Article marketing can be a powerful way to improve search engine rankings, drive targeted visitors to your website, and improve your company's brand. Over time, I've learned a number of important lessons when it comes to article marketing.
Article marketing if free, and, if you like to write, it can be fun. It is not fast however, as you have to wait for the traffic, and wait even longer for the sales.
Let's get down to business.
PARTt #1: Only Submit to Popular Article Marketing Websites
Not all article directories, websites, and blogs are the same. Submitting your articles to sites that have a low Google PR (page rank) or very few inbound links doesn't do a lot to promote your content or pass along any value back to your site.
Consider the sites you submit your content to carefully. Actually, the only site that I would recommend submitting to is ezinearticles.com.
There are a few reasons why I choose ezine.
1. Resource Box
The resource box is a short paragraph about the author that publishers usually request with article submissions. It's included at the bottom of the published article and is an opportunity to brand yourself, your business, and your website. The minimum it should contain is your name, business name, and web site address. Space permitting, the resource box should also include a tagline, e-mail address and credentials.
2. Inbound Links
Every time your article is published there should be a live link to your website in the resource box. This give you one more inbound link to help the search engine ranking of your site. Be sure to include important keywords in the link text for extra points with the search engines.
3. Building credibility
Published articles help establish your expertise. You develop a position of authority in your field and recognition with respect to the topics you cover in your writing. It's easier to gain a prospective client's trust when you have the credibility of being a published author. Prospects who trust you are more likely to make a purchase.
4. Receptive audience
The people who receive the ezines containing your articles have subscribed because they're interested in that particular ezine's topics. Thus, your article and business information are being delivered to people who have voluntarily pre-selected themselves to receive the sort of information about which you write. Compound this benefit by submitting each of your articles to several ezines.
5. Exposure
When your article is sent out to a publisher's list, it's an excellent result of your efforts. In addition, many publishers place articles from the current issue on their homepage, and then archive the articles. Visitors often refer to the archives before deciding whether to subscribe, and so the exposure you receive from each article extends beyond the initial publication date.
6. Leverage
You have content that you can leverage when you write articles. Whatever you write can be used for multiple purposes. For example, develop an article into a seminar presentation, and expand the material to make an ebook. At the very least, publish the article on your own website. Search engines look favourably on new content.
7. Viral marketing
Allow ezine publishers to include your articles in their free ebooks, as long as your resource box is included. Since these are being given away, your ad multiplies. Also, submitting articles to publishers that have a free content directory on their site will allow visitors to republish your article intact, again multiplying your exposure.
Conclusion: If you could benefit from any of these seven reasons for writing articles, then the time for action has arrived. Go to any search engine, and type in a phrase like ‘ezine publishers’. You could narrow the search by including the topics you'd write and include the word free.
Once you've found some publishers, and you know there's an audience out there for your subject, write your first article. Be sure to proof-read your finished article; your intention is to establish credibility, and to brand your business. A well-written and polished piece will help you accomplish a favourable result.
Once you've gotten your first article published, go ahead and do it again, continuing to spread the word about you and your business all over the Internet.
I hope you have learned a lot about ezine articles in this first part, now let's move on to part two.
PART #2- Submit Your Article on a Regular Basis
When I don't train consistently because of traveling or personal issues, I lose karate tournaments. If you want to achieve your business goals online, you have to consistently write and submit articles. You have to be in front of your audience on a regular basis. Otherwise you will lose sales to your competitors. How do you do that? This tip might help you:
It's simple and you've probably heard it before. Plan! The most effective way of getting everything things done is by first; making a list of the things that you need to get done. The second step is organizing the list chronologically "when you will do it". Writing your daily (weekly, monthly... etc) tasks down is a powerful key to success and relieving stress. Guru David Allen teaches that a trustworthy agenda will let your mind rest and not cling to each thing that you have to do -this definitely eliminates stress. Well, let's get started right now.
PART #3- Manage Through The Ups and Downs
Not every article you write and submit online will be a success. You will have ups and downs with your article marketing efforts, but you have to keep writing consistently. It's the only way you will win in the long term.
The following tips may help you to write better articles:
On the Internet “content is king”, and the real guts of content is the written word. If you are managing a website you need readable text for your onsite articles, for articles in your promotional newsletter or ezine and for promotional articles to be published on other sites or in other ezines. While these writing tasks can be outsourced to professionals, it is also possible for you to do it yourself if you follow a step-by-step process that is outlined in the following ten tips.
1. In the first paragraph clearly state what the article is about. In standard journalism you would tell who, what, why, when and where an event is happening. In web articles you oftentimes state a problem, such as “how to get good written materials for your website”, and then explain how the article is going to solve the problem “by showing a simple step-by-step approach to writing”.
2. Organize your material in a point-wise fashion. Before you begin writing think of the points that your article is going to cover. You may not necessarily show the points, as I am doing in this article (calling them ten tips), however, for your own outline of the article you should know what you are going to say before you begin writing. Write down these points and then make sure you include them as you begin the writing process.
3. Put the reader at ease. You are not writing for a scientific or literary society, but to your peers on the Internet. Write in a simple style and if you introduce new terms, define them for your readers.
4. Explain your points in short paragraphs. Short paragraphs are easier for the reader to follow. No one likes to look at a long block of solid text. Three, four or five sentences are usually enough for one paragraph.
5. Don’t be afraid to spill all the beans! Tell your trade secrets! No, I am not crazy, the more you tell, the more the demand you will create for your goods and services. I once hesitated to write an article on “Tips for Writing Meta Tags” (http://www.a1-optimization.com/optimization-tips-2.htm) thinking, who will need my search engine optimization services if they read the article? I was wrong, the article was widely published and generated several orders for my services. If you give more information, people will understand that you really are an authority on the subject that you are speaking about.
6. Give concrete examples and personal experiences to back up your points. Tell how you faced a problem and how you solved it. Or give hypothetical examples of the California Widget Company and how its website would, for example need a title tag of “Widgets: electronic widgets from the California Widget Company”
7. Emphasize the benefits of your product or service. When it comes to selling, it is the benefits that sell, rather than the features. Sure, you are selling garden supplies, home décor, clothing, gifts and jewelry on your website. These are features. But the benefits are that people can get these items in one place without shopping around, that they can save time and money, etc. The gurus of Internet marketing, such as Ken Evoy (http://myws.sitesell.com/webpromote2.html) all say that you should constantly mention the benefits that you offer to your potential customer.
8. Give resource information to your readers. Give the addresses of websites where your readers can get more information on the subject that you are talking about. These may be your own websites or they can be other resources. In case you are worrying about losing customers, good outgoing links from your website are also helpful to your site’s page ranking and positioning in search engines.
9. Get another opinion on your article. Show it to your friends and colleagues, and don’t worry if they criticize you, it is better that your friends find the mistakes than your clientele. Always remember, a good editor is a writer’s best friend
10. Keep your most important information near the beginning of the article and summarize what you want to say at the end. Editors usually cut things near the end, so keep your most important points and ideas in the beginning of the article. At the very end of the article you can summarize what you set out to accomplish in your opening paragraph.
You may not win a literary prize, but if you follow the steps that I have outlined above you will be able to produce effective written content for your website and for your promotional outreach via your own newsletters and through articles published on other websites. These articles could become the key to success in your Internet endeavors.
It took me a long time to become successful at article marketing, and I am still not really 'rolling in the dough.' However I learned that there are no obstacles that I couldn't beat if I consistently persevere. How many of us secretly wish our success would be handed to us on a silver platter? Well, unless you're investing in hyips and get lucky, Get real. There is work involved. The solution is to make the hard work fun by doing what you love to do (sharing your expertise) and delegating what you don't (the mind boggling, manual article submission.)
PART #5- Model Others That Have Succeeded
Find someone who's already been successful at article marketing. You will find that individual adapts his or her techniques, forms and strategies to continually improve his success. When writing your articles, model article templates that work for others and then adapt it to your own writing style.
PART #6- Diversify Your Content
Aricle marketing is a great technique for promotion, seo, and other benefits. However, it's only one tactic to be used as part of a comprehensive online marketing campaign. You can easily turn your articles into products like blog posts, white papers, eBooks, and podcasts. For example, I could turn this GOD LONG article into an entire ebook! But instead, I wanted to share it with you here at DTM.
PART #7- Use the Right Tools
If you're serious about article marketing, then consider the many tools (free and paid) for writing and or distributing your articles. I used to spend about 5 - 6 hours submitting articles to directories and can now achieve the same outcome in as little as 30 minutes. I personally do not use an article submitter, since I only submit to one directory.
PART #8- Keywords
You need keywords in your articles. Here are some tips to do so.
Determining keywords is a critical step in writing articles online for effective public relations strategy. If your articles, blog, eZine, or website do not contain related keywords, surfers will be unable to find your articles when they conduct searches.
According to Sharon Housley the formula is a little tricky - you will need to locate terms that are popular and relevant to your article. "These terms may or may not be terms that *you* feel are relevant terms," she says.
The optimal terms in an article should be terms that a potential customer would use when searching for an article with your content that relates to your area of expertise.
In order to achieve success your article should be optimized with terms and phrases that are descriptive, related to your content, and which receive a significant amount of searches.
"The caveat, of course, is that you want to find terms and phrases where there is little competition, so you quickly achieve high ranking in the important search engines," according to Housley.
She gives this great formula: relevant + popular with searchers but not with competitors = success
"Markets saturated with other sites competing for search terms make it difficult to find quality keywords. Sometimes it is better to optimize for a less popular term, one that is more targeted at your visitor, as it will likely have a higher conversion rate than a less specific popular term," she believes.
So how do you go about it?
Here are 6 easy steps:
Step 1: Brainstorm a list of logical terms and phrases that relate to your area of expertise, product or offerings. This should be done by a number of individuals; sometimes people have very different ideas for search terms and by identifying a variety of people and their search terms you may tap words that hadn't occurred to you.
Step 2: Use free and low-cost tools available online and for download to allow you to expand and research terms that have been brainstormed. The results typically vary with the tools but overall the tools will assist you in determining where to focus your keyword efforts. The tools will often assist with pay-per-click engines, creating expanded, related keywords or phrases that can be bid on.
Examples include:
KeywordTumbler - KeywordTumbler takes existing keyword phrases and generates multiple variations, reordering the words. This allows you to build a large keyword list in seconds.
http://www.keywordtumbler.com/
TheDowser - Overture Keyword Tool, Google Keyword Sandbox, Keyword Harvester, Google AdWords report analyzer, Google AdWords optimization tool, log file analyzer, conversion tracking and optimization tool.
http://www.thedowser.com/
WordTracker - Wordtracker helps you choose the right internet marketing keywords that will help your search engine placement and ranking. Use Wordtracker for keyword research. Web marketing is all about search engine ranking, and that starts with the proper internet marketing keywords. Get a free keyword report and web site promotion information!
http://www.wordtracker.com/
Keyword Suggestion Tools - A handy little tool will show you the results of your query from both Wordtracker and Overture for determining which phrases are searched most often. Enter a search phrase below to see how often it's searched for, as well as get suggestions for alternate (but similar) keywords.
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/
Keyword Ranking Tool - This utility can be used to check search engines for keyword ranking and track search engine ranking for your various keywords over time, which, as you probably know, is critical when doing search engine optimization.
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/
Overture Keyword Tool - After entering a keyword or phrase, Overture provides a list of related phrases that have been searched on. The tool provides a count that indicates the number of times the phrase has been searched on.
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
Topword Tool - Topword Tool is a free online tool that analyzes a complete web page and counts keyword occurrences, as well as keyword phrases (number in brackets), equal to or above that set in the Minimum Occurrences setting. It supplies a list of keywords and keyword phrases which are most likely to achieve the highest rankings on a major search engine. The tool will also analyze your meta description/keyword and title tags and then, through color coding, inform you of words/phrases which should be included. The main use for this tool is checking your optimization and tweaking existing web sites to rank well.
http://www.abakus-internet-marketing.de/tools/topword.html/
Google Suggestion - The Google Suggestion is a new online tool for webmasters. As you type into the search box, Google Suggest guesses what you're typing and offers suggestions in real time. This is similar to Google's "Did you mean?" feature that offers alternative spellings for your query after you search, except that it works in real time. For example, if you type "bass", Google Suggest might offer a list of refinements that include "bass fishing" or "bass guitar". Similarly, if you type in only part of a word, like "progr," Google Suggest might offer you refinements like "programming", "programming languages", "progesterone", or "progressive". You can choose one by scrolling up or down the list with the arrow keys or mouse. The tool provides a number that indicates the number of searches a specific word or phrase has had.
http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en
Step 3: Examine your log files on your own website to see what terms customers are using to find an article or website,
Step 4: Visit competitors web sites and articles and examine their meta tags for additional terms,
Step 5: Use a thesaurus to find related terms, include misspellings of keywords in your keywords, and optimize for various forms of nouns and verbs, including tenses and plurals.
Step 6: Measure your success. Keyword statistics give Internet marketers a way to tap into what is on the minds of Internet consumers. When you can match your marketing efforts to the various ways people locate their items of interest on the net, Housley says "potential customers will be streamed to your site like ants to a picnic". Also measure posts to your blog or new subscribers to your Ezine as other ways to measure how successful your effective public relations strategy has been.
PART #9- Recommended Sites
Here are some great sites about article marketing:
http:// www.edwardsmoneyblog.tk
www.articlewritingtips.com (the name fits it!! haha. )
www.ezinearticles.com (Yea, go there and search around.)
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/...ting.html (List of 50 helpful article writing tools.)
There are hundreds of other sites, I just came up with these by doing a quick search on Google.
Thanks for reading and have a great day!
Sincerely,
Edward Brown
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