You can read the fist here:  3 dead easy ways to get extra traffic – number one

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What will induce people to visit your site?

Use the full power of the internet. Move away from your idea of communicating as in the more traditional sense of word only. The internet is the biggest multimedia space the world has ever seen.

We tend to get stuck in the mind set that the written word is the only communications tool available to us. We still think of journals, newspapers and books as the means to communicate.

The internet has opened up a whole new vista. Now you can add video, sound, broadcast, radio, photographs, illustrations, graphics and more to your blog, web site, Facebook page or hub page.

You can attract and entertain visitors with a variety of media and it never has to be boring again. Your internet presence can be as interactive, informative, entertaining as you wish. You can create a visual and aural smorgasbord for your visitors that will make them come back to you over and over.

Why restrict yourself to the written word when you can make it so much easier for yourself by talking to people, drawing things, creating videos, interactive slide shows and so much more.

Go multimedia

But the multimedia components that are attractive to visitors are not the only benefit. Part of the advantage of the internet is that everything can get tagged and captioned. So identify your items that you have placed into your web site, blog or other forms of online presence.

The captions and tags need to be in line with your keywords and focus of your topic. Create content to go with your main theme. If your blog is about goldfish, stay on topic and show beautiful photos of goldfish, create videos about them, compile a slide show on goldfish and their habits.

In other words include different forms of media so your visitors never get bored. But stay on topic. Remember that you need to maintain your focus. It’s not a problem if you have more than one area of interest. Just make sure that you set up another web site or blog to cater to that interest.

Once you have your media elements compiled and tagged you will find that the search engines will send traffic through to you on the strength of those media elements. That means you have a further way of getting traffic through your videos and graphics.

Spread the word, image, sound

Now take those media elements and spread them around the internet. Submit your videos to YouTube and other video sharing sites. There are many. Upload your photos, graphics and illustrations to Flickr and any other image sharing sites that you can find.

Post your powerpoint presentations to sites such as Slideshare or Slides. Or create a hub page or Squidoo lens or Facebook page where all of your media elements are welcome too.

Be creative, use the full scope of the internet and tag with your keywords and you will find traffic flowing to your site at a greater rate than you could have imagined.

Be creative. You will stand out from the crowd. And that’s good!

This is a post from: The Digital Archives

3 dead easy ways to get extra traffic – number two

Have you ever noticed that newspapers and magazines have different column widths? There is an interesting theory behind this. It takes your eyes longer to scan content when the line of text scans from one end of the page to the other.

This means that scientific journals tend to run their lines right across the page. On the other end of the spectrum, how much attention does one have if reading about celebrities? Not much. Readers just want to get the quick details. The bits of scandal is all they are interested in.

This means that magazines publishing to an audience who want to quickly read about their favourite or not so favourite celeb will want to read quickly. You will notice, now that you are looking at it, that these rag mags have quite narrow columns and short paragraphs.

It makes it easier to scan the content. For scientific or architectural journals the reader will want to take his time and read carefully in order to understand the content. Your audience composition therefore will influence how your format of your article will look.

If you are writing your articles for the internet you will need to remember that most readers will visit the internet to learn something quickly, scan content for relevance and in general remember that the internet reader is not there for leisurely browsing.

This is the reason why short articles are favoured over lengthy tombs of content. It also means that your paragraphs should be short and your articles not too long. About five hundred words is a good length to aim for.

A particularly popular format for the internet is the point form article. These articles usually have titles such as ‘5 reasons you got ditched’ or 10 things to remember when …’. The reason for this particular genre to be appreciated is that readers are in a hurry. A point format article gives the sense of an informative but nevertheless quick read.

On the other hand if you are writing articles that will be used in a more learned environment your approach would probably need to be quite different. You would need to write longer, provide many cross references and substantiate your arguments with supporting data.

Besides your width of your column, length of article, the use of point form and the size of your paragraph what other format considerations would one need to bear in mind? Some format suggestions which are not entirely article writing related are such items as not using font that is too small.

In particular for writers wishing to publish their articles on the internet such consideration as background colour and font style are formating issues which do make a difference but could be the topic of another article. Learning how to write articles requires you to consider format as well as the words you write.

This is a post from: The Digital Archives

How To Write Articles – Decide On The Format