Using Content Hubs To Promote
By David Risley (c) 2005

We've all heard it before: content is king. And it is true. If you own a site, you need to post something interesting that people want to read before you can expect people to stop by. If your site is a content-based website, then you've already taken a huge step. However, if your website is a business website whose only purpose is to talk about your services, then you really should make an effort to post some content onto your website which is helpful to readers, free, and relevant to your services or website. If you do this, your site will attract traffic from people looking for information, not just to purchase something. And with increased traffic in general, you will get increased attention. And this increases your statistics.

Writing content for your own website is only half the battle, though. You have got to get people to read it. Just posting a website is not going to get people to come to it. It would be like building a business in the middle of the mountains. Nobody knows its there and you won't get any customers. If you get your articles out there for people to read and the articles are written correctly, you can position yourself as an expert in your field and promote your own website. One way to do this is by publishing on content hubs rather than limiting it to your own website.

A content hub is a site which publishes articles on all topics (usually categorized). Those articles are freely available to anyone to use on their own website, newsletter, blog, etc. So, many publishers or site owners in need of fresh content for their website can go to one or more of these content hubs, find an article they like, and use it. They have to maintain proper credit to the author and publish the small author bio which accompanies the article.

Let's look at this, though, from the author's viewpoint – your viewpoint. Let's say you are selling consulting services for search engine optimization. You have a site for your services, but you blend in with all the other such services. So, you write a series of articles giving tips to webmasters on how they can optimize their website. With your article you include a short bio of yourself. You include a mention of your services and a link to your website. You publish your article on a bunch of content hubs. Other websites, newsletters and blogs grab your article off those sites and use it on their own. Your article therefore spreads throughout the internet. Being that your site is linked with the article and is therefore on all of these other websites now (including the content hubs themselves), search engines who are constantly spidering the internet pick up on your article and index it associated with
your website. This, in turn, raises your ranking in the search engines. And you get increased traffic to your website not only from search engine searches but also from your article.

Now, let's say you have done some research on keywords and you interlace your article with certain keywords. When the search engines spider your article all over the internet and associates with your website, it will raise your search engine rankings even more. There is a real science to this, and if done correctly, can drastically raise your internet presence in a short time. I recently had a meeting with the CEO of In Touch Media Group, a Clearwater, FL based company which is in the business of internet marketing. They use content hubs as part of their strategy for clients and they couple this with their vast archived data regarding keywords. They showed me the stats of one site which they have, in the course of just a few months, taken from essentially no traffic to a VERY respectable level of traffic. After getting an article out in the content hubs, they will follow up a few weeks later with a press release.

So, how can you publish some of your articles on content hubs? Well, the first step is to find and visit them. There are many of them out there, but here are some of the better ones:

* http://www.goarticles.com/
* http://www.isnare.com/
* http://www.submityourarticle.com/indexi.php - a service to
send your article to a bunch of hubs at once
* http://www.articlecity.com/
* http://www.exchangenet.com/
* http://article-directory.net/
* http://freezinesite.com/

There are services to help you distribute to a large collection of publishers at once. I have used Isnare's distribution service (http://www.isnare.com) and it seems to work well. There are also distribution groups on Yahoo. Here are a few of them:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Free-Content/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/article_announce_list/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/article_announce/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/articles4you2use4promotion/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/articlesubmission/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Free-Reprint-Articles/

With that, I wish you the best of luck in your promotion efforts. Start writing!

David Risley is a web developer and founder of PC Media, Inc.
(http://www.pcmedianet.com). Specializes in PHP/MySQL development,
consulting and internet business management. He is also the
founder of PC Mechanic (http://www.pcmech.com), a large website
delivering do-it-yourself computer information to thousands of
users every day.

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Tip 2 – Affiliate programs for your website
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Tip 3 – Keep messages simple and clear.
This ensures that more people end up reading your marketing materials. Vague messages, hard to understand content and poor design can effective ruin our campaign.