by Lisa Schmeckpeper

Website promotion is one of the most debated topics on discussion boards today. Many support banner advertising methods, some argue that reciprocal links are the way to go, and others swear by ezine advertising.

One of the most overlooked ways to gain traffic is by writing an article and submitting it to various publications. There is no better way to spark new interest in your product or service than to write an article about it and have that article seen by thousands of interested people. Getting an article published is fairly easy if the article is a topic of interest. Specialty articles should only be submitted to highly targeted publications if you want to increase your chances of being published.

We recently had two of our articles published in the Internet Day publication on September 3rd and 17th. Now, the article on September 3rd was planned. I had submitted the "Preparing your holiday marketing strategy" article that ran in our September 1st issue in the hopes of it being published. We had a fairly good response from the article and we saw an increase of about 400 visitors to our log on the 3rd. We welcomed a bunch of new subscribers and took on a few new clients for design and promotion services.

The article on the 17th was a total surprise. I logged on to check the email in the morning and couldn't believe where all these requests and subscriptions were coming from. I had over 164 legitimate email messages in my basket. Had I signed up for a promotion and forgotten to schedule it on the calendar? No. Did I finally get a decent placement in Yahoo? No. I opened an email from Internet Day and my article stared back at me -- an article I wrote a couple of months back about one of our newest website design clients and his horrible experience with a webmaster school in Florida.

Now, why don't more people use article submission to gain traffic? I think one of the main reasons is because webmasters are not always the best writers. I know that I never liked writing very much in school and my grammar is definitely something that needs improvement. But that is the beauty of the net. We are supposed to write to a third-grade level. We also have our own slang on the net and it is generally acceptable to write exactly how we talk. It's much more personal and fun to be able to write that way instead of writing a formal book report for your 10th grade English teacher.

But just because we write so that a third grader can understand our articles doesn't mean we should write like WE ARE a third grader. Which is something I still need to work on. My grammar is terrible. It has never been my strong suit but nevertheless I will continue to write. Why? Because I received countless letters from people telling me what a help I was to them or how much they enjoyed my style of writing. So I took the 4 or 5 "you have bad grammar" responses I got with a grain of salt. I am taking measures to improve my grammar on my own and I have also accepted an offer from one of the kind souls who pointed out some grammatical errors to proofread my articles before they are published.

But the point of this article is to impress upon you the importance of sharing your knowledge and experience with others no matter how bad your grammar may be. I received over 1,000 hits from the Internet Day article on the 17th. That's 1,000 qualified visitors.

Could you imagine what that would have cost us to buy from a banner service? 1,000 click-thrus from highly targeted visitors? At the very low rate of even one dollar a click-thru, that article should have cost us 1,000 advertising dollars. Actual cost of the article = $0.00.

Another interesting angle on it is that Internet Day is distributed to more than 30,000 people. In banner terms that's a 30:1 click-thru ratio! When is the last time you had a banner do that good?

Another perk to having your articles published is that you are bringing visitors to your site based on your skills and knowledge, not the graphic skills of your banner designer. So I encourage you to start compiling a list of publications that you can submit your articles to. Write some articles about topics you have experience with, and start submitting. It is the absolute cheapest way to get qualified traffic to your site.

If your articles have to do with Internet marketing please feel free to submit them here first! We wish you success!

This article written by Lisa Schmeckpeper of LRS Marketing and originally published in their free newsletter, Website Success Monthly. To receive a free copy of this informative e-zine just send email to subscribe@lrsmarketing.com or visit their website at www.lrsmarketing.com. Copyright © 1998 [LRS Marketing]. All rights reserved.

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