Article Bumping and Bumming - Ways To Power Your Articles

You did the keyword research. You wrote the article. Your resource box is so good that you sense a click-through rate world's record in your near future. You might be a bum marketer, but you're producing high-potential material. Guess what? It might not be enough.

Some other goofball who accidentally stumbled onto your great long tail keyword may end up beating you by three pages in the search engine results. A less-than-relevant page from some random site that doesn't even use your keyword could end up getting more traffic than your perfectly assembled article.

What's the scoop? How can you bump your articles up in the SERPs for maximum exposure (and maximum profits)? Sometimes, the only difference between Google's second page and an awesome position is a handful of links. If you can get a few backlinks directly to your article, you might be able to climb the ladder.

So, how are you supposed to get backlinks to your bum articles? Let's run through a few different options.

First, social bookmarking is a great shortcut. You can set up an account at a series of social bookmarking sites and drop a link to each of your articles. If that seems a little time consuming (and it can be), you can get a free account at OnlyWire or another services that allows you add bookmarks across a series of sites with a few mouseclicks.

Second, blogging can be a great way to get the job done. Set up a handful of blogs at some of the more popular free sites. Link to your articles from your Blogspot and Wordpress blogs and you can give your bum marketing articles a boost.

Third, you can actually write articles about articles. This little known trick is great. Some directories will let you pepper your articles with additional links. You can use that opportunity to link back to your own articles. One nifty trick is to write an article about the fact that you've just published three articles. Link (with anchor text, of course) to each of those three articles within your new offering. If you mass distribute this one, it's going to add a healthy supply of links back to your original bum article.

Fourth, use your other properties. Link to an article from one of your sites. If you work with Squidoo lenses or Hubpages, you can quickly generate some nice links back to your articles, helping them to climb up in the SERPs.

There are many ways to generate some extra links back to your articles. Use some of these simple ideas and compliment them with a little bit of your own creativity. You can finally start getting great results from your bum marketing efforts once you start bumping those articles!

Article by Quality Free Articles Directory

Article Marketing - Three Strategies For a Traffic-Driving Resource Box

Your articles won't drive any traffic or produce any sales unless you get the readers to click on those links in your resource box. Even the very best articles can turn out to be under-performers when resources boxes fall flat. Here are three things you can do to make your resource box work better.

Tip One: Don't Dwell On Yourself

There's a common drive to use resources boxes as an opportunity to present an author biography. Sometimes a little information about yourself can be a good way to build some credibility, but you're usually better off not focusing on yourself.

You want the reader to click through. That means you need to give the reader the most compelling possible reason to do so. No matter who you are, you probably aren't that reason. Use the resource box to give the reader an irresistible opportunity - something they want but can only get by clicking your link.

Tip Two:  Be Specific

There are forty million resource boxes (at least) floating around in cyberspace that read something like, "for more information about this topic, please visit www.mysite.com."  Some of them are attached to great articles.  Some of them hang from the bottom of horrible articles.  All of them share one thing in common:  They don't drive traffic.

You need to use your resource box to explain exactly what makes that link worth clicking.  "Click here for more information about business X" is not compelling. Tell the reader what they're going to get and why they should want it.  Be specific and tout the aspects of your site that make it uniquely valuable.

Tip Three:  Sell Without Screaming

Your resource box is like a tiny persuasive essay or an "elevator sales pitch".  You have limited space in which to make your impact and you can't waste it on empty verbiage.  You need to sell in that box.

However, you can't scream.  Response rates to hype-riddled capitalized resources boxes is a lot lower than you might think.  "Click HERE NOW to go from being a PAUPER to buying and selling MILLIONS OF MANSIONS within 4 hours with an UNBEATABLE SYSTEM that will have the blackjack dealer pushing PILES OF CHIPS in your direction at your request!!!!!!!!!" is a bad resource box unless you've done the world's greatest job of pre-selling in your article. 

You need to build resources boxes that persuade and that produce action.  The best way to do that is to focus on the readers' needs, to construct a compelling reason to visit your particular site and to do so in a slightly more subtle way than the usual sales page headline's rhetoric.

Article by Quality Free Articles Directory