As a content writer, your main source of income is going to be people clicking adverts on your articles. However, given that only a few people will ever click these adverts, your main focus should be on trying to generate as much traffic through your articles as possible. There are many ways to do this, the obvious of course is to write good content and market it well. However, there is another way that many people overlook. Also, these tips can be used in many different formats, not just Triond.
Networking your articles. And in this little skit, I will explain to you how this is done. We will start with what networking is, then more on to how to create the links, and finish with how to use the system responsibly.
We will start with the basics, and build our way up to the more advanced stuff as we go along.
What is Article Networking?
Put simply, its increasing traffic through your articles by placing links to your other works within them. It's as simple as that, but HOW you do it is where the lesson lies.
The power of this is obvious. You get more hits, as people who find one of your articles may well go right to other ones you have written.
How do I Make a Link in my Article?
Hyperlinks are text (or sometimes images) that have a link connected to them. Basically, when you click the text or the image, the URL connected to it loads. Creating these is very easy. First of all here's how to do it in MS word.
- Highlight your text by clicking at the end of it and dragging it back to the start where you want your hyperlink. For example, I want it here.
- Right click on the highlighted area, and click "hyperlink" in the drop down menu
- In the new screen that pops up, enter the URL (for example www.evisisgreat.co.uk), and click okay.
- Your hyperlink will be created, and your text will be formatted to a blue colour with an underline
To do it with a picture, simply right click the picture, click hyperlink and then figure it out for yourself. Note however, that for some reason many Triond articles do not allow hyperlinked pictures (they remove the hyperlink).
Next, how to do it in Triond's online editor.
- Highlight your text as you would in MS word:
- You'll see there's a little button just above the highlighted area (it looks like a chain, and it's next to the undo/redo buttons). Click it!
- In the top line, enter your URL. Then you need to decide if you want the link to open a new window, or to open in the existing one. More often than not, you want the link to open a new window so as not to disturb your reader's reading! Click insert, and it's done!
Now, how about creating hyperlinks in other areas, such as forums and blogs? Most blogs will allow you to use BBCode tags. To create a URL hyperlink in these, use the following code:
[url=http://YOUR URL HERE /]THE TEXT YOU WANT YOUR READER TO SEE HERE[/url] .
Of course, all this hassle begs the question, why bother? The answer is simple. Because it looks a lot neater than pasting links everywhere, it doesn't break the flow of reading, and if people have an idea what the link is about before they click it, they will be more likely to follow it.
How do I Network my Articles Effectively?
First of all, you need to make sure that there is a reason to link to an article. Basically, make sure that what you are linking to is related, and pertinent. For example if I'm talking about music piracy, and I mention an obscure genre of music I have written an article on, then I put a link to that article just after mentioning the genre, so people can read about it if they want to.
Next is to link to sources. Show the reader your sources and they will take you more seriously. While this may not help with your hits directly, it will make you look a lot more credible as a writer, and people will be more likely to look at your other works.
If you have taken your own photos for the article, then provide thumbnails of them in your article, then links to them as well. This will encourage readers to visit your photographs too, increasing your hits. I did this quite well with my article, walking with the dead.
Finally, provide links at the end of your article to related material you have written. For example.
One last point is the idea of "mother articles", these are basically directories linking several related articles together. Say you have five articles about food in your country. You create a sixth article and provide links to all the other five in it, along with a short description of each article. Now, someone who finds that mother article and thinks it sounds interesting may well load all five "sub articles". You have now just had SIX hits from ONE person. Here is an example of a Mother article.
