I've been operating two small retail Websites for several years with modest success. Recently, I decided to branch out into a different area of e-commerce. I set up five different Websites at once and I wanted to find a way to obtain a lot of links to my Websites in a hurry. I wasn't interested in paying for promotion, and I don't care for the tedious process of exchanging links. On a lark, I typed the phrase “unusual Website promotion techniques” into Google, just to see what sort of search results came up.
That search yielded mostly Websites for companies that were offering to promote Websites for a fee, but one link did catch my eye – a site that mentioned writing articles to provide free content for Websites. I read the article on the Website and realized that I had found what I was looking for. This seemed to promise inexpensive, useful, fast results. I would write articles about topics that were relevant to my Websites and submit them to sites that would provide them to other sites that needed content. In exchange for this, I would receive a link back to my site. I decided to give it a try.
I did a search for “free content” on the Web, and made a list of sites that accepted articles and offered “live” links to the author's Websites. I wrote an article of 400 words or so, submitted it to several different free content sites and waited. In order to accurately judge the effectiveness of this technique, I used a version of my name that I generally do not use as my author name. That way, I could do searches for my name in search engines and be certain that all results related to articles I had written. I submitted my first article in the afternoon and I I did a search for my author name in Google the next morning. I was astonished to see that not only had my article been published by several sites, but my author name turned up in search results just fourteen hours after I had submitted the article!
Clearly, I was on to something. I began writing articles in earnest. It wasn't hard; as I am promoting seven different Websties, I had seven different topics to choose from. In the six weeks or so since I published my first article, I have written 60 more on topics relating to seven of my Websites. In that six weeks' time, the total number of links from external sites to my own sites has increased from 765 to 11302. The growth in the number of external links to my sites has been explosive, and I'm now getting daily traffic to each of my sites. In just six weeks, I have managed to obtain a level of traffic that previously took me more than a year to obtain through traditional Website promotion methods. If you have a knack for writing, submitting free content articles is a great, fast, effective Website promotion tool. I highly recommend it.
©Copyright 2005 by Retro Marketing. Charles Essmeier is the owner of Retro Marketing, a firm devoted to informational Websites, including http://www.End-Your-Debt.com, a site devoted to debt consolidation and credit counseling, and http://www.homeequityhelp.net, a site devoted to information regarding home equity loans.