<< Table of Contents

Part 4j - Article Marketing - Find More Opportunities

If you take little else away from this chapter, please remember the following tip. It has the potential to deliver a lot of qualified traffic to your business website, and to boost your search engine rankings like no other technique.

Once you have a growing collection of articles, and you've begun to publish them through websites like EzineArticles.com, you're ready to find additional publishing opportunities.

Quick story. I was doing some link building for a software review website once, and I thought I had exhausted my options. I had submitted press releases online, submitted the website to directories and published articles with the big article directories.

Then it dawned on me. There were hundreds, possibly thousands of websites out there looking for the kind of content I could provide, but not knowing where to look. So I began searching phrases like "software articles" and making a list of websites that provided this content.

Next, I emailed these sites one by one and invited them to use any of the 100+ articles I had written on the subject. All I asked was that they keep the author's note with hyperlink. By being proactive with my article publishing, I earned more than 30 new and highly relevant links! When you combine quality content or a unique website with strong imagination, your link opportunities are limitless.

The benefits of such placement are two-fold. First of all, when you place an article onto a high-visibility website, you will gain direct traffic from that article (as people follow the link within the author's bio back to your website). Secondly, you will be gaining those all-important backlinks / inbound links from other websites to yours. This will help you consistently improve your search engine rankings over time.

Here's how to use Google or Yahoo to find plenty of article opportunities. Let's say you have a handful of articles on the subject of "small business finance." You've submitted your articles to the big distribution websites like EzineArticles.com, but now you want to find even more opportunities. You could enter the following search queries into a major search engine and screen the results for suitable places to submit your article.

• Business finance +submit article
• Small business articles
• Small business +submit article
• Business financing articles

Hint: Just because a website does not have a "submit your article" link in their menu does not mean you can't offer your work. It never hurts to email them and offer the article!