The Best Way to Get Traffic to Your Blog, Website, or Article, Online For Free

You realize you need an audience.

Use Article Hubs

If you have a blog or website or you currently write articles for another blog or even if you are simply an aspiring writer, you may find yourself wanting to get traffic to your website or viewership for your articles. You want or need an audience.

To make money online, you need customers. Even if you are not selling anything. Most people will tell you that the only way to start getting organic traffic through search engines is to build a website with an abundant amount of valuable content. Easier said than done.

Not everyone has the time to dedicate to writing articles every day or even every so often- much less create articles that other people actually find interesting, informative, helpful or insightful. And, even if you are a highly skilled writer that has time to write on a full time basis, you will still likely find it difficult to achieve any significant web traffic.

Any more, trying to compete online in any market is impossible to do quickly, or inexpensively if you try to do everything by yourself. This is why more and more people are turning to article hubs to publish their articles, build followers, promote their website and/or blog, build SEO for their own website with link building and to simply get an immediate audience for their articles.

Article hubs are websites that allow people to create and post articles to their site for free. Among the most popular article hubs are ArticleBase, Ezines and HubPages. I have used and am familiar with all three and I prefer HubPages over the other two.

ArticleBase is much looser in their criteria for what they will allow to be published. But, your article will get published within a day of your submission, which is convenient. However, anything that gets published to ArticleBase is then considered to be public property for anyone to copy and paste into their site.

ArticleBase ranks highly within Google and other search engines, but not as highly as the others. Their interface is very clean and easy to use. However, there are no direct money making opportunities. The main advantage is of using ArticleBase is being able to provide a couple links (per article) to your site or blog, which will help with your site's SEO and hopefully, your audience growth.

Ezines is a bit different. They review your articles for about 7 days before they publish them. After you publish 10 articles, they review your account and decide if you are eligible for platinum status. This allows for faster publishing. There is also an intermediate ranking that you may get assigned as well.

Both ArticleBase and Ezines have a standard text box that is inserted below your article where they allow you to link to and promote your own site or blog (or whatever you are trying to promote). Ezines ranks very highly with Google and other search engines and their analytics track your article visits as well as clicks to your links that you are promoting.

HubPages seems to have all of the best attributes of the other article hubs, and more. They seem to rank higher more consistently with Google than the others do. I don't have any data to support this, so this is just my opinion based on what I have personally witnessed. One thing is for sure: HubPages ranks very highly in search engines.

HubPages will basically publish your article as soon as you submit it. However, all articles are reviewed and they may unpublish your article later if it violates their guidelines. HubPages has a scoring system. Everyone starts with a score of 50, the highest being 100.

75 is the magic number to reach. At this point, your links that you build within your hubs (articles) turn from "no follow" to "do follow." Your score is a reflection of the quality of your articles, comments, followers, traffic your articles get, etc. So, in essence, HubPages rewards you with powerful link building (do follow links) once you have "helped them." You help them by building a larger audience for HubPages with your unique content that you provide for their site.

You don't have to be a professional writer to achieve a decent score. I have been writing for two months and my score is currently a 76. I write about several different topics from sports to insurance claims to an article like the one you are reading now.

HubPages allows you to design the page elements, add pictures, help create the URL of your article and they have a very effective and specific article-categorization mechanism that truly sets HubPages apart.

Perhaps the best thing about HubPages is that you can link your Google AdSense account as well as other ad/affilliate accounts to HubPages. So, you can actually earn money through your existing accounts with your articles that you post to HubPages. You split the revenue with HubPages 60/40. You get 60%.

So, while HubPages may be a little more strict with their article requirements and scoring system, you get rewarded more in the end with their higher Google ranking and their money making opportunities that the other article hubs discussed here simply do not provide.

Using article hubs to promote your own site or blog is becoming more and more polular as people begin to realize that it is better to "join 'em if you can't beat 'em." But, using these article hubs not only allows you to "join" them, but you can also use their power for your benefit.

In fact, you can ride HubPages all the way to the bank.