You are probably wondering how a well-written article could possibly bring people to your website. But it’s the simplicity of this method that is the most charming. It is based on the fact that most people set out looking for information on the web

You can build huge lists by writing keyword rich articles relevant to your business. These articles can be featured on your website, submitted to article directories and other websites that are continuously looking for good content for their readers.

Articles are a great way to generate high quality focused traffic since they establish you as an expert in your area based on the info you provide. They are also useful for building trust, which is very important in the online marketing world. It is important to write them and use them in the right manner.

Here are tips to ensure that your articles bring in the kind of visitors you can convert to customers:

• At the end of your article provide a resource box with a link to your website. Include a brief message with your optin URL, telling the visitor very briefly about how they will benefit. The reader will be encouraged to visit your website to know more and will be in a receptive mood to sign up. Provide a full link to your website.
• Articles must be original content. You can either write them yourself or have them outsourced. They must stimulate the reader so that they will bookmark you and keep coming back.
• The title of your article must be catchy and include the keywords that your visitors use to find you, making them eager to read on. Something like “One secret strategy that will change the way you make money online” if make money online is your main keyword.
• Here’s a no-brainer, nevertheless very important as it is often overlooked. Check your content for spelling errors and make sure it makes for continuous reading.
• Remember to link the articles on your website to your blog, your ezine, your newsletter, the forums you frequent - as all these will bring focused traffic.
• We’ve already said this - but don’t forget to optimize your articles. This is how search engines will find them and help you get traffic.
• Allow your articles to be republished with the resource box intact - this in turn will bring in traffic from various sources. There are many newsletter and blog publishers who keep looking for good content to reprint.

The beauty of article marketing is that you can use the same article to bring in traffic from different sources.

Popularity: 22% [?]

One of the main reasons why so many membership sites fall flat on their faces is due to lack of expertise in their selected niche.

For people to visit your website AND pay for information, you have to be the expert. Why would anyone pay you otherwise?

The moment someone mentions your area of expertise, your name must pop up in people’s heads. Easier said than done, you say? Listen up, it is not that difficult.

Before you select your niche, there are certain things you can do to make it easier for you to become the expert.

• Evaluate your expertise. Why should people pay to listen to you?
• Who is your target audience? Students, businesspersons, executives, investors or work-at-home moms? Determine their gender, backgrounds, income level, interests, professional and educational backgrounds. This will tell you what unique angle you should explore in your website.
• How good is the competition? What areas are they exploring? Do they know more or less?

By the time you have answered these questions, you already know where you stand. Listed below are some things you can do to become THE expert in your field.

Read: Read all kinds of material - books, forums, blogs or magazines. Forums are a great place to find enthusiastic questions, diverse answers and innovative ideas. Sometimes, you can even pick up hot information on new products from various forums.

Narrow your focus: Suppose you picked self-improvement as your area of expertise. You know that this niche is simply too vast for one person to do full justice to it. So you narrow your scope and take up one aspect, say ’stop smoking’. Good. You are now targeting a specific group of people. But, how about narrowing it down to ’stop smoking using herbal supplements’? Haven’t you just chopped off more than half the competition and targeted an even more specific group of people? Can you begin to see how narrowing a field down to its sub-topic will make the subject manageable and not overly competitive? It is much easier to dominate a narrow field of interest.

Speak whenever you get the chance: More than 95% of the population develops nervous ticks when they stand up to speak. So, the moment you walk up to that microphone, you are already ahead of 95% of your competition! Speaking about your topic establishes you as the indisputable expert in your niche. The next best thing to do is to give interviews. This neat technique wins you the label of an expert, free advertisement and increased traffic.

Write: There’s a public perception that only an expert can write well. This is more so if you are writing a book. So, get busy and write a book on your niche. If you can’t do it yourself, go for second best: hire a ghostwriter. Write good, read-worthy, thought provoking articles and send it out to ezines and other websites. This is the easiest way to get free publicity. Submit press releases that pique people’s interest. In short, generate EXTRA-ordinary content. Only this can establish your expertise.

Network like your life depends on it: Create a bulletin board, start a blog and visit related forums. Attend networking events where your clients hang out. Remember, it’s not who you know that is important, it is who knows *you* that counts!

So, there you have it!

Formula for expertise = Consistent great content + continuous online presence.

Popularity: 25% [?]

AdSense is an advertising program that has been developed by the people at Google. When you have AdSense running on your website or blog, Google places a number of text ads on your page. These are related to the content on your page. For example, if your website page is about car repairs, then AdSense runs ads about cars or auto mechanics- these usually appear along the side or at the top of the website. Every time someone clicks on an ad, you make money. This is fundamentally how AdSense works.

AdSense is both appealing and easy, and it essentially means that your website will start making money on its own- you don’t have to do anything. Just let the ads run and you get to cash the checks. But for many people, sometimes these checks are hardly anything to write home about. Perhaps they earn a couple of hundred every few months but that’s it. And yet there are a number of other people who are earning anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000 every month with AdSense. What’s the secret? Why is it that some people are earning a pittance with AdSense and others are getting big bucks?

The Big Secret

The secret to AdSense is that there is no real secret- these people just have a keener sense of how AdSense works. Let’s break it down to basics- AdSense works on keywords. Some keywords are worth only one cent while other keywords can bring in nearly twenty dollars per click. High-end keywords would be those that are used the most often in search engines, like travel, diet or credit repair. Naturally, the more high-paying keywords you have in your website, the more money you’ll make, correct?

Technically, yes. But remember that you only get paid if people click on the ads. If your website is just stuffed with keywords and the content makes no sense, then people are not going to click on your ads either. That means that you’re not going to make any money at all. So you need to make sure your content is relevant to these high-paying AdSense keywords as well. For instance, ‘attorney’ is a popular keyword that can bring in a lot of money. To make AdSense work best for you, you need to provide good content on attorney information that will encourage the reader to click on the ads.

Popularity: 23% [?]

We already know that success on the Internet is founded on niche marketing. This involves finding a niche market that is not too large. A list of relevant keywords is then made through research. The next step is to write keyword rich content that you can post on your website enabling your niche market to find you. Now here’s where a blog can be tremendously valuable because you can get massive amounts of free traffic.

Basically, a blog is like a simple website. You can start one with zero investment and publish your keyword rich content online. You’ve probably seen people use a blog as a personal diary or to just post news. The fact, however, is that you can use a blog as a niche site almost effortlessly. Blogs are the best way to keep adding fresh keyword rich content and making it available to your niche. It brings in heavy traffic much more quickly than your regular website - and blogs are perfect for niche marketing.

But don’t just set up a blog and keep posting content - also add categories and moveable type. Your category titles must preferably be your most important keywords. Remember the list of keywords you made when you researched your niche? Post relevant keyword rich content under each category. This is crucial because as you keep building the blog site, you’ll have hundreds of pages. Every page can be linked to the ten or so categories you’ve made. These links will be made of your best keywords and through these, your niche website will get a high ranking with the search engines since your category names are made of your keywords. It’s a fact that Google is partial to blogs in particular!

Niche blogs can be submitted to the special RSS and blog directories and start generating focused traffic right away. Interestingly, you’ll find that the kind of traffic you get from this source is a lot more than the search engines bring up. It is easy to find the top blog directories online and get yourself indexed. Each time a new post is added, you can ping these directories to alert them, inviting the search engine spiders to visit your site.

It is important at least initially to keep adding fresh content every day because this will make it attractive to the visitors as well as the largest search engines. Assuming you build a niche blog site that has at least thirty new entries by the time it is thirty days old, you can expect a big and steady flow of traffic.

Because of how easy it is and hardly costs anything, niche blog sites are the preferred way to reach the niche market since blogs are one of the vital places to find your niche site. You need not limit yourself to one blog. If you intend selling more than one product, you should set up a niche blog site for each of these products.

Popularity: 14% [?]