It is a time honored strategy to submit articles to the search engines for generating traffic. Article submission has been used since the early days of the Internet and is still an effective traffic generation strategy even in our Web 2.0 times.

Many questions have been asked about the best method of submitting articles to get the maximum traffic and effectiveness. So, what are the best techniques and which are the most effective?

The first technique is to submit your article to the granddaddy of all article directories, EzineArticles. This site has built a reputation of being the best article directory in town. It is loved by marketers and by readers and most importantly, by Google.

It is a source of frustration to many marketers who find it hard to meet the submission guidelines or cope with the timescales for articles to be approved.

However, if you read their guidelines and stick to them, your articles will get through without a hitch.

Once they are in Ezinearticles you instantly receive benefits from it. Articles in this directory tend to rank very well in Google, even without backlinks to them. Add in a few backlinks and suddenly you find your articles are ranking in the top ten for moderately competitive keywords. In fact, even without backlinks they can often rank well just because they are on Ezinearticles.

Once your article has been published you need to do some simple backlinking to it just to give it that extra boost in the search engines.

Firstly, take your Ezinearticle author RSS feed and submit it to RSS directories. You can either use a tool or do it by hand. If you are doing it by hand, just pick the top ten directories in a Google search and that will be good enough for now. You can always submit to more later on, so make sure you keep track of which ones you have added your feed to.

You can also use one of the many ping sites to ping your article. This does give Ezinearticles a lift, but it also gets your article noticed.

Finally, social bookmark your article. Again, you can either use a tool or do it manually. If your article is newsworthy and well written then you can look at adding it to sites such as Digg or Stumbleupon to get further links and traffic.

Of course, there are other article directories out there, but none of them carry the weight of Ezinearticles. Google Knoll is a current contender and is very popular with marketers who are using it to submit their articles too. So far though, these don’t seem to be ranking as well as Ezinearticles, but it is a good way to get the Big G to notice your sites.

For the other article directories it is not worth submitting articles manually to them, except maybe the top half a dozen big directories. Many of the rest get so little traffic it is not worthwhile, except for the backlink. Therefore you should either outsource or automate these submissions to free up your time to concentrate on building your business.

If you are submitting articles then you need to make sure they are on Ezinearticles for maximum traffic. Do some simple backlinking to your article and you will easily find your articles ranking well for their keywords and bringing you good traffic.

Hey there, here is a quick way to generate some targeted traffic to your blog. It offers a great way to brand yourself, give your blog exposure, and generate some quick traffic. If you treat that traffic right you can convert it to subscribers. Build those relationships.

So here ya go a step by step “blueprint”

1) Go to http://www.google.com/alerts

2) Type in your keyword or phrase.

3) Click “Comprehensive” for type so you can get ALL the news for that keyword.

4) Determine how often you want to receive your report. I chose “once per day” but you can also choose “as it happens” that way you can get involved right away.

5) When your alerts arrive, click on the sites. If they are blogs thats perfect, you can comment on the blog post. The key here is write something useful and valuable don’t spam.

You might want to end with a question so you can start a dialogue. You already know it is targeted to your niche.

So there you have it another way to drive free traffic to your blog, and develop relationships.

Lance Tamashiro and Robert Plank have two advanced strategies you can put into action just a few minutes from now to grow your mailing list faster and get more sales than you’re getting right now. Those two tactics are the “teacher’s pet” method and the “guest blogging” method.

Thats it for today, let me know what you think.

Scott

I just finished reading a new report by Walter M. Prorok Jr. and Chris Vendilli. Inside this report Walt & Chris talk about the in’s & out’s of configuring your Twitter account along with some free third party services to maximize your traffic & exposure.

I was skeptical at first, but after reading through the report and watching a couple of the videos available at their website I must say, I’m pretty impressed.

These two guys have been silently attracting visitor after visitor to their sites using Twitter, and they’ve created a step by step guide so that anyone can replicate their ideas & systems.

Yeup another “system.” Most of us have pretty much come to recognize the word “system” as overused and often incorrectly placed. But, with “The Twitter Report” and the videos, this stuff really is correctly called a “system”.

Walt & Chris have uncovered every known tip & trick for setting up your Twitter account to give you maximum return per tweet, while keeping everything on auto-pilot as much as possible. They leave nothing to question and go pretty in depth.

Most of the stuff they cover you could likely figure out on your own. But; why waste time, energy, and money trying to figure it all out on your own when you could just see how it all worked out for them and simply follow their suggestions, which are already proven to work successfully?

After reading the report and watching some of the videos I give TwitterHints.com two enthusiastic thumbs up, and I recommend it to anyone who wants to stay on the cutting edge of this new wave of communications & hyper-connectedness.

You’ll learn how to configure your settings, which 3rd party sites to join & how to set them up to run campaigns automatically, and much more.

I’m sure you’ll enjoy “The Twitter Report” as much as I did and you can go check it out here: