You hear everywhere about two major priorities for your business - building your list and using articles to promote your site. Obviously, if you can combine the two efforts, so much the better.

The best way to make your articles help you build your business is to provide great information. You want your leads to be impressed enough to sign up for your newsletter so that you have many opportunities to sell to them.

To increase the effectiveness of your articles in building your list, you need to ask for the subscription in your resource box (most sites won’t let you put a lot of links in the article or blatently promote your site in the article body). You can either include the email address for subscriptions or link to your subscription page.

The advantage articles have is that they can closely target the kind of people you want to subscribe to your newsletter. Write about a topic you know they are interested in.

Does it really work? That depends on a lot of factors. Is the article of high quality? Is your subscription form easy to use? Is it a topic that people are going to want to get a newsletter about?

There are no promises in business - some things will work, some things won’t. Keep trying and find out what tactics work for you and you are comfortable in using.

It’s so much fun seeing a site that was doing nothing for me start to take off.

One of my sites that has been sitting there doing nothing has in these past few days started making sales. Pretty decent amount too, considering it had been doing nothing. We’re talking at least $20 in commission over the past few days.

Yes, I know that sounds like very little, but do consider that this is one of the sites I only put the minimum effort into, not one that has been costing me a lot of effort. It’s also one of my ugliest sites. Not plain, I do use color in it, but it’s not nearly so carefully done as many of my sites.

No particular secrets to how this particular site is doing what it’s doing. Didn’t even submit it to directories, although I really ought to. It has a few links pointing to it, but really not all that many. Just it’s time to do something, I guess.

That’s what I love about having a wide range of sites. You never know when one will start to do well.

Writing articles is a great way to market your website, but it doesn’t come naturally to everyone. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to take advantage of article marketing without struggling to write articles on your own.

Hiring a freelance writer is a great way to get articles written for your business. There are plenty of writers out there willing to be hired to ghostwrite articles that you can take credit for writing. You’ll own the copyright and can do as you like with the articles.

Many writers aren’t interested in the business or marketing side of things; that’s why they hire themselves out as writers rather than writing for their own websites.

One of the biggest things you have to watch out for when using freelance writers is how honest the writer is. There have been cases where a writer will plagerize someone else’s work and sell it as their own.

Any time you start working with a new writer, check for references. Get samples of their writing work. Then, when you buy an article from them, check with sites such as Copyscape to ensure that it is not likely to have been plagerized.

You can post your request for writers at sites such as Guru and eLance. This allows writers to bid on your work. You can generally get a lower price per article if you request them in bulk, but make sure you have the right to request corrections and rewrites at least once per article.

Don’t make the mistake of assuming the cheapest writer is the best one. Maybe they’re good, but more likely it’s the only way they can get work. Finding a writer who can do the work to your standards is far more important to your business in the long run than saving a little money.

No matter your topic, whether you’re an affiliate marketer, direct marketer or sell your own products or services, you need to get traffic to your website. But sometimes it’s a pain to do so. Building traffic isn’t really the fun part of the business for most people.

Today I thought I would offer some of the free ways you can build your traffic. Well, not really free. They cost time, after all.

1. Article writing - This one works two ways. Post the article on your site as search engine food. Then again, you can submit it to article sites in the hopes that other webmasters will add it, along with your resource box, to their websites, building your reputation and your traffic.Does it work? Part of your success in article writing depends on you. Are you creating quality content or just typing up junk that makes no sense, offers nothing of value and is nothing but a sloppy ad for your business? Quality content has a much better chance of working.While you want to attract the search engines, keep in mind that it is your visitors you want to keep and sell to. Search engine food does no good if visitors are immediately turned off.
2. Quality link exchanges - The keyword here is QUALITY. Don’t just exchange links for the purpose of getting another backlink to your site. The search engines are getting better all the time at ignoring unrelated backlinks.Give as good a quality as you get. If you can, agree on non-link page exchanges. If you must stick with link pages, make sure yours and the ones you will be placed on are well categorized and have a reasonable number of links. I recommend no more than 25 outgoing links, less if you can manage it.Categorized links really help with keeping things relevant. I do not suggest exchanging links with all kinds of sites and building your own huge directory of unrelated sites, just because the other site owner has done the same. Do you really think someone looking for dog training tips is going to care about a search engine optimization website?
3. Free directory submissions - These won’t generally get you much traffic directly, but it’s a way to get some one way links to your site. I like the list by Vilesilencer best.
4. Now, if you don’t mind irrelevant links, the DigitalPoint Co-op is a pretty good solution for backlinks. Not perfect, but in some areas it works very well.
5. Clean up your HTML - Sloppy HTML makes it harder for the search engine spiders to go through your website and it can increase load time. Try to learn CSS and use external stylesheets to control the layout of your page.A lot of people wonder about meta tags. I say use basic ones with accurate keywords and description, but don’t stress about them. Meta tags were abused so much in the past that search engines put very little value on them. However, some still prefer that you have meta tags, so I don’t skip them either.
6. Participate in forums - I do mean participate, not advertise. Be a member. Give real advice and ask real questions, even if it doesn’t relate to your business. So long as the forum lets you have your signature file you will get some interest in your website.
7. Answer questions at Yahoo Answers - Same as with the forums, or they’ll ban you. I’ve answered a variety of questions there, some with links to one or another of my sites, others with no links, and still others with links to appropriate other sites that I have nothing to do with. Keep it honest.

I hope these ideas get you going on building some free traffic. They’re time consuming, but building a business takes time. Hopefully some of these ideas will be fun for you.

One of the most popular online businesses right now is affiliate marketing. And why not? It’s cheap to get started, you don’t have any boss but yourself, and only the deadlines you set. You can take time off relatively freely, and can have plenty of time for your family.

This isn’t to say it’s easy. How seriously you take your business as an affiliate marketer will have a huge impact on your success. Most do have to work long hours as they get started. There’s a huge learning curve. And then, just when you think you’ve mastered it, something changes and you have a lot of work that you are going to feel the need to get done!

Here are five of the qualities that will help you to make it as an affiliate marketer.

1. The desire to learn

If you aren’t interested in learning new skills and learning about new topics, affiliate marketing is quite simply not for you. Unless you want to pay someone to do the work for you, you’ll need to know how to run your website, which requires at least a basic knowledge of HTML. You’ll need to know how to promote your website. You’ll need to understand the products you are promoting and the kinds of people likely to buy them.

How do you learn all of this? Read, read, read. Find out from others what ebooks have helped. Read on discussion boards about affiliate marketing. Read the emails you get from the vendors you are representing.

2. The willingness to spend time and effort on your business

If you think your affiliate marketing business is going to result in money just pouring into your mailbox, think again. Yes, you can take time off any time you please and your business will still be there, but what condition will it be in? There are emails to respond to, websites to grow, marketing to work on and so much more.

Immediate results are highly unusual. It takes several months for most websites to really start generating traffic. During this time you need to keep adding to your site, tweaking your efforts to maximize your return.

3. Determination, or perhaps stubbornness

You need to be determined to make it as an affiliate marketer. You need drive. You need to be able to push yourself when there’s no boss telling you what to do. You need to not give up when, after six months you still aren’t getting anywhere near the results you hoped for.

4. Discipline

This goes right along with determination. You need to know when you can work, how much you can work and that you WILL work. You need to throw yourself wholeheartedly into your work. You need to know what your goals are so that you make the most of your working time. You need to avoid distractions.

5. Optimism

Hope springs eternal in affiliate marketing. Your business can take a long time to really take off. So much of affiliate marketing is about fulfilling your dreams and following your passion. It’s about finding a way to a better life. You have to believe that you can work your way to the better life you are after, whether it’s an extra $1000 per month or $100,000 or more per year that you are after. There are no guarantees that you’ll reach either of those, but you have to ignore that and go for what you want.

Affiliate marketing offers no guarantees that you’ll earn the big bucks or even a few dollars. However those who make it work find it to be a wonderful, rewarding lifestyle. Personally, I’ve found it rather addictive. If you reach the addictive point too, you’ll find that you spend much of your time thinking up new marketing ideas, new websites and that you’ll just want to keep going. Have fun, don’t let the bad times get you down and keep an eye on your business!