In the next few articles we will discuss some methods of getting free traffic to your websites. As they say there is no such thing as a free lunch. You can get traffic to your site but it involves a constant level of work. It is not for lazy people. Today we discuss the use of article marketing.
Write a useful article. The article should be closely related to the dating niche or subject of the dating website you are trying to promote. If we keep on with the theme of vegetarian dating, you can write about anything to do with vegetarians such as recipes, celebrities who are vegetarian, health tips for vegetarians and so on. Write the article yourself, or get a freelance copywriter to write it for you, there are many available on the net. Do not copy it of another website or you will be penalized for duplicate content.
Once we have the article and it is useful and interesting we have content that we can disseminate on the world wide web. Make sure links to your site are embedded in the article or in relevant places or in the “About the author” box at the bottom of the article. If you have submitted the article to the right places, other websites will pick up the article/news item through automatic RSS feeds or other methods and publish them on their site so you can get hundreds or thousands of links to your site. You will also be boosting your reputation by building authority.

A couple of pointers when writing your dating article

Make sure you have a few different catchy headlines, something that will attract people to read the article. Make several versions of your article, when you were writing it I’m sure you thought up several ways to say the same thing so you are halfway there, look up synonyms for keywords and use these in the different versions. Change the order of sentences in your paragraph and in the article itself.
When we have the article in a few different versions, it’s time to start posting it on the web. One of the first places you should send your article to are the article directories. Below is a list of the top ones, but definitely submit to ezinearticles.com. knol.google.com is also very good as your article will appear on search engines quite quickly.
Some articles directories require payment, and as this is an article on free traffic avoid those. Each directory has its own rules on embedding links into the text, some allow it some don’t, Only post links in the text if it is relevant. Most will allow a link in the authors block. Make sure there is a way to put in link to your dating site or at least a link to a blog or something like squidoo or hubpages where you can promote your site.
Directories that have “nofollow” policies are not particularly helpful unless your brand is well known. Post only to maximum 3 or 4 article directories, and post to each one a different version of your article.

Some useful article directories:

http://ezinearticles.com
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.netterweb.com
http://www.articlefinders.com
http://www.articlecity.com
http://knol.google.com/
One step forward is to start some article pages of your own, my suggestions are:
www.hubpages.com
www.squidoo.com
www.technorati.com
On these sites you can post your article and get comments on them, similar to a blog. Make sure you set up the RSS feeds so these articles are added to other websites automatically.
Also post your article on forums and social media sites. If your article is good put it on Digg.com or other similar resources.
Article marketing will not only disseminate information about you and your site, it also helps in the creation of backlinks to your sites which will increase your page rank and therefore improve your standings in the search results.

A couple of reminders

• Don’t spam your article. It does not help to submit the same article to thousands of directories, duplicate content gets ignored or penalized.
• Try and make your articles short, around 500 words, use catchy headlines.
• Your article should start with a summary of the article, a leader paragraph of around 50 words or so, that will catch the attention of the reader.
• When posting to some forums or social media sites, use this leader paragraph with a read more link that directs the reader to one of your sites where you can be a bit more overt about advertising your dating site.

There are thousands of instruction articles on the web that will help with your article marketing activity. Just make sure you use common sense, avoid all sites that promise you will get rich quickly if you use their software for only $29.99, don’t use spinners or mass submission software, use only original material, and you can be very successful at attracting considerable free traffic.