One of the best ways to build your name and drive traffic to your site is article writing. This strategy has proven to be one of the most effective ways to establish your authority for the major search engines like Google.

You get your composition on the Internet through E-zines, article directories, article sites, E-mail groups, distribution lists, and article announcement lists.

These sites are visited by thousands of people each day. Your position as an expert and the Google ranking of your business’ site rises with every article that you write and submit.

Articles promote your site because if your name is published as an author helps establish you as an authority. Because your article links back to your site, you will start to see more visitors.

When Google gets a request to look for a keyword, it goes and finds the best sites with that content. Writing articles with links back to your site will improve your web presence.

While some of you may not enjoy writing or feel that your writing is not good enough for this task, I will show you how to create a system for creating good, keyword-rich articles.

Most article directories prefer articles of about 400 700 words in length, so these are pretty short articles.

That is also the perfect length for a blog post, so when you write your blog post, set it up to be redistributed to article directories.

Some ways to come up with an angle include:

• Make a list of the common questions people ask about your school. You can format an answer to a question into an article.

• What are the common objections you encounter during the enrollment process?

• What bonus benefits of your school can you tell people about?

• What are some little-known or interesting facts about your martial arts that people might enjoy learning about?

Keep in mind that your article has to be informative and not a thinly disguised ad letter or you run the risk of being rejected by the directories.

Submit Your Article to the Directories

  • There are hundreds of directories, but we’re going to focus on the top three. Avoid services that will submit your articles for you. Each directory has its own set of guidelines and auto-submissions are usually frowned upon and may result in your account being closed.
    Currently, the three most visited directories are E-Zine, ArticleBase, and ArticleCity.
    1. E-Zine.com is the biggest and most visited site. It’s also one of the more stringent in its guidelines. You can expect a few requests for revisions before E-Zine will publish your article. 

2 and 3. ArticleBase.com and ArticleCity.com are easier to work with, but don’t have the same search engine clout that E-Zine.com seems to have.

If you were to write and submit one article per day, you would have 365 articles in circulation after one year. That is a lot of potential traffic. Even one a week or one a month adds up.

Your Resource Box

The most important element of your article is your resource box. The resource box is your “pay off” for providing the article. The resource box is the “author bio” that is below your article body and it’s also known as your “SIG” (short for Signature).

What Goes into Your Resource Box

Your Name: This may seem obvious, but it merits serious thought. In some cases, you may be using a pen name rather than your own. Either way, you want to be consistent in your name and/or pen name. I always use John Graden rather than sometimes using John J. Graden.

Your Website Address: It should be in valid url form: http://www. YourSite.com. I like to capitalize the words in the url to make it easier to read and remember.

Your Bio (Again)

These 1 to 3 sentences encapsulate the essence of what makes you and your business unique. Also known as your USP (Unique Selling Proposition).

Your Contact Info

Use your business phone number, a way to reach you for interviews, or your press/media kit. Keep in mind that article marketing is a timeless strategy and you may not easily retract what you put in your article once it hits major distribution. Once an article is out there, it’s out there for good.

What if You are not a Good Writer?

As I’ve said, of the skills you want to hone, writing (along with speaking) is at the top of the list. Still, what if you hate writing articles and you can’t afford to hire people to write for you? There are solutions for you, although I still want to impress upon you the importance of learning to write well.

Many article writers who do part-time and freelance article writing charge minimal fees.

Craigslist.org, elance.com, guru.com all are good ways to find writers. I’ve had a lot of success with Elance.com and Craigslist. com. While writers’ compensation is a good topic for debate, you’ll usually have better results paying by the word and establishing

a minimum and maximum threshold. For instance, 10 cents per word for a 500-word article is $50.

While that may seem easier than writing it yourself, paying a few hundred dollars a month for something you could do (and benefit from doing) yourself may motivate you to sit down and start typing.

To truly experience what a good article can do for you, you have to write original ones. Plus, Google penalizes plagiary, so make sure your writing is original.

You hold copyrights to them and you will be able to use them in any way you want. Your original articles will help you in building your business, your reputation, and your site.

Best of all, with technology today, you can repurpose your articles into other valuable media.

  • Compile the articles into a book. 
  • Transcribe the article into an audio mp3 program. 
  • Using Powerpoint or Keynote for the MAC, you can create a video version of the article by combining reading the article as a voice over and illustrating what is being described with words, images, and video. 

• Pull key points from your articles into an outline for your speeches and presentations.

By leveraging a simple 500 word article into an audio presentation, a book chapter, a video presentation, and a speech outline, the time spent on writing the article brings you tremendous return in value.