One of the main tools used in Internet Marketing is the provision of free content. This can come in the form of blogs or as published online content. For a beginner, this is one of the 'cheapest' forms of getting yourself noticed. However, as with other low-cost methods, the price to pay is the time taken to generate significant traffic to your website.
Free content provision is also more commonly known as article marketing. You basically submit free articles written by yourself to various online and ezine publishers for publication. Each article will contain a resource box holding a description of yourself and your website's link. As more and more of your articles get published, you'll generate long term no-cost traffic to your website through these links.
To put it in the simplest form...
Good content + Links ==> Traffic to your website
==> Monetary rewards aka $$$
If you think about it, this is really what runs the entire Internet system. Every time you get online to search for a particular topic of interest, you are really using this formula.
Let's see how it works... step by step... you get online and go to one of the major search engines. Key in your keyword and press "search". The search engine immediately goes through all the content it has indexed and provides you with a list of links that it thinks is most relevant to your search word/phrase. You then click on the various links to find more details on what you were searching for.
Most of the world uses the major search engines like Yahoo, MSN or Google because we trust them to be able to provide us links that are useful and relevant to us. Those links can be the free content that we, as internet marketers, can provide.
Its kind of funny really... due to the intrinsic trust we have in the major search engines, we are willing to click on those links given. Big search engines are more trusted and provide more valuable links because *you* think so. As a result billions of dollars are made by Yahoo and Google every year because they provide what are perceived as quality content.
So how can we get in on this phenomenon? By providing free good quality articles in order to get two things.
1. Traffic Generation
As explained before, with each article comes a resource box that will hold a description of yourself and a link to your website. The more often your articles are published, the more link backs to your website will be created. This will result in more traffic being generated to you.
2. Reputation / Recognition
With articles being published internationally, you will be able to brand your own name. Each time you submit an article to an article directory or an online publisher, your name is submitted as the author. Over time with more articles marketed, the number of links to your name will increase.With all the back links to your name, your reputation as an 'expert' in your field will also grow. You will be seen as someone who knows their subject matter and someone to be mentored by.
In essence, the provision of free content through articles is a wonderful way of generating traffic and building up your reputation online over time.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
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