How to Drive Web Traffic to Your Articles

One of the hardest things when you are just beginning as a web content writer is to figure out how the heck to get the word out about your articles. After all, views are money, and the more people that view and read your articles, the more money you make. This is especially true in those situations where you're participating in revenue shares, or where the website has a bonus program that is contingent upon your articles getting read for you to make money. Of course money isn't the only consideration when it comes to driving web traffic to your articles, it's just nice to have people read your articles, find them helpful and comment on them. I even like negative comments which I don't get that many of, but every once in awhile I'll get one. The thing is even negative comments if they are constructive can be helpful to a writer.

Here are some ways you can drive web traffic to your articles.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• A computer
• An internet connection
• Published web content articles

1. Set up a mailing list on your website. This can be just a simple little fill-in box on your website that people fill in their e-mail address and name.

2. Bookmark your articles using social bookmarking websites. The cool thing about social bookmarking is that this will not only increase web traffic to your articles, it will help to get your articles indexed on the search engines as well.

3. If your article page has an RSS feed then when new articles are added to your page use a pinging service to let everyone know you have new content. While your article page is not a blog per se, if it has an RSS feed, the format is close enough that you can get away with pinging when your article page has been updated.

4. Comment on other people's articles. I always go and check out other author's articles who visit mine and post comments. Often when I reciprocate, the other author and I help each other get the word out about our articles.

5. E-mail your close friends and family when a new article is published. Our close friends and family are often our first fan base for our writing; so let them know when you are newly published.

6. Post links to your articles or your article main page in your blogs. This is a great way to let the online world know that you write and what you are writing and publishing at the moment. Don't forget to ping your blog when you post a new entry.

7. Post a link to your article page, or to each article individually on your page on any social networks you are a part of. Just like with your blogs, this will really help to get the word out.

Tips & Warnings

• Make it clear on your website that the mailing list is to let people know when you have new articles, or other types of writing published.
• Use Only Wire to bookmark your articles. Only Wire allows you to do a bookmark for more than one service, so you can do all your social bookmarking at one website, rather than having to do it one at a time.
• Be positive and constructive when posting comments to other author's articles. No one likes to have their article dissed. Try to find something you like about it, and if you cannot at least try to make your comment constructive. Other authors will reciprocate.
• Some web content websites offer the possibility to post a link to some of the social bookmarking websites with the click of a button when you have a new article published. If you write for such a website, take advantage of this.
• Don't spam your mailing list, otherwise you are going to lose subscribers quickly. What I mean by this is that if you are regularly getting published, then wait until you have several articles published and then send a message to your mailing list with a list of links, or just the link to your main article page.
• If you use StumbleUpon.com, be careful about rating too many of your own articles and websites because after awhile you may discover that you can no longer give a thumbs up or down to anything that has your name on it.

Resources

• Only Wire

[diginb]

on 9/29/2008 Didn't know about only wire...will have to check it out!

[luv2blog]

on 7/3/2008 Great info

[LonnaLight]

on 12/18/2007 Thanks for the great information!