With companies sinking millions into online promotions, it is no wonder that competition on the Internet is more intense than ever. As a result, many small online business owners are desperately searching for a way to draw traffic (customers) to their sites. Though many different methods have been proven effective from online ads to SEO optimization, one of the most popular and affordable ways to advertise your web site is through articles. Yes, articles.

What goes into the average article?

Ordinarily, web site owners will compose articles about the industry their company competes in. For example, if you own a business that specializes in Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC), you might write a series of articles that provide consumers with advice about all their HVAC needs. Afterwards, you can submit these articles to quality directories like EZINE. If accepted, your articles will be featured on the site and you can also include links to your web site. That way, when a potential customer reads your article, he can visit your web site right from the page.

Writing and publishing articles on directories has a number of obvious advantages over other forms of promotion. To begin with, it is cheap. All that is required is time and average conversational writing skills. But no matter how well you write, what potential customers really like to see is that you know you stuff. And if you publish enough articles, you can easily establish yourself as an industry expert, which will undoubtedly increase traffic to your web site.

As you might expect, article writing also has its share of disadvantages. Probably the most blatant one is that article directories do not allow duplicate content. This means that sites will not allow you to submit an article if it has been previously published on another directory. The bottom line is that each and every article you submit must be one hundred percent original, which means you will have to write a number of different articles on the same topic if you want to appear on numerous directories.

And writing dozen of articles about an industry can be quite challenging, even for someone who has experience in the industry. That is one reason why many online business owners seek the help of professional writers to compose their article for them. But this can be quite expensive and you still might not get exactly what you were looking for.

So what’s the solution?

Well, only recently many web site owners have been learning how to turn articles into videos to increase traffic on their web sites. Oftentimes, in fact, they start with an article they have written, one that they are especially proud of, and they convert it into an informative video. They can either learn how to do it themselves, or they can contact a video service that specializes in the process.

What learning how to turn articles into videos do for you?

The easy answer is that you can reach a much broader audience with videos than you can with articles. For one thing, video sharing sites do not have any rules against duplicate content, which means that you can post your videos as often as you like. It is also an undeniable fact that more people watch videos than read articles. For instance, YouTube is now the second most visited site on the Internet. As popular as some directories are, they could never compete with that kind of traffic.