches and check those out and see if they are up to exchanging links. If they are not, you could always just add those into your blog roll. You do not need permission to do that if they are not into linking. However, in the world of blogs, most blog owners are thankful for all links, and are willing to return the favor. This is a great way to market your blog that some do not think about or use. If you use this technique to get your blog seen, you will not be sorry. It is a trick you can even use to market your website.

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