There are two main reasons for wanting to promote your articles (blogs & websites too). These are to increase traffic and to obtain one way back links. Both of these strategies will improve click through rate (CTR) - so more pennies for you! Making some time to work on increasing traffic and getting back links will:

1. Bring more visitors to your pages
2. Improve your position on google search (serps)
3. Increase your pagerank

For the complete beginner I'm going to explain each of these terms more fully. For more seasoned internet publishers scroll down to see the websites I've identified.

Traffic

This term relates to how many visitors you get to your pages over a day, week or month. The basic premise is this: more visitors = more clicks. That's why internet publishers spend time trying to increase their internet traffic, because to make a reasonable income they need a lot of visitors to their pages.

One Way Back Links

A one way back link is basically a "vote" for your page. Google uses these "votes" to help determine how good your page is and therefore, how high in the search results your page will be placed. Think of it like this: if you write a fantastically, brilliant article on "How to Increase Page Rank for Google Search" then hopefully in a natural way, over weeks and months, other websites and articles will post a link to your page from their page.

These links are "votes" for your content. They say, "Hey, this page is really worth reading!" The difficulty is this - who will know when you have published a fantasically, brilliant article to even be able to link to it in the first place?

That's one reason why web publishers make efforts to create for themselves, one way links to their content. Google still sees the links as votes even when you have created them yourself! The more incoming links to your page the higher in the search results your page will be placed and the higher the page rank for your page. Both help increase traffic to your page and therefore click through rate.

Click Through Rate (CTR)

An average click through rate is just 1-2 % per thousand. What this means is that if you have a 1000 visitors in a given period, 10 - 20 of those people will click on an advert. Not a lot really! These figures are just averages though. If your page content is targeted to people that are looking to buy a product or service you could well have a much higher click through rate.

SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages)

When web publishers talk about serps what they are referring to, is what position their pages are at on search engines (mainly Google) for particular keywords or key phrases. Getting on page one of the results page is the broad aim, and getting to be first on the first page is the ultimate aim. Why? Because 70% of people will click on the first result!

So for instance, my HubPage, "How to Describe Yourself" is at position 6 on Google's first page for that very same keyphrase. This brings in a lot of visitors, much more than if it was on page two or three of the results pages. And if it was number 1? Well I'd have tonnes more visitors!

PageRank

Pagerank is specific to Google. It's a special formula that google uses to determine how much of an "authority" a page or a website is. The highest possible pagerank is 10, the lowest is 0. The impact of pagerank is that generally speaking, pages with rank 10 will outdo those of lesser ranks in the search results. Pagerank 4's will outdo pagerank 3's and so on.

It takes a few months minimum for google to asign your article a pagerank, so don't worry if you haven't got one yet. Just for your info an average pagerank is 2 or 3. HubPages rank is 6 (which is very good) which is why our hubpages can get a good position on the search results quickly.

If you want to check your pagerank or serps, here are the best, free SEO tools I've come across for doing that as well as other important tools.

Okay, so now that we've finished the lesson on why we should promote our articles, let's look at where we can promote them.

Where the best places on the internet are to promote your articles is a HUGE topic, so I'm not going to be able to cover everything here, nor would I want to! So I'm going to focus on Content Sharing Websites and provide links to the best articles on the other methods of article promotion.

10 Content Sharing Sites

RedGage

At RedGage you can post the link, title and description of your articles, blogs and websites. The website has a nice look. You can earn through adsense. It's simple to add your content. A negative is that I find the site quite slow.

Qondio

Qondio is a fairly new site that actually encourages you to promote your website and offers 100% adsense revenue! The more content links you add the better. There is a $5 charge to sign up.

shetoldme

Again you can post the link, title and descriptions of your articles. It's easy to use. All links are DoFollow. You can choose to get involved in the community but it's not essential.The down side for me is that the site has an unfinsihed look and the layout isn't great.

DoFollowDigg

All links are DoFollow (hence the name!). You can earn through adsense. It's got a pagerank of 4. Easy to use.

Spicy Page

I haven't used this one, but they want you to post links to your content! Content is then rated by site users.

TipDrop

I have written a whole article about this one called "Free Google Backlinks". It's another revenue sharing site (they're just giving it away aren't they!) and you write a short 255 word summary of your article to answer the question, "What do you know about that?".

yousaytoo

This is a website where you can share any of your blogs. You get a 50% share of adsense revenue and can also sell through amazon.

Propeller

Propeller is a news sharing website. Post links to your articles if you think they are newsworthy! The site content is moderated and you should expect to get involved in rating and commenting on articles to get the most out of it. Has a pagerank of 8.

Esnips

eSnips is a social content-sharing site with a PageRank of 6, where you can publish and share any media type. You get up to 5GB of web space. I haven't used this one so tell me what it's like!

Scribd

Scribd is not strictly a content sharing site, it's more about document sharing. They want unique content, so it means more writing but it's certainly worth checking out. PageRank 8.

Social Bookmarking

Most of these websites can be accessed through the "share this" button at the bottom of your hubs. When you click a share this button you can post the link to sites that you are a member of which could include:

Facebook, Facebook Group, Stumble Upon, Delicious, Digg, Twitter

For a massive list of bookmarking sites have a look at this hub by Hal Licino.

Article Sites

Article marketing is very popular for a good reason - it works! But it is time consuming. It basically involves writing articles to promote your articles! Here are just a few of the places you could write for:

HubPages, Ehow, ArticlesBase, Ezine, Info Barrel, Experts Coloumn, Squidoo, Xomba, Senserely, Scribd

Here's a hub which explains which writing sites offer what from Marian Swift. And another from Darkside called HubPages Traffic Bonus.

(Click here if you want to SIGN UP to HUBPAGES.)

Other

RSS Feeds

Here is a wonderful hub on the benefits of creating and distributing RSS feeds for beginners by Kmackey32

YouTube

Many people create videos to upload to YouTube to market their websites or affiliate interests. Here's a hub on how to do it from Karthickjck.

Yahoo Answers

Last but not least, I would reccommend answering questions on Yahoo Answers. You can browse through questions and find ones that your hub or website answers; post a response and then add your link in the "sources" box. I've found this method good for traffic.

Thanks for reading and good luck with your article, blog or website promotion! If you have any questions please leave a comment and I'll get back to you as soon as I can.

Also, remember to bookmark this page in case you need to come back to it in the future.