Submitting Articles for Traffic

I have been testing a lot of different techniques to generate traffic to my niche sites. So far the best traffic techinique that I have found for my niche sites is to submit articles to the free article directories.

For one of my sites I was receiving 1 to 2 unique visitors a day from the search engines (site is currently in Google's sandbox so traffic is only coming from yahoo and msn.) I decided to write some articles and submit them to the free article directories to see if that would drive traffic to this site.

Over a month period I submitted 5 original articles that included the site's url in the resource box. With each article submission the traffic for the web site spiked up to 50 to 100 uniques a day for a couple of days after the submission. At the end of the month the web site is now getting 10 to 20 unique visitors a day with several of them coming from sites that picked up the articles. The adsense income for the site went from less than $.50 a day to $10 a day immediately after each submission and has since leveled off to around $2.00 a day.

Even though this technique seems to work it is very time intensive to write a 500 to 700 word article. That is probably why I have been very consitent in submitting articles ;)

I am planning to do some more article promotions over the next month for several of my other sites to see if they will also benefit from this type of marketing.

Getting a good deal on hosting.

Well I have been looking for a new host for some new sites I want to create. My goal was to find the best deal that I could on a good hosting plan.

I was able to find a deal that allowed me to save over %50 on my web hosting fees.
Here is how I went about finding my web hosting deal.

1. Researched hosting companies to select plans that met my requirements. I used online web hosting forums and review sites to narrow my search down to three companies (Bluehost, Hostgator and IX Webhosting.)


2. Looked for coupons, rebates, discounts for the three hosting companies. I used the following google searches to find the best deals and/or discounts.
   
   
   
   • "Company Name deals"
   
   
   • "Company Name discounts"
   
   
   • "Company Name coupons"
   
   
   • "Company Name rebates"


3. Selected the best deal that I found. Here are the deals that I found:
   
   
   
   • BlueHost - $7.95 (yearly) - Normally Costs: $95.40.
     
     Deals:
     $40 Rebate - Total Costs: $55.40 - Savings: 42%
     $50 Rebate - Total Costs: $45.40 - Savings: 52%
     
   
   
   • HostGator - Baby Plan $9.95 (yearly) - Normally Costs: $119.40
     
     Deals:
     1 month free Coupon ("cheaphosting") - Total Costs: $109.46 - Savings: 8%
     $25 Rebate - Total Costs: $94.40 - Savings: 21%
     $30 Rebate - Total Costs: $89.40 - Savings: 25%
     
     * I think that you can use the rebates and coupon codes together, but I am not sure.
     
   
   
   • IX WebHosting - Business Plan $7.95 (yearly) - Normally Costs: $95.40
     
     Deals:
     $55 Rebate - Total Costs: $40.40 - Savings: 58%
   
   I ended up selected the IX Web Hosting plan because of the $55 rebate.
   

The key is to select the company or companies that you want to use and then to look for any coupons and/or rebates that you can use to lower costs of the plan that you selected.

PageRank Does Not Equate To Traffic

A lot of people seem to be focused on building their Google PageRank for their sites without understanding that PageRank does not equate to getting traffic. It is fairly easy to get a new site to have a 4 or 5 page ranking within 30 days. But even with a PR5 ranking these sites are not guarranteed to recieve tons of traffic.

So, how come a PR5 ranked site not recieve very much traffic:

1. Pages are not optimized for the right keywords. It doesn't matter how high a pages PR is, if it is targeting keywords that nobody searches for.


2. The "anchor text" of incoming links does not target the right keywords. A lot of webmasters ignore the importance of using "anchor text" correctly.


3. The "anchor text" of internal links is not keyword optimized. A lot of sites out their just use general text like "home" or "articles" as the anchor text for these important internal links.


4. Site has landing in Google's Sandbox for its main keywords. This can happen to new sites that are targeted to popular keywords. There is nothing that can be done to remove a site form the sandbox, except waiting for it to come out naturally.

The good thing is that it is easy to correct the first three problems.

I have to admit that I have been guilty of jumping on the PageRank wagon over that last two months. Currently, I now have two PR5, and 8 PR4 sites that have all been built since January, and none of them are getting the traffic that I expected.

So, I am currently optimizing the sites to target the right keywords (ones that people search for) and have modified the "anchor text" of internal and external links to support these keywords.