There are numerous ways to increase website traffic. This article focuses on 2 of the most effective methods – article marketing and video marketing.

But before you start doing these 2 techniques, or any other promotional methods to increase website traffic, you might want to just focus your time and effort on things that you like to do, or tasks that you have a natural talent for… unless you’re starting out on a tight budget.

If you find that you have a weakness or you don’t particularly like doing a specific activity, then you should consider outsourcing it to other people.

Focusing on your strengths and delegating mundane tasks to others will help you in attaining your desired results at the soonest possible time.

Increase Website Traffic Through Article Marketing

If you’re having a difficult time coming up with ideas, or you don’t have a passion for writing, article writing could be outsourced to a qualified writer who understands the market or industry you’re involved with. If not, confirm if the ghostwriter can do the much-needed research to be able to write the type of articles you require.

If you have a tight budget, you might consider doing it yourself initially until you’re earning a comfortable income to hire freelance writers.

Of course, if you love writing (meaning you don’t regard it as a task but as an enjoyable pastime), then writing is something you can do. After all, nothing can give more satisfaction than making money while doing something you enjoy.

Since article marketing is a powerful promotional tactic to increase website traffic with steady, long-term results, you should consider doing it either by yourself or by outsourcing.

After writing the articles, submit them to article directories. Now, instead of submitting your articles manually, some people recommend using article submission services or software. They can easily submit your content to hundreds, if not thousands, of article directories with just a few clicks of a button.

Article submission services usually charge you either by submission, or every month or quarter. Some of them offer you lifetime memberships for a one-time fee.

Using article submission services or software can be cheaper than hiring someone to manually submit your articles, but the disadvantage is that you’re not sure if they’re only submitting to sites that are reputable and trustworthy.

In case they submit to “not-so-good neighborhoods,” then getting a lot of backlinks from such sites would be useless; it may even prove to be harmful in the eyes of the search engine because getting thousands of backlinks all at once might send a red flag.

A great alternative is to simply gather a quality list of the most reputable, high page rank sites. Then you can hire a student or part-time worker to do the article submissions to these high quality sites.

Increase Website Traffic Through Video Marketing

Another method to increase website traffic is through video marketing. By creating and publishing your videos on video-sharing sites like YouTube and Yahoo Videos, you get to have extensive online coverage when it comes to authoritative video publishing.

I recommend that you do the video yourself, especially if you’ll be appearing in the video, as this creates a personal touch. A favorite tool for producing videos is the bargain video production camcorder called “The Flip”. With the Flip camcorder you just record the video you want to show online, plug it in your PC or laptop computer, and press a few buttons to release and share to the public.

But if you absolutely can’t do the video yourself due to extreme shyness, or if you’re unsure if your voice is good enough, then you could outsource the video creation. However, take note that you may need to invest a hefty amount if you want to outsource the creation of a high-quality, attention-grabbing video.

Video marketing provides some excellent SEO benefits to increase website traffic. Google owns Youtube, so you can expect Google to favor Youtube videos in their search results if you put in the right keywords.

Don’t just upload to Youtube though. Upload your videos on other video-sharing sites too like Google Videos, Yahoo Videos, AOL Videos, Metacafe, Revver, and Veoh, among others. You may use a free video submission service like Tubemogul.com to submit your video simultaneously to all your selected video-sharing sites.

To have higher chances of your video ranking in the search engines for your keyword, put your keyword in the title of the video, and then put all related keywords in the tags.

If your video gets popular, getting to increase your website traffic should be a breeze. Just test it and see how effective it is.

Leverage Your Articles By Turning Them To Videos

Are there other ways to monetize your articles aside from submitting them to article directories? Sure! You can turn your articles into videos. You could either use camtasia and record the powerpoint version of your article as a video, or you can speak directly in the video as if you’re giving helpful advice.

Did you also know that you could create a powerpoint version of your articles and submit them to slideshare.net? Just make sure the url you put in the presentation is posted in a non-promotional way (either in the beginning or end), as slideshare prohibits us to do any marketing; but you can still get exposure to your site in a non-obvious and acceptable way.

Hope these methods help increase your website traffic and skyrocket your profits.