Article marketing and social bookmarking is proven to be a very effective combination if you aim to get targeted traffic to your website. Visitors who arrive through articles and social bookmarking sites on your website are really interested in your products, services or at least curious on what else you have in store. Thus, this combination of article marketing and social bookmarking is one of the most profitable and cost effective ways to market online.

Here are some steps you can implement instantly and start getting targeted traffic to your website:

1. Write Quality Articles

The first step anyway is to write quality articles yourself or hire a professional freelancer to write articles for you (be careful though, only select freelancers who can provide samples and references of earlier work). Make sure that these articles are related to your niche and that your keywords appear in these articles. You should also incorporate links into the article that will redirect the reader to your website or page.

2. Submit Articles To Directories, Blogs And Web 2.0 Properties

The next step is article submission to a) major article directories, b) blogs within your niche that accept guest posts and c) web 2.0 properties like Squidoo, Hubpages, Livejournal. Examples for major article directories are ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com, articlesbase.com. Do not submit only to article directories or only to blogs. It is important to diversify your link sources and you can also test what works and what doesn’t work for you in the process in order to optimize your traffic strategy. Search through blog directories for blogs within your niche, connect with fellow webmasters and ask them if you can publish guest posts on their blogs. You will get visits from people who browse through article directories and blogs, however we are aiming for visitors from search engines where your blog posts appear in search results (if indexed, more below).

3. Social Bookmarking

The power of article marketing can be boosted through social media sites like Digg, Technorati, Mixx and Stumpleupon. Once you have submitted your articles to article directories and blogs, make note of the page URL of your article. Submit this page URL to social bookmarking sites. You can use free  services like onlywire.com or socialmarker.com that help you with the time consuming social bookmarking task.

4. Test and Review

You have to constantly keep track of your site’s traffic and your content URLs in search engines so that you can test all the different ways of article marketing, article submission, article distribution, social bookmarking, etc. Maybe you’ll notice that some article URLs are not indexed in google while others are indexed nicely. Focus on submitting your content to sites, blogs and web 2.0 properties where you are certain that your content will be indexed in search engines, as this is what we are looking for in order to get targeted traffic from search engines.

admin Article Marketing, Social Bookmarking, Web Content