by Stan Seecrets

Experts in website promotion all agree on this: get as many inbound links as possible. To achieve this, write free-reprint articles, sent them to major article depositories and soon you will have hundreds, if not thousands of inbound links. That is the hype, the razzmatazz. The experiences of this techie turned internet writer may provide some useful pointers.

This author started with a clean website and wrote 5 articles in as many weeks. There is nothing else.

Within a week, this author’s site got a #1 ranking from Google, using the author’s name as the keyword and has stayed there during this period. MSN finally gave a #1 ranking after wavering between 8 and 12. For 2 to 3 days, Yahoo ranked it as #1 or #2, after which, the ranking disappeared altogether.

There are about 100 sites which reprinted these 5 articles. Many did not activate the link found in the author’s bio. The three major search engines reported a total of 48 inbound links. MSN reported 34 links, Yahoo 13 and Google 1.  All in all, this author’s site received about 100 visits from various countries. One article appeared in foreign-language site from Brazil.

Do not be surprised at meeting the odd article pirate. This particular website strips the author’s bio, changed the title slightly, take the whole article in word for word and claim the article as his original creation. Looking at this site closely, it is easy to spot the various styles of different writers, yet this article pirate claimed authorship of all those articles.

This author’s personal take.

Have lower expectations - taking a digit or two off from the figures is closer to reality for most writers.

Choose the right topics. Writing about celebrities, hair are popular topics. There is one particular article on hair in places where the sun has hardly shone before, which had over 30,000 hits in an article-submission site alone. In contrast, articles written by this author on cryptography and technical analysis have only 100 hits. How these popular topics are related to your website’s theme will need your creativity at its best.

Consider using teenagers and young people as your test-market. If they do not read your articles, chances are, few would.

Submission to article sites is an exercise in patience. The author still wonders how some experts still claim there are hundreds of article submission sites, when there are only tens of listed article depositories. Probably, they may be referring to the thousands of one-theme sites such as web marketing.

Despite some flaws, this author still recommends article-writing as a web promotion tool. Seeing your articles accepted by 100 sites and read by thousands is indeed gratifying. Seeing your opinion being quoted and discussed in forums is exhilarating. Seeing one of your articles being blatantly pirated provides a new badge of honor – how many articles get pirated anyway? The internet, like everyone else, is imperfect.

Stan Seecrets’ Postulate: "Website promotion is a journey of a million sweats. Savor each drop and it will taste like honey".

[This article may be freely reprinted provided it is published with the author’s bio and activating the link to the URL below. It can be edited, summarized, expanded, translated into any human language not excluding Ada, Algol, Assembly, Basic, C, C++, Cobol, Delphi, Forth, Fortran, Java, Lisp, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby PL/I, Smalltalk, Snobol,  et al. In the case of print media, the same condition applies except that the URL must be printed in bold letters. Violators will be required to donate 2^256 cents (or the lowest legal tender in your country) to your favorite charity – if you do not know what this number is, check out the first article by this author on cryptography.  In cases of reprinting in realms outside this planet, you are free to do anything with it – our copyright laws do not apply to you, nor enforceable within your realms.]

About the author
The author, Stan Seecrets, is a veteran software developer with 25+ years experience at http://www.seecrets.biz which pecializes in digital asset protection. A free RSS/XML syndicated feed on all his free-reprint articles is also available. You can email him with comments or criticism to Stan at seecrets dot biz. © Copyright 2005, Stan Seecrets. All rights reserved.