How I Put My Site On Steroids has proved to be one of my most popular posts, but it’s been three years since I wrote it. In today’s exercise for Problogger’s 31DBBB project, we were urged to update an old post. I decided to go back and see whether the steps I outlined then still held true.

Article Marketing

The first step I took back in 2006 was to use article marketing, writing articles with a link back to my site. That worked well and still does. In fact, I am still getting traffic from articles I wrote back 2005. I no longer write reviews for consumer sites, but if I were going to do it, I’d probably write those reviews on Amazon as their profile features are now much better.

Leveraging Your Blog

The second step was to get a blog and submit my site to directories. That still works too, although I would argue that getting a social media presence is far more important. If I were writing this post from scratch, I’d suggest people get a Twitter account, Delicious account and Facebook profile or page (depending on whether they are promoting themselves as individuals or businesses).

Navigation

Making your site easy to navigate is still a valid way to boost traffic, so yes, having a search box and sitemap are crucial. Once your blog has a bit of content, it’s useful to use a layout that makes it easy for people to see content in different categories. I also like having a tag cloud, because it tells me both what your blog focuses on and how to find it easily. There are also dozens of plugins which highlight your content such as related and popular posts plugins – use them. (For example on this blog, I use related posts, random posts, featured posts and a tag cloud.)

Social Media

One piece of advice which I didn’t give in the original post was to participate in the social media. When you connect with others on Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, Stumbleupon and through blog comments, you encourage them to visit your site. The more you reach out, the more you get back. And that’s a great way to build both a network and site traffic.

I know these steps work, because my traffic has increased more than tenfold since I wrote the original post. What else would you use to put your site traffic on steroids?

I can’t talk about promotion without mentioning one of my favorite ways to promote – through article marketing. I’ve heard people criticize it, but I have found it an effective and free way to promote my writing services. The only investment you need to get started is the time it takes you to write an article. For me, that’s about 20 minutes if I’m writing on an area I already know about.

Follow tips for good web writing to write a good article for article marketing. Finish it up by writing a brief call to action, inviting readers to get more information on your site. You will be able to include at least one link in this part of the article, though many directories forbid links in the article body itself.

Getting Started With Article Marketing

The first time you try article marketing, you will need to take the time to sign up with an article marketing site. My favorite is EzineArticles, because it’s easy to use, has articles of a decent quality, and gives you quick Google juice. In other words, when you publish an article there, you will find it listed on Google within a few days. Other well rated services are IdeaMarketers and GoArticles. Once you’ve registered, publishing future articles will be even easier.

Why I Like Article Marketing

There are two reasons why I like article marketing. The first is because I can write about anything I like. It gives me a chance to spread my wings and try writing about new topics. In other words, it’s good writing practice, with the added benefit of having articles that I can add to my portfolio. I have used the articles I have published on EzineArticles to land gigs before.

The second reason I like article marketing is because of the links I get to my site. Article directories supply content to thousands of sites. Although the links aren’t always good quality, they do result in traffic to the sites I promote – and that makes it even easier for people to find me online.

Getting The Most From Article Marketing

For best results, write several articles. I have written more than 40 and have placed these on various article directories, some of which still come up on Google when people search for my name. Others I know have written hundreds, and they really sing the praises of this strategy. Article marketing works because it promotes you both directly and indirectly. Although I don’t write as much for directories as I used to, I sometimes recycle useful blog posts to get some additional attention for my blog.

Article marketing is good because it is free, it uses skills you already have and it sends traffic to your site. Believe me, that traffic keeps coming for a long, long time. I am still getting traffic from articles I wrote three and a half years ago. I have used these articles as samples of my work, and to get people to see more of my work. You can do the same.

There’s always a lot of debate in the freelance writing world about writing for free. The main question is: should you do it? Before I attract a hailstorm of criticism over the very notion of writing for free, let me say up front that I believe that freelance writers should get paid fairly and promptly for the work that they do.

When Not To Write For Free

Ok, so those are the times when writing for free pays off for you. However, there are some cases to avoid like the plague. The free sample scam is used on many freelancing sites. The client asks for a free sample with your application and gets the required content free. Don’t fall for it. Most reputable clients will be happy with samples of existing work, so publish those samples on your blog, or include them in your portfolio and send the prospective client a link to the work.

However, there are some occasions when writing for free can be a good career development move. Here are some examples:

Creating A Portfolio

When you start out as a freelance writer, writing for free may be the quickest way to build up a portfolio of written work that you can show to prospective clients. There are many ways to approach this. You could:

• write some pieces for your local newspaper (try to get a byline)
• write for online magazines and blogs
• write some articles for free article distribution sites
• start a blog of your own

Any or all of these strategies will help you to get a wide range of written work to start you off in your search for the perfect freelance writing gig. For me, this is a case of giving writing away in the hope of securing even bigger writing commissions. It’s a calculated risk, which has paid off for many freelance writers I know.

Honing Skills

While you’re doing all this free writing, you are also developing your writing skills. You learn to work to a brief and to think about what your readers need. This is a great time to be writing, because you probably have more creative freedom than you will ever have at any time in your writing career. My advice is to use it – write about anything you like in any style you like. Anything you can’t publish on other sites can be used on your own blog. This will show your versatility as a writer.

Raising Your Profile

Even when you’re a full time freelance writer, there are still some occasions when writing for free can pay off. For example, guest blogging gives you the chance to write for new audiences and get new readers for your stuff. It creates more links to your work that can enhance your portfolio and raise your profile. When clients come looking for a freelance writer, one factor that will attract them is visibility, and you can raise this quickly by contributing to others’ sites and blogs. It’s worked well for me. Although I still write some posts for free, I also have several paid blogging gigs, which is one of my dream jobs.

My Own Experience

When I started freelancing, I had plenty of experience of writing. However, since I’d been teaching journalism for a few years, I didn’t have a lot of recent clips. I created a portfolio site and blog, and used article marketing to showcase my work and drive traffic to my blog. I also used those articles to get other work, which led to several clients who became regulars. Although earning from freelancing is no longer a problem, I still do some writing for free, mainly for profile raising and to get the chance to write for new audiences, which is good for my writing skills. Do you ever write for free?

Technorati Tags: writing,writing career,get paid to write

Write for free? You must be kidding!

That’s the reaction that many freelance writers have when it’s suggested that maybe it might be worth writing without getting paid. However, those freelance writers might be missing a trick. Here are a few ways that writing for free might pay off.

1. Showcasing your work

One of the reasons why I recommend that freelance writers have a blog or website is that it is a good place to show people what kind of writing you can do. You can write articles in areas of expertise or craft creative or humorous pieces. It doesn’t matter much what you write as long as you show that you can write something that engages your audience. That’s what the people who hire you will want to do with the copy that you write for them. Your site is the best place to showcase your work and create an online portfolio. In this case, writing for free is a first step to getting paid to write.

2. Bringing your writing to a new audience

One way to get new people to see your writing – and to attract potential clients – is to write for other sites and blogs. You may not always get paid for guest articles and guest posts, but new people will see your writing, and some of those may want to hire you. Free gigs may lead to paid gigs, too – and the articles and posts that you write will further extend your writing portfolio.

3. Bringing traffic to your website

Article marketing is a proven way of bringing traffic to a site. Some of the articles that I wrote two years ago are still bringing new visitors to my website. Some of those people want to hire me and some click on a few ads, which means I get paid. I didn’t spend very long writing those articles, but I have reaped great rewards from the 20 minutes I invested in each one.

4. Feeling good

You can also write for free on a volunteer basis, for organisations that need the help but don’t have the funds to afford a writer. The benefits you get are twofold – you can give something back to the community and expand your portfolio at the same time.

These are four good reasons why writing for free can pay off for writers. Care to add any examples of your own?

Like any other freelance writer, I want to get paid fairly for my work. However, there are times when writing for free can be worth it. You get promotion and publicity and it raises your profile.

Here’s another case in point. Nearly two years ago I wrote It’s Your House, Don’t Give It Away, an article on severance of tenancy (UK legal term for putting your house in joint names), for a friend who was running a legal services website. Since the object was to drive traffic to his site, I put it up on EzineArticles.

Now the friend has returned the favour, submitting my article to a UK legal services firm as part of the flagship content for their new blog. Although the blog is new, this firm is one of the fastest growing legal services firms in the UK, so it won’t do me any harm to have my article there, with a link to my site and EzineArticles profile. I may not have been paid in money, but I have been amply repaid in promotion.

Freelance Writing Is Not Easy

Freelance writing is not an easy job. You have to spend time writing things you are not interested in because you’re getting paid, and you are always worrying about where the next gig is coming from, at least at the start. And if you’re ghostwriting, you don’t even get the credit for your writing. That’s why promotion is so important for freelance writers. It keeps your name out there and keeps the freelance writing work coming in. I’m always saying that writing for free isn’t writing for free if you get something out of it – and now I have a concrete example to show you.

Freelance Writing History

When I started freelance writing, I wrote an article called Freelance Writers – Five Reasons Why You Need A Website. Some of you may recognise it as Freelance writers – four reasons to get on the net. I didn’t get a dime for this article. It was picked up by freelancewriting.com and has been read by more than 3,000 people. It has also resulted in 120 visitors to my site in the past year. That’s 10 a month since I wrote the article.

Freelance Writing Promotion

That’s one freelance writing article. I know that’s not a lot on its own, but I have about 50 articles out there, at least 33 of them unique and all with links back to my site. That’s potentially a lot of traffic and may be part of the reason that I’m now getting more than 1,000 unique visitors a month to my freelance writing site. I am also getting Adsense money because some of those visitors like what they see. And people are starting to contact me about writing work (in fact, some of them are contacting me FOR freelance writing work, but that’s another story). My point is this, one free article has made a big difference to my profile and to the money I make from freelance writing. Why not try it yourself?

Finally, one of these things that I can write about legitimately. Do you know that one of my most read free article marketing articles on EzineArticles has to do with funeral flowers? I’m not making this up, I promise. Here’s how it happened. About four years ago my husband got into a new financial venture, selling prepaid funeral plans in the UK market. He had a partner and things went swimmingly for a while. I did a website for them and it seemed to do the trick. It was simple (which was just as well given my skill level) and professional.

A few years later, they wanted to drum up some publicity, so I suggested article marketing. I took the original website content, most of which I had written or edited and (with their permission) turned it into eight articles relating to funerals and funeral plans. One of them is about planning your funeral, including thinking about flowers for saying goodbye, as Dotflowers mentions.

Even though those articles have nothing to do with my main business of freelance writing, ghostwriting and teaching, they’re still out there working for me. The reason is that part of the deal was that in the three link resource box, one of the links pointed to my site. Depending on the search engine you use, you can find the article (called ‘It’s Your Funeral: Why Not Plan It Properly’) at least a hundred times. That’s a hundred inbound links to my site. OK, so some of them are probably not the best quality, but at least they are there.

My point? Even if you write about something like funeral flowers and even if the article is old, you can still get some benefit for the resources and sites you are promoting.

Now that you’ve made your site search engine friendly and submitted it to search engines and directories, it’s time to up the ante and use a few more tried and true methods of raising your site’s (or blog’s) profile. If you’re blogging here, you already have a head start, as you can use your posts to promote yourself, your site or your blog.

How To Promote Yourself With Article Marketing

Article directories are websites that have articles on almost every subject. Some are all-purpose, covering everything from family issues to healthcare, while others have a niche, such as computer advice or art. All of them are hungry for content. Here’s how you can provide that content and promote your site, blog or business at the same time.

• Step 1: Write an article. This can be about almost anything, as long as it’s useful. Your blog posts here are a good starting point. Keep the articles short (250-500 words) and remember to spell-check.
• Step 2: Sign up with an article directory and submit your article. Many article directories will vet your work before approving it. Whatever their guidelines, stick to them and your article should be approved. Avoid self-promotion or promotional links in the body of your article. Most article directories disallow this.
• Step3: Make the resource box work for you. The resource box is where you can put your bio and a few links to your site, blog or product.

Example:I have three different resource boxes that I use on EzineArticles – and I have changed the content a few times over the last few months. Click on a couple of my articles to have a look (try this one on interviews and this one on funeral planning ). In the first, I link to my WritingUp blog; in the second, to a resource I’m promoting.

Article Submission

Article submission services extend the strategy. Although I recommend EzineArticles, I have also found the Article Marketer service to be effective. Article Marketer is NOT an article directory. Like EzineArticles, you submit your article (with bio) and get it approved. The article is then sent out to hundreds or thousands of publishers and article lists, depending on the service you choose. I’m on a budget, so I’m using the free service, which claims that 3500 people see my articles. You can set release dates, which is great if you want to submit articles while on holiday, and they just KEEP ON SUBMITTING your articles. Another option for article submission is Isnare, but you have to pay for this.

How To Automate Your Article Submissions

Many of the article directories run on the Article Dashboard script, and there’s a free article submission tool that targets these sites. It’s called Article Distributor. It incorporates signup details and an article formatting screen and will automatically paste your article into the correct boxes on these sites. Don’t worry, it doesn’t allow spam. You still have to select the category and press enter on each site. (Please note: The Article Distributor developer has stopped downloads while he works on the next version.)

Multiple Article Submissions: Pros and Cons

Pros: Your work is everywhere, with links back to your site. Inbound links are GOOD.
Cons: your work is everywhere; Google hates duplicate content

Some of my free to reprint articles are published in 20 or 30 locations, and as far as I can tell, this hasn’t affected my appearance on Google, Yahoo or MSN. Perhaps that’s because the articles are all relevant to the locations where they’ve been reprinted. I don’t really know, but so far the strategy is working.

In the next part of this series, I look at other ways you could promote your website or blog.

Related posts:
How I Put My Site On Steroids
How To Optimize Your Website: Keyword Research
How To Optimize Your Website: Keyword Placement
SEO: What’s Under The Hood?
There’s Life Beyond Google

Update:  see How I Put My Site On Steroids Again for more recent advice.

I’ve previously given several good reasons why freelance writers should have a website. Once you’ve got that showcase for you and your work, you’ll need to make sure that people see it. When I launched doublehdesign.com in June 2005, I had 26 unique visitors (and I knew most of those by name) and a paltry 757 hits. By the end of January 2006, that had risen to 620 (Dec: 472) unique visitors and more than 16,000 hits. How did I do it?

I took some advice. Early last year, my husband bought and downloaded a book that promised to share the secrets of the super-affiliates. These are a handful of people who have made megabucks from the internet. Naturally, I was interested to see how this was done. What I didn’t anticipate was that Rosalind Gardner would show me free ways of increasing traffic to my site and raising my profile.

So what were the steps I took? First of all, I wrote some free articles for article directories, with a link back to my site. One of the best of these is ezinearticles.com, in my view. Signing up was simple and seven days after writing my first article for them, I appeared in the search results on Google. I also wrote reviews for a number of consumer reviews sites, which I then linked to from my own site.

I did some keyword research and found the best keywords for my site, using the tools she recommended. I followed some of her advice on site design, though I admit I’ve not implemented that as well as I might. I also got a blog and an RSS feed for my site and submitted both to several directories. I put a search box and a sitemap on the site and made sure there was a place for people to contact me. I also put some free-to-reprint articles on my own site. I also got an Adsense account.

So far, there’s just one recommendation I haven’t agreed with. Rosalind Gardner recommends Elance as a good place to find freelance work, but it hasn’t worked for me. Guru is far better, in my opinion.

So what’s the bottom line? Although Rosalind Gardner’s primary aim is to tell you how to build an affiliate marketing business, the content of her Super Affiliate Handbook works just as well for general profile raising. My stats (which have increased even more this month) prove that. And I’m not done yet. Every so often I go back to the book and look for the next step, and when I’ve got more money to spend, I’ll be carrying out some of her other recommendations. I’ll keep you posted.

Let me say up front that I have nothing to gain from this recommendation. Ezinearticles doesn’t even have an affiliate program yet. But when they do, I’ll be one of the first to join.

This is a site that features free to reprint content for websites, ezines and email newsletters. I use it mostly as an author. Creating an account with ezinearticles is as simple as filling out the one page signup form and replying to the confirmation email. That gives you a basic membership which allows you to submit up to 10 articles (again on a one-page form).

Each article is vetted by an editor and then uploaded. You can create a brief bio of yourself and can put a resource box with a link to your site.

This site is fantastic – a week after uploading my first article I was able to find my site on Google – and is a must if you want to get your name known and build traffic to your website. There are two additional levels of membership: Basic Plus (up to 25 submissions) and Platinum (unlimited submissions).

Other features on the site include a weblog and members forum (which isn’t accessible from the members’ site for some obscure reason). As a publisher, you can link to the articles, pick up rss feeds in various categories and make use of the content.

I have found several of my articles reprinted on other sites with a link both to ezinearticles and to my own site – a win-win situation as far as I’m concerned.