by Gordon Hamilton

Created on: August 02, 2010

Any website or blog is only ever likely to achieve its stated objectives where it receives a steady stream of targeted, Internet traffic. This means that attention must be paid to obtaining this traffic from every legitimate source possible for the lifetime of the website or blog. Although good SEO and subsequent high rankings in the search engines will be likely to generate organic traffic, these rankings can only be maintained and traffic levels maximised by also employing every possible means to drive traffic directly to the site from elsewhere around the Web.

When a website or blog is first created, it is common practice and an excellent idea to obtain as many permanent backlinks to the site as possible. In the first instance, this is likely to be achieved by submitting a link to the site to social bookmarking sites or blog directories and linking to it from any other blogs or websites which one administers around the Web. The problem with these links is that very often, over a period of time, the traffic which is obtained from them can begin to dry up and the effectiveness of the arrangement will diminish.

In order, therefore, to keep driving traffic to a website or blog, ways have to be found of creating new, legitimate links on a permanent basis. The beauty of article marketing is that by their very nature, articles afford bite-sized pieces of extremely relevant information, do not take long to write in comparison to website or blog content and can therefore be used almost indefinitely to create a stream of effective backlinks to any Internet location.

The best way to determine subjects for writing articles to generate traffic for a website or blog is to look at the bigger site and split it in to very specific subtopics. Although any website or blog should have been created on a niche subject in the first instance to stand the greatest chances of success, it should be possible to further separate the topic for article writing purposes. An extremely simple example of this procedure would be where the website is one which promotes a business selling a number of products. An article could very effectively be written upon one individual product, incorporating a link to the company website on the basis of affording further details or alternative options.

When a topic for an article to be used to promote a website or blog has been identified, careful checks should be made to ensure that the hosting platform upon which one wishes to publish the article allows such promotions and hyperlinks to be included. Assuming this to be acceptable, an article should be written focusing only on the very specific subtopic identified and published when complete.

By repeating this process again and again with different aspects of the website or blog, one should rarely be likely to run out of material, as websites and blogs should be receiving their own updates on a regular basis. Where a problem does appear to have arisen in this respect, however, with a little imagination, it should be entirely possible to write a new article on a subtopic previously utilised but from a different viewpoint and incorporating fresh or simply alternative information. Publishing the article on a different site from its related predecessor may also be prudent in this instance.

By being resourceful, extremely focused and sufficiently industrious, one should be able to promote any website or blog indefinitely in this way by using short articles and therefore drive quality, targeted traffic to it on a virtually never ending basis.

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