by Ruth Belena

Created on: December 24, 2008   Last Updated: January 01, 2009

Online writing sites can provide a good regular income, when revenue is based on number of page views each article attracts. If you submit articles to any of these sites, and you want to increase your earnings, you need to know how to generate more page views. If you do nothng to promote your articles, earnings from page views can be disappointing.

Getting Traffic From Search Engines

The greatest number of page views should come from search engine results, so you need to make sure your articles will be easily found. One way to do this is to include a few top keywords and phrases in the title, in the body of the article and in the tags.

An article should never be stuffed full of repeated keywords, you should just use them naturally in your writing. A free keyword search tool will help you to find the most popularly searched words and phrases.

If Google find links back to an article from other relevant webpages, popular blogs and high quality sites, the article will get a higher page rank, and that will help to increase number of page views.

Promote at Social Networks and Bookmark Sites

If you are a member of a big social site you should take advantage of the option to customize your own profile page. You can have a link on your profile to your blog, or to a personal webspage, and you could use this link to show an article list, a single article, or an About Me page.

Some social sites allow you to link images and text to some of your best articles. At MySpace you can post bulletins to be sent to everyone on your friends list. Facebook has a newsfeed to inform all your friends every time you add a new link for sharing.

Twitter is a good site for promoting articles, and is becoming increasingly popular with writers. A link to each new article you write can be posted to your Twittter page, and will instantly appear on the pages of all your followers.

You may also consider joining Digg, StumbleUpon and Technorati. Digg is probably the best for getting your articles quickly indexed on Google.

Use Blogs To Get More Page Views

You do not need your own blog to promote your articles, if you visit other people's blogs and post appropriate comments on them. You could search for blogs about online writing, or better still, find blogs on similar topics to your articles.

Your name is usually hyperlinked in a blog comment, and you can link it to a webpage of your choice. You may post a link in your comment, if it is relevant to the topic. Never spam your links, your comments will be rejected and deleted.

If you have a blog, or personal website, keep adding new content with links to individual articles. Write a brief introduction to the subject of your article and include the opening sentences, with a link to "read more", "read the complete article", or hyperlink the title.

Use Forums to Promote Articles

You can reach your target audience by searching for forums with topics relating to your articles. Join the biggest and most active forums, carefully check the rules of each forum, then create your signature, and place links within your forum posts, where links are allowed.

How Article Directories Work

Submitting a free article to a directory allows other people to republish that article on their website, in an ezine or as part of a newsletter. Whenever it is republished, the article has to end with your resource box message, in which you can include one or two sentences and a link to any webpage. If your free article appears in popular ezines or newsletters, it can generate many more page views for your paying article, and is less time consuming than networking.

Learn more about this author, Ruth Belena.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.