The eternal question for web marketers is How do you get people to come to your website? It doesn’t matter if you are selling a product like cell phones, a service like landscaping, your own info-products like ebooks or DVDs, or your own original music. It doesn’t matter. To be successful online you have to get people to come to your website. You have to get traffic.

One powerful way is to build your web presence by spreading information about your products or services around the web. You have to reach people where they are. If people in your target audience are not at your website (yet), you have to go where they are and try to draw them in.

We’re not talking about advertising here – although advertising is important and certainly works.

We’re talking about offering free information that people are interested in reading or listening to or viewing. This is what we call compelling content – stuff that people are interested in and that addresses needs or desires or interests that your target audience have.

But creating this kind of content has HUGE problems!

1. Many of us do not have the time or talent to produce compelling content.

2. Hiring other people to write articles or produce interesting, informative audio presentations or videos for you may be too expensive.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a simple solution to this problem.

Well, believe it or not, there is a simple solution and it is staring you in the face.

You can use other people’s (free) content to draw your prospects to your websites.

Using other people’s content

We’re not talking about stealing content and putting your own name on it. No, we’re talking about aggregating other people’s content and associating yourself with it – exactly the way Google does.

In case you haven’t noticed, Google doesn’t produce any significant content themselves. They take the stuff you and I produce and aggregate it in their search results pages. Then they run ads on these results pages and make billions of dollars.

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could do something similar? Well, you can. You can aggregate content focused on your own niche to create a valuable resource that people interested in your niche will visit.

Sources for this kind of content are almost limitless. Here are just two of them:

- Articles from sources like Ezinearticles.com, focused on your keywords

- Videos from sources like Youtube.com, focused on your keywords

The trick is to select content (articles, videos, blog posts) that are focused on your target keywords. Make sure to punch up the titles and introductory remarks so they contain the keywords you want to focus on. Then build links to your aggregating site to improve its performance with the search engines.

Claiming Pre-Written Content as Your Own

Another common source of pre-written content is what are called Private Label Rights articles, or PLR. These are available from various sources on the web, usually at dirt cheap prices.

Unfortunately the quality of PLR articles is usually pretty bad. They are often old, rehashed and repackaged, and have probably been published many times on other sites. Unless you intend to edit them extensively PLR articles are pretty much useless.

Other sources such as BlogEasy offer regular installments of pre-written content for specific niches. The initial niche being focused on by

Writing articles is one of the best ways to gain some online exposure for yourself and for your web properties. As I have pointed out in a previous post, Why Article Marketing is Worth Doing you can write articles on just about any subject and submit them to many different article directories – some of which are considered authority sites by Google.

That means that not only can writing articles enhance your own status as something of an authority on the topics you write about, but when you embed links in your articles they become a great source for backlinks to your website(s). That is one the most important factors for boosting your search engine ranking.

But there are two fairly frustrating parts about writing articles that often torpedo the best intentions of many marketers and small business people. First, they take a significant amount of time to write. And, second, they can take a lot of time to submit to article directory sites.

Outsourcing your writing

The most popular solution to the “I-don’t-have-time-to-write” syndrome is to outsource the writing to people who are eager to do it for you. Often these people are experience writers who have already been exposed to the type of articles you require. And usually you can find someone to do it for a very reasonable cost.

The source we currently use is TextBroker.com and I recommend them highly. Like most freelance sites they act as a middleman between writers looking for work, and marketers or publishers looking for specific types of content.

Once you open an account you will have to deposit a small amount of money into it in order to actually place orders. Placing an order involves submitting an idea of what you want the article to be about, the keywords you want to focus on, a couple of resources they can use to find information on the topic, the length of the required article, how quickly you need it done, and the quality level (between 1 and 5) you are looking for.

Once a project is submitted, if it is left “Open”, then any writer with at least the desired quality rating can take the project on. For example, if you want a “level 4″ article, then any writer with that rating or above can claim it. Once the project is claimed the writer will submit the finished article to the system where you can accept it or ask that it be revised.

We’ve had literally hundreds of articles written by these folks and sent very few back for revisions. We often make small editorial revisions, but that is to be expected in any project.

For a 450 word level 4 article you will pay around $10. We highly recommend TextBroker.com.

Article Submission with SubmitYourArticle.com

The other painful part of the process is submitting your articles to article directories like EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com, IdeaMarketers.com and many others. Since there are hundreds of these sites, and since at least 10 of them are fairly highly ranked by Google most article marketers recommend submitting to at least several of the better sites.

Even submitting one article to five or six sites can take a long time. If you intend to go at article marketing in a serious way you could be spending your whole day doing nothing other than submission.

That’s where an article submission site like SubmitYourArticle.com comes in. These guys will submit any number of articles to several of the major sites, as well as (in their words) “hundreds of other websites in our distribution network.”

The important thing about SYO is that they get your articles into the most important, highly ranked sites. Not all distribution systems do this. Also, like many article distribution sites SYO has integrated “spinning” capabilites which they call “Article Leverage”.

The one downside to the SYO service is that if you need to submit articles on behalf of different authors you will need a different account for each author.

Other than that (reasonable) limitation, SubmitYourArticle.com is the best article distribution service I have found.

Promote your business with these
Free “Green” reprintable articles

Green Tips for Homeowners

Green Tips for Homeowners is a series of short articles about “hot” green topics that agents can use for publishing in newsletters, blogs and other promotional materials.

New articles in this series are made available every month.

Subscribers to Green Tips for Homeowners will immediately receive 5 original articles at absolutely no cost.

Future monthly installments will also be sent to you free of charge as long as you remain a member of AgentMapIt.

The package also includes suggestions on using these articles in email promotions, reprinting them in your own blog, or incorporating them into your own promotional programs.

Sign up here – It’s Free!
Free sign up includes
Free AgentMapIt Silver Membership