What is the reason you’re writing the article? The point is to get visitors and traffic to your website. The only place you can provide a pathway to your website is within your articles resource box. So you need to write one that will get a click.

One way to do that is to give the reader a reason to click. Maybe you just wrote a Pulitzer prize winning article on stock car racing, but you need more than a URL in the resource box to get them to continue to your website. Readers need a reason so give them one. Tease them with additional articles or tools, such as “For 10 Things You Must Know About…”

You can offer visitors free gifts. That word free is still an attention grabber so offer a free link, free report, newsletter or list of something.

It does not matter to the reader how great and wonderful you are so don’t brag about your accomplishments. Just keep your comments about yourself to a minimum with a hook. Something like Jim Doe won 2006 Realtor of the Year. Learn how he did it at….

Use the resource box to link to a useful piece of information or resource on your site. It does not have to go to the front page. If you land the reader in a place where can find what they are looking for and search around from there they tend to stay longer. Link to what is most relevant to the topic the reader expects to find.

Linking to pages within your website also allows you to optimize the pages with the links. The anchor text should relate to the contents of the landing page. This will help in ranking your website for various terms within your niche.

For example if you have a website dealing with sports fishing and a page devoted to bass. By linking with a bass fishing anchor text to an interior page of your site that deals with bass fishing, it will help the search engines to recognize the various topics your website covers. Plus improve search engine results for those broadened terms. Directory submissions also assist in targeting keyword traffic.

Understand that articles will only bring you traffic if you provoke an interest in the reader to click. The links will help improve search engine results to get you noticed for those keywords and topics. So keep both of these factors in mind when writing your own resource box.

The reason this works is because when surfers do a search for a specific product, such as “SEO Site Analyzer” the title (first line) of your Google Ad says exactly that then the search engine is most likely to grab your advertisement over someone else’s and place it at the top of it’s hierarchy of ads. Furthermore, even though your ad is not first or second in the search engines, using the exact title is more likely to simply grab the attention of the surfer who then exclaims “That is just what I am looking for!” as he points and click on your site.

It is not just the title of your Google Ad that should be optimized. It is even more effective to combine different keywords into all three lines of text that you are allowed. If you can manage to do this while keeping the content of your ad exclusive and specific then you should see sales and conversions on your site rocket. Also if you get a lot of clicks through a pay per click ad campaign then the increased amount of visitors to your site that results could end up in pushing your website URL to the top of the search engine page rankings!

The problem is, how exactly would people get to know that your website exists? Surely, they must first learn about its existence before they could visit it, right?

Well, it’s a fair assumption that 80% of the traffic that you’d be able to generate for your website would come from the search engines. Therefore, it is essential that you submit your website to as many search engines as possible. The process starts way before submission, of course, as you would have to optimize your web pages to constantly and efficiently win the attention of the search engine spiders.

Sounds like hard work? Well, this is something that you must do to assure a high volume of traffic for your website, dear friend. You have to employ certain tactics to get a better chance at online success.

But this is the realm of search engine optimization, or SEO as it is fondly called.

You could also try viral marketing and article marketing. The former would fetch for you an exponentially increasing traffic at a regular pace. The latter would result in a boost of users that would get to visit your web pages. Both strategies pursue the goal of exposing your website’s link to as many people as possible. Viral marketing would allow you to continuously spread your link through the use of a free product, which is usually an eBook or a special report, with words to encourage the recipients to distribute the same to their respective networks. Article marketing involves the submission of an article to the many article directories in the World Wide Web. Each article comes with a resource box that includes a link to your website.

Both strategies entail some work, specifically writing.

Are there easier ways to win traffic, you might ask? Well, there are some tactics that require little work yet provides substantial results. Let’s take a look at them.

• Increase your link popularity. Link popularity simply means the number of websites that contain links to yours. If you want to know what your website’s current link popularity is, just use the free tool at www.linkpopularity.com . Convincing other webmasters to display links to your web pages can either be very easy or very difficult. If you have befriended some webmasters throughout your online experience, this would be a cinch. Otherwise, expect to barter for such a spot on their websites, either in exchange for your goods or services, or by allowing them to display their links on your web pages as well.
• Buy spots. Most of the time, money does all the talking, and convincing. If you can’t talk them into allowing your links to be displayed on their websites, simply buy a spot on their web pages. Usually, you’d be given the spot for a month, with the option to renew the agreement every month thereafter.
• The previous two tips are about linking to other websites. Make sure that you choose popular websites. The purpose here is to garner visitors from highly visited sites to check out your web pages. If the other website generates less traffic than yours, your efforts would just be for naught.
• Try Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. This would require some financial investment from you. Overture and Google AdWords are the most prominent PPC advertising programs today. You just have to pay the program for every visitor they manage to refer to your website. You don’t have to worry about going broke, as you could always set a daily limit of how much you want to spend.
• Try traffic exchange programs. There are free ones and there are paid ones. Free traffic exchange programs allow you to join a membership community. For every website you visit, you will earn a certain number of credits. You could use these credits to purchase traffic for your own site. Paid traffic exchange programs don’t require you to visit other websites, but you do have to bring out some cash to avail of their benefits.

The traffic strategy you employ should depend on the nature and the goals of your website. A careful study of the benefits and consequences of each tactic should be made before resorting to them. Make sure that they are a perfect match for what you want your website to achieve.

You don’t necessarily need talent or even good grammar to write a blog. You do however need a real passion for what you are writing about and to have some kind of idea of what you would like to sell that might be attached to your blog and the keywords that go along with it.

Once you have decided what you want to sell finding affiliate links is pretty simple. Let’s say that you want to write about exotic bonsai trees on a blog. Your next step is to simply type in the words “bonsai ñ affiliate” into a big search engine like Google and you will be lead to scores of sites that have affiliate programs for selling bonsai.

Sometimes the affiliate link will also read “affiliate program”, “associates” or “partners”…there will normally be some kind of help section on how to sign up. The good thing is that this signing up part of the affiliate program process is always free. Depending on what type of program or site is mastering the affiliate program you can make money per click or on different rates of conversion. You can also make money if you persuade someone else to join the same affiliate program.

A highly recommended source of affiliate revenue is Clickbank, which has an average commission rate of 50%. The good thing about Clickbank is that the checks to affiliates do arrive in the mail on time every two weeks. It is a very reliable site when it comes to payouts.

The thing to remember when trying to build traffic is to build a name. Make a site that is memorable and branded, not just a site that tells you to buy something. Affiliates getting a high traffic flow have branded themselves and established trust in their sales area. This may be by having their picture on the site and writing a lot of content for it in a personal way. This can also be through targeted information sent to potential clients.

So just spam people with your information? Not in a million years. Spamming, in addition to being illegal, is annoying and will do the opposite of establishing trust. You need to build a legitimate list as soon as possible that will accept your targeted marketing. These are people that you know are interested in your information, or in the product, or both. These are the ideal people to market to. Many affiliates send out informational newsletters, information reports, ebooks, or any other type of regular contact they can think of that will convey information the customer wants and keep reminding them about the products.

Setting up a auto responder is the fastest and easiest way of keeping track of all of it and getting the information out to the customers. And if you can send them items that will keep their attention and establish your trustworthiness, they will likely come back to your site again as customers. Repeat customers are the cream of the crop, so once you have them, don’t let them go.

Blogs are hot right now. You don’t have to discuss Paris Hilton in your blog (unless you want to), but you should keep some type of blog that will keep people interested enough to keep returning to read it. The content is up to you, but sites without a blog are quickly dying out. Starting up a blog is easy and is usually free as well. You can review the products you are selling, talk about the industry that the products pertain to, or you can talk about Paris Hilton if you really need to. But get the blog out there and get people hooked on it. Some people are now keeping several blogs going at once to promote different items or different categories of items.

One of the best ways in the beginning for capitalizing on the free power of search engines is to make sure your site is search engine optimized. Get the appropriate keywords and keyword density on every page of your site, and let the search engines help get you traffic. Everyone uses search engines, so let that work for you to bring you interested searchers that may very well become customers.