No doubt you have come accross this time and time again; to improve your websites popularity, search engine ranking etc., you need to write articles. You will also probably think, as I did, that I can' t do this.

There are ways around this. You can purchase the rights to articles that will allow you to add your own resource box to the bottom. The content may not be the freshest and the newest, and many others may be using the same content or variations on it, but it is still content with your resource box tagged on at the bottom. There are numerous article submission directories and sites on the net, such as the biggies like www.goarticles.com, to small ones like my own at articles.directorygold.com . You will be able to submit your article, even if it isn' t original, to some of these without duplicating existing content on the article directory. This is what I did first.

The next possibility is to go somewhere like www.elance.com, and pay someone to write articles for you. This is more expensive than the first option, but has the benefit that the article is original, so it is more likely to be copied and published elsewhere. Also, make sure you have the complete rights to the material you commission, so that you may modify, relabel, or amalgamate into an ebook if you desire. Usually, you should get several decent articles for the amount of money you spend.

Finally, are you sure you can' t write your own article? That you haven' t found out something in your life that will be of interest to others? There is a huge list of possible article subjects at GoArticles and other sites, and you will be amazed at what you do know if you sit and think about it. After all, as I said earlier, I didn' t think I was capable of writing an article, yet this is one I wrote myself, and it isn' t my first. If you' ve made mistakes, an article describing how NOT to do something can be just as useful as one describing how to do something. If you still have problems coming up with a coherent article, jot down your notes and pay someone to ghostwrite it for you. Again, check sites like Elance for ghostwriters.

Why write and distribute articles in the first place? Free advertising and promotion. I submitted several articles to a handful (under five) of article directories. Several days later, after Google had done a recent crawl, I did a number of phrase searches on the web. If you enclose your search phrase in quotes, Google will search for that specific phrase. I searched for some of the article titles I had posted, and my own name (admittedly, this is only useful if you have a rare name that doesn' t bring up pages of search results for other people of the same name). I found the articles I had published showing up on several websites. What made this even better was that a number of the places where I found the articles weren' t places I had submitted them to. Other people had taken my articles and published them on their own websites. So the benefit is, lots of non-reciprocal links pointing to your website, that frequently you didn' t have to do anything beyond intially publishing the article to get. Free traffic, advertising and promotion for a few minutes work.

A final note. Make sure the articles are useful, and not just promotional sales letters. They don' t have to be long, 1-2,000 words is usually adequate as a maximum length for an article, but don' t just publish sales blurb. Your article won' t get syndicated elsewhere, and your reputation will suffer. Get known as a source of decent quality articles, and you will become known as an expert.

(c)2005 eGDC Ltd
Adrian Kennelly is the webmaster of DirectoryGold Web Directory, which includes Free Image Hosting

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