Article Marketing

If you want to really make your article "SELL" then you've got to craft the perfect RESOURCE BOX. This is the "author bio" that is below your article body and it's also known as your "SIG" (short for SIGnature).

Here are the essential items that should be in your RESOURCE BOX:

• Your Name: You'd be amazed at how many folks forget to include their name in the RESOURCE BOX. Your name and optional title should be the first thing in your resource box.
  
  
• Your Website Address: in valid URL form. Example: http://Your-Company-Name.com/
  
  
• Your Elevator Pitch: This is 1 to 3 sentences that encapsulates the essence of what makes you and your offering unique. Also known as your USP (Unique Selling Proposition).
  
  
• Your Call To Action: You've got them warmed up and now it's time to lead them to BUY from you or visit your website. This is where you "Ask For The Sale." Best to only give (1) specific call to action.

Here are some optional items you could include in your RESOURCE BOX:

• Your Ezine Subscription Address: While getting your interested visitor to surf your website is nice, capturing their email address can help you begin the confidence/trust process. If you're going to do this strategy, include a URL for your ezine subscription address and do not use an email address for the "join" address.
  
  
• Your Contact Information: Such as your business phone number or how to reach you for interviews or your press/media kit. Keep in mind that article marketing is a timeless strategy and you may not have an easy ability to retract what you put in your article once it hits major distribution.
  
  
• A Free Report: This could also be part of your call to action or your free bonus report that further enhances your credibility as the expert on the topic of your article.
  
  
• Your email autoresponder: I'm not a big fan of this strategy due to the fact that spammers will text-extract your autoresponder address and add it to their spam list. Perhaps this strategy was best for the 1990's and has now run its course.
  
  
• An anchor URL that is related to one keyword or keyword phrase that you want to build SEO strength for. Example: if I wanted to build search engine relevance/strength for the term "Article Marketing," I'd link up that term in my resource box to my website. This is an intermediate to advanced level strategy and should not be abused by over-doing it. Keep it simple.

What NOT to include in your RESOURCE BOX:

• A listing of every website you own. There is no faster way to dilute your credibility than by posting a half dozen irrelevant URLs that have nothing to do with each other. Best to only post ONE URL that is related to the topic of your article.
  
  
• A listing of every accomplishment you've achieved to date. No one cares. Keep your resource box brief and to the point. Yes, your resource box should be benefit oriented so that the reader finds value in reading it rather than your ego being justified.
  
  
• Advertisements or pitches for products that are not relevant to the topic of your article.
  
  
• Keep the size of your resource box so that it's no larger than 20% of your total article size. Too often I see resource boxes that are 50% of the size of the total article and this is abusive.

Your Perfect Resource Box Conclusion:

The BODY of your article is where you "GIVE" and the RESOURCE BOX is where you get to "TAKE" for your article marketing gift of information. The resource box is the "currency of payment" you receive for giving away your article. Be sure to include your name, website address, your unique selling proposition as briefly as possible and a simple call to action.

About The Author:

Christopher M. Knight invites you to submit your best quality original articles for massive exposure to the high-traffic http://EzineArticles.com/ expert author community. When you submit your articles to EzineArticles.com, your articles will be picked up by ezine publishers who will reprint your articles with your content and links intact giving you traffic surges to help you increase your sales. To submit your article, setup a membership account today: http://EzineArticles.com/submit/

Keyword Research Tools For Free.

To add to my6 last post, I wanted to share the free and easy keyword research tools that I use to find my keyword phrases.

First, you want to try to find 3-4 word phrases with high search volume, enough that people are actually looking for them.

Next, you've got to make sure to actually look at the first 10-20 results and see if there is room for improvement. Usually there is.

Try to register your domain with your main keyword phrase within it. If need be, use hyphens, for example http://web-social-marketing.com.

Make a list of a ton of related keyword phrases that you can use interchangeably for anchor text within your content.

Here are the 2 tools I use (in order of importance)

Google Keyword Research Tool
Good Keywords
SEO Book Keyword Research Tool

Now get to researching and don't forget to look at your competition.

Sheree

P.S. If there are plenty of people paying for advertising, you've got a profitable keyword phrase. Also, competition is a great thing.

Click Here To See What To Do Next

Why is keyword research so important?

Why is keyword research so important?

Well, even if you're doing affiliate marketing, you'll need to find a way to reach your target market. There are so many websites out there peddling their wares that you need to find a niche within a niche in order to find a small group of people who are actively searching for whatever you have to offer.
This is especially true in the world of home business opportunities and information products.

For example, your main keyword cannot be "Home Business" or "Internet Marketing" when you are starting out with your new home business. There are too many big companies out there competing for those keywords who have tons of advertising money and have been around for a while.

Think about your interests and your strengths.

You want your website to reflect on topics that you have researched or learned through experience. Is there something you've always wanted to learn? Something you are an expert on? Something you're really interested in?

Figure out what your going to make your website about and then research the possible keywords you could use. Make sure you check out your competition and see how you could give your target market something different.
Give them something more than they're currently finding on the Internet.
When you're doing your research, don't be afraid to dig really deep and find out what your market wants that they're not already able to find. This is going to be your long term strategy. You want your site to be content filled and resourseful enough that you won't have any trouble getting other webmasters to do link exchanges with you.

Let's do a little brainstorming.

Let's say that you're an affiliate marketer. You need to think like someone who is searching for what you have to offer. Let's say you're selling an information product about starting a home based business. This can be a really hard niche to get noticed in because there are so many information products out there and there are so many affiliate opportunities out there.

So, you can narrow your topic down to your area(s) of expertise.

* Have you tried different methods of running your business without success? make your website about what NOT to do when starting a home based business.
* Are you a techie? Make your website a how to website for the more technical aspects of home business set up.
* Are you a master at creating website design? make your website a how to for home business entrepreneurs who want to have their own website.
* Are you a people person? Get into network marketing and make your website about techniques network marketers can use when prospecting.

Even if your not an expert yet, find a topic that interests you and get to researching it!

If you plan out your business before creating your first website, you'll save a lot of time and money. Whatever it is that you want to do, you'll find plenty of learning resources on the Internet. Just remember to be careful out there.

There are a lot of "companies" selling information that can be found for free on the Internet. I am always adding new free resources for Newbie affiliate marketers, because you are their prime target. Don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter. before you leave here today.

With that said, there are also some really good products out there if you want to learn something in detail. For example, I really wanted my business to get a head start and I found an awesome full course on Internet Marketing (after buying a couple of other 'newbie targeted' products that were junk). I also wanted to get a thorough education on website design and found a great product for that as well. Those are just some examples of things that I wanted to have some know how on and I found it.

There are resources on the Internet for just about any subject you could ever want to learn about. Just be aware of the 'expert competition' that's already out there.

One thing I found when researching the "Home Business" niche is that a lot of people are just parading their opportunities on a website with a good domain name.
If you set out to help people rather than make a quick buck, I promise you that you'll have far greater results.

Lets Start earning.com Search Engine Optimization

7 Surefire Ways To Increase Your Traffic Starting Yesterday

Internet. Business. Profit. To fully integrate all of these words into a successful merging you will need another word. Traffic. Every article you will find about making your site or company successful would always include the importance of generating traffic.

So, we all know that in the core of it all, traffic is the most essential thing to a successful internet based business company. Aside from ensuring that you have a great product to sell, and you have your company’s internal organization well taken core of, it would be time to get to the nitty gritty of things, generating traffic.

If you already have a site and you want think that you're not getting the traffic that you're supposed to be getting, then its time to reconsider. If you are contending in these very competitive business, you should always be a step ahead of your competition, increasing your traffic flow should have been done starting yesterday.

Timing is essential, that’s an old adage known to everyone. But with generating traffic, you should always be on your toes and be a day ahead of everyone. Never think of today and tomorrow as a starting point for making your site traffic laden, it should always have been yesterday.

To help you out in generating more traffic for your site, here are some seven surefire ways to increase your traffic starting from yesterday.

1) Invest in good advertising with search engines

Google’s Adwords and Yahoo’s Overture provide great advertising schemes that are very truly popular and assures great traffic. Although with this surefire way to increase your traffic would cost some money. While some would shy away from spending money to increase traffic, it is imperative in this case to do so because Adwords and Overture is the top surefire way to increase your traffic.

You could see for yourself the success this search engine advertising methods have reaped rewards for so many companies. Lots of site feature these advertising system and many have signed on to reap the benefits. Do not be left behind. Every penny is worth it with using Google and Yahoo’s advertising.

2) Exchange or Trade Links with other sites

With exchanging links with other sites, both of you will benefit from the efforts both of you do to enhance your sites traffic. When one site features another sites link, they could provide one another with the traffic one site generates. The efforts are doubly beneficial because it would seem like both of you are working to generate more traffic. The more links traded with more sites the more traffic could be expected.

3) Use Viral Marketing

Viral marketing allows you to spread the word about your company and product without any costs or if ever low costs only. This is a marketing method that can be quite sneaky; you can attach your company’s name, product or link to a certain media such as a funny video, entertaining game, an interesting article or a gossip or buzz. With this method, people get infected with the creativity and entertainment of the medium that they will pass it on to many people.

4) Search and use proper keywords or keyword phrases for your sites content

Search engines look for certain keywords that they would show in their results page. In doing so, having the right keyword and keyword phrase is a high requirement in ranking in high in search engine results. You could write your own content or you could hire someone to do it for you.

5) Write Articles that can lead traffic to your site

Submit articles to sites that would contain the same subject that your site deals in. If you sell car parts write press releases and articles about cars and car parts. Attach your sites description and services at the end of the article as well as the link.

6) Join forums and form online communities

Capture a market and show your expertise and credibility. When you found a good foundation for your site, people will trust you and your site and will pass on to many people their trust. Traffic will certainly increase because they know that you can provide what they need.

7) Lastly, Offer newsletters.

If many people know what you are about and your existence is shared with many others, you will find a loyal traffic that can provide you with more traffic by recommendation. If you arouse the curiosity of your customers they would be pushed to help you with your traffic.

The Newbie Business Center

3 Things You Must Do Before You Submit To Article Directories

To all writers and non-writers out there, now is the time to start digging up those creative writing skills back.
With modern communication technology comes the popularity of information-based marketing, which is one of the oldest and most effective techniques in getting targeted prospects to sites and converting them into buyers. This is why article writing, submissions and publications are also getting popular.

There are already many tools that people can use to make the process of distributing their articles more easily. Though this is invaluable in getting the contents more exposure, which is only half of the story.
Let us take a look first at the common mistakes that some people make before submitting their contents to article directories:

1. Confusing the reason to promote the articles with the reason to write them.
In article writing, there are three key benefits why you are promoting them; branding, lead generation and promotion, which are all part of your optimization efforts.

But there is only one reason why you write an article, and that is to inform your audience. If the article is not focused on this primary and most important purpose, it will fail to achieve the three promotion benefits because no one will be interested in reading them.

You need to figure out first how to get people to read what is in your article, then make them click on your resource box. You can achieve this by producing better contents.

2. Failing to maximize the promotional opportunities of article marketing.

You may know already that your articles can help you generate additional links back to your site. But do you know that you can get more visitors and better search engine results from that same articles?

Mention keywords at strategic places. Just be sure not to overdo them. Some are even using anchor texts which is also an effective method. But it is important to know that majority of the directories are not able to support this.
Remember that is not only about the links back to your site. Part of doing well in your article marketing is getting picked up by publishers with a large number of audiences and gaining the ability of leveraging other brands because of the quality of your work. Better search engine results also are great benefits.

But these things do not put much money in your pocket. There are other factors that can turn your article marketing efforts into an opportunity that can boost your earnings. Not just increase the number of visitors to your site.

Start out with a plan and see to it that your article will serve the function that you intended it to have.

3. Publishing content that does not help your readers.
Maybe in the process of writing articles, you are thinking that all that is you wanted is links back to your site. And any visitors it can generate are fine.

Guess what? Not all article banks and directories are going to accept your content automatically. Oftentimes, they have some guidelines and specifications on the articles that they are accepting.
You can double the number of sites you can submit to by writing articles that the directories want to share with other people. All it takes is one publisher with a hundred thousand readers to increase your potential audience overnight.

Write the articles that publishers want in their publications if you want your article marketing to work the most effective way for you. This also means you have to obey the standard guidelines, spell checks, researching on a good topic and even hiring a writer to produce a good content on your behalf.

In the end, it is all really a matter of choice on your part. You can start getting a little exposure from increased links back but on a very basic level. Or enjoy massive exposure from a little extra time making quality contents.

It will be your choice. You may not be aware of the fact that an article submitted on directories is not meant to have the same level of exposure as highly-targeted content ones geared on a narrow group of people.

Learn the difference between these two and it will surely help you know what kinds of articles to write and to submit.

Click Here To Learn More About Article Marketing

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Just Why is SEO So Damn Hard?

And What You Can Do About It! - Part I by Leslie Rohde If you've been doing SEO for a while, you might remember the "good ol' days" when getting top ranking was easy. Wow, was that ever fun. Doesn't it seem a lot harder today? Yeah, and it is too, but why? Better still ... what do we do about it? It is said that if we do not understand history then we will be damned to repeat it, so in Part 1 of this three part series, let's take a look at what has changed these last few years and how these changes have made ranking more difficult. This will set us up to understand what has to be done today to command top rank in the major search engines. GEOMETRIC GROWTH Reported Index Size Jun 2000 1 billion Dec 2001 3 billion Jan 2004 4.3 billion Nov 2004 8 billion latest est. 12-14 billion Remember when businesses did not have web sites? That was not very long ago. Now pretty much every commercial vehicle has a domain name plastered across it. Doing business on the web truly has made it to the mainstream which was not true even just 5 years ago. This alone has created a huge increase in the number of websites in the index. And then there is that Adsense thing. Just in case you are not familiar with it, the Google Adsense program allows web sites to place Google advertising on their site and share in the advertising revenue when visitors click the Google ads. This makes for a trivial way to monetize website traffic, so of course, in nearly no time at all about a billion (give or take) websites were launched with the sole purpose of attracting visitors to click Google Adsense advertising. This gave rise to the expression the "Made for Adsense" (MFA) website. The net impact on the Google index can be understood to some extent by just looking at the number of pages indexed. Even if nothing else changed in SEO in the last few years, from just these numbers alone we should expect ranking to be about three times as difficult today as compared to a few years ago. But the "business of search" itself has changed too, making top ranking more difficult still. MOVING THE FOLD Remember when Google had no paid ads? Now look at it! When Google first started selling advertising space, there were a maximum of two sponsored links and there was often only one actually taken. Today Google will show as many as three (Yahoo! will show four!) and Google results pages have sprouted a bunch of other stuff as well. The screen shot here shows three paid ads; a result from my own computer because I have Google Desktop installed; and the #1 listing shows the expanded result. This kind of advertising-heavy display has become more common of late. In other cases you might find local search results that take even more space. The result? It's no longer enough to be in the top 10, or even the top 5 results. Almost all clicks go to the top 2 or 3 because all the rest have been moved below "the fold" - the point where the user has to scroll to see the rest of the page. And this all feeds on itself. Because there is now way more competition for a reduced number of high value spots, more businesses are simply buying the sponsored positions, making the need to do so even more common! By itself, the movement of the fold line has had the net effect of making SEO three to five times more difficult. THE SEO ARMS RACE Like it or not, business is a competition, and search engine ranking doubly so. For you to get top ranking means that someone else doesn't, which they will likely not be very happy about, so they'll try to take it back ... and so will the next guy ... and the next guy ... and the next. At some point, some smart guy or gal figures out how to "game the system" and for a short time is unbeatable - right up to the point that other people figure out his secret. And then the cycle repeats. I've been doing this for 7 years and it shows no sign of slowing down. If anything, it's getting worse, and I'm partly to blame. As ranking gets ever more competitive and complex, web masters find equally tricky techniques to gain an edge. In any competition, especially where money is the reward, people will always come up with new and better ways to win the game. As time goes on, this makes it progressively more and more difficult for new people to enter the marketplace because the seasoned competitors have developed so much more specialized knowledge. This is not unique to search marketing, but is a natural process that is true in all business, and geo-politics as well - it is what us cold-war kids called "the arms race". And the stature of some of today's players in search marketing is a real and valid concern as well. Who of us can afford to compete with companies with search budgets of literally hundreds of thousands of dollars? As more and more large companies become aware of and educated about search marketing, the opportunities for smaller players might become restricted. So with each passing year, the competition increases, the existing players tend to be better funded and the knowledge and expertise required to be successful grows larger. No wonder SEO is harder today and unavoidably these trends will lead to more and more web business failures. BUT THE GOOD NEWS IS... This is actually the best time in the history of the Internet to get started in search marketing! I realize that is counter-intuitive given all the bad news I just laid on you, but the bad news ignores the opportunity. The economic rewards that come from effective search marketing today are simply huge and getting bigger at a rate that out-paces the increase in either competition or complexity by a wide margin. Sure, the "good ol' days" were great and the ranking was easy, but the profits were nothing! Nothing compared to the level of success achievable today. Right now, today, will in some future year be regarded as "the sweet spot". In part 2, I'll show you how and why this is true and how you can, and should!, position yourself to take advantage of it while it lasts.

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