No-Cost Website Visitors For Your New Aromatherapy Venture, Year After Year

If you're searching for free methods to generate leads for your new complementary therapy business, especially if it has an online shopping cart, the best way is Article Marketing because it's free and the traffic keeps coming, day after day, from each piece of work. So if you are looking for product launch ideas read on.

Article Marketing isn't a fast way to get started online, but it's a low-cost, no risk tactic anyone can adopt. First let's compare it with some other ways to get Internet traffic. Let's take the example of promoting a new shopping cart.

The usual way of bringing traffic to your new site, taught by other on-line marketing courses, is to get in touch with other webmasters requesting a link exchange. This can be successful, but it's a slow process and you need to be careful who you target. For example, if I sell dog collars by mail order I may be happy to do a link swap with someone who runs dog training classes, but not someone else selling dog collars.

Another method is answering questions on forums in your subject area, with your URL in your signature. Also effective, but time-consuming.

In theory a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign is fast to set up and you could see prospects within an hour. In practice unless you're experienced at these campaigns, you can spend ages testing for the optimum settings and exhaust your budget without making a single sale. I did! And being of a suspicious nature , I often wondered how many clicks were by my competitors, spending my money!

Other online strategies include FFA (Free For All) sites and traffic exchanges where you view other people's sites, in return for them viewing yours. This strikes me as a waste of time. I want to sell, not buy, so why sit wearily, clicking on other people's sites so that they will sit bored clicking on my web-page? They probably never even look at my advert. With tabbed browsers the temptation is just to open the next tab to click on the one, without reading the adverts.

These ideas are time-consuming and ineffective for a serious product launch.

Offline promoting methods include networking to swap cards at business clubs. Time-consuming, expensive and again in general, people are there to sell, not to buy.

In contrast, article marketing targets people who have implied that they are interested in the product your website targets. Choose the correct keywords and readers will be actively looking to buy, not sell.

The idea of article marketing is that you draft an article and submit it, with your website details, to article directories from which publishers can download articles for blogs etc so long as they include your website details with your article. Then when interested parties read your article, they can click onto your website.

The article you have produced in an hour or so stays (theoretically) online forever and you have the potential to receive targeted traffic from it in perpetuity.

For example, I submitted an article in October 2005 and 4 years later it is still generating traffic, with no extra work, and had received 28,897 lifetime views, with 5,961 clicks through to my website. How much would that have cost by PPC? Another advantage is that the best article directories send you a report showing the keywords from which your article is being found.

My belief is that article marketing has so many advantages over alternative methods that I cannot imagine why it would not be one of your marketing strategies.

Much of my success with article marketing was learned through trial and error. With a little free, or low cost, training I would have seen rewards much earlier.