Five Tried-and-true Methods to Bump Up Article Traffic

Are you wondering how to bump up your article traffic?

Many people turn to online article sites to earn money from their writing because it is just so much faster–no printing out and mailing off hard copies with cover letters, return envelopes and postage; no waiting months to hear whether your articles have been accepted for publication in print magazines; no waiting for what seems like forever for payments.

Articles can be quickly submitted to online sites allowing writers to track their article views and earnings . . . which brings me to the reason for writing this article. This discussion looks at five tried-and-true methods to boost article traffic for higher earnings.

Bumping Up Article Traffic With Keywords

If you aren’t using keywords in your articles, your articles will attract fewer views. Why? Search engines scan your content and keywords help in relation to indexing. A page that contains keywords stands a better chance of ranking higher.

Keywords should appear at the start of your title and/or ALWAYS in your title. Your first paragraph should contain your keywords, and as you work down through your article, you should include keywords in your bolded subheadings and in your paragraphs. Always end your concluding paragraph by inserting your keywords.

Get into the practice of writing all your online articles this way and you should notice a difference in your article views.

Boosting Article Traffic with Interlinking

Interlinking your articles means including links within the body or at the foot of each article to your other articles, which means that one article generates traffic to another. Make sure, when you interlink, that your articles are related. A reader that is reading an article about the many ways to prepare and enjoy steak is probably not going to read an article about the benefits of vegetarianism.

Increasing Article Traffic via Inbound Links

It is important to link to your articles from other online sites so that you have inbound links, which makes the search engines “happy” and helps with your article ranking.

• If you have a blog, use it to link to your articles.

• If you create HubPages, you can link to two of your articles in each related HubPage.

• Xomba is an excellent site that allows you to bookmark (article link + blurb) your articles. You also earn on your Xomba content.

• I recently did an experiment with one of my top-earning articles. I wrote two articles about the same subject but with different slants, then linked to the original article so that it had two inbound links. The result? 1000+ views in 6 days.

Bookmarking to Bump Up Article Traffic

You should take the time to bookmark your articles. While submitting online articles is so much faster than submitting by hard copy methods, the time you save should be used to keep your articles in circulation. A method of helping your articles to become “sticky” is to include them at StumbleUpon, Digg, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Yahoo Buzz, Fave It, Xomba and SheToldMe.

Using Free Article Directories to Boost Article Traffic

Have you considered writing and submitting articles to free article directories? Why do this? Your articles may be picked up and re-syndicated (republished) because site owners are looking for fresh content, on condition that they include your author bio and resource box links. You can encourage readers to gain additional insights by checking out your links. Ezinearticles and GoArticles allow resource box links; ArticlesBase allows article links in the article body. The potential is that over time, as your work is used and posted across online sites, your articles–like ripples in a pond–spread out into cyberspace.

Recap:

1. As you write your articles, include keywords

2. Before publishing an article, interlink to your other articles

3. After your articles are published, link to them from external sites. Make it a habit to link back to your newer work, so that over time, you build up a huge network of links that operate in the background.

4. Now for a bit of monotony: get busy and bookmark your articles. Bookmark others’ articles too. This keeps you in good standing with the social networking/bookmarking sites and also helps you to draw readers/subscribers at these sites. Additionally, other writers may be more willing to return the favor if they know that you are willing to bookmark their work.

5. Pinpoint your most-viewed articles. (At Triond, if you click on the heading “Total Views”your articles will conveniently rearrange themselves so that they display in succession, starting with the highest-viewed article down to the lowest.) This is so much faster, over wading through page after page. Write two or three related articles and point all of them at the original article. Submit these related articles at EzineArticles, ArticlesBase and GoArticles.

You will not do this with all your articles, of course, but make sure to target articles with the most views and work to promote these. (If you’ve followed the steps to boost your article views, you will have included links in your most-viewed articles, so a surge in viewers will spill over to your other articles, too.)

These five tried-and-true methods for bumping up article traffic really work. Yes, this all takes time and effort but the pay-off happens months and years down the road.

• Creating Search Engine Friendly Article Titles

• Tips for Optimizing Your Articles–Think Content-Rich

• Using Xomba and SheToldMe to Drive Traffic to Your Triond Articles

• How You Can Make $100.00 Per Month Writing for Triond