What’s the Best Article Marketing Strategy?

Everything in Internet marketing has a strategy attached to it. Whether you’re talking about graphics or joint ventures or an article marketing strategy, you want to have a plan of attack in place before you embark on a campaign that could cost you time, money or both.

With article marketing, two primary factors are involved – quality and quantity. You can’t neglect either one if you want to have success as an article marketer. If yo churn out a high volume of crappy articles, then they won’t convert and your time will have been wasted.

Likewise, if you take too long working on individual articles, you won’t see the kind of traffic you’d hoped for that will help you generate a nice steady flow of profits. So how do you come up with an article marketing strategy that works for you?

When you’re just starting out, you can take the do it yourself route to keep costs low. But there are so many tasks you have to deal with each day, it may seem hard to get article marketing tasks finished.

Start out slow. Plan to write 1 article per week that’s 400 words total. At the most, this should take you about an hour. If you find that it takes you three or four hours to write an article, then you may need to shelve your article marketing efforts until you’ve completed a course on writing for an online audience.

Once you have the time, increase your quantity to three articles per week, until you’re finally working on one article each day. That’s 365 articles a year out there working for you to pull in targeted prospects.

Rotate the type of article that you use. For instance, on day 1 write a question and answer article. On day 2, write a story article. On day 3 write a list article, and so on. Each week, check the stats on your articles and see which ones are converting better for you.

Each month rotate the directories that you’re using for your article marketing campaigns. On month 1, try EzineArticles.com. Then in month 2, use Xomba.com, and so on. Your niche may convert better in one directory over another, so again, track the results.

At the end of year one, analyze all of your articles to see which directory and type of article you’re ranking high in Google for – and which resource box is converting into click throughs for you, too.

The best article marketing strategy is one that provides the right balance between writing enough content and writing the right kind of content for your target audience. What works best for you may not be an exact duplicate of what works for another marketer.

Twitter Marketing Questions Answered for Beginners

Are you an internet marketer?  Although you may not technically be employed as one, it is one of the many hats you will and should wear when working online.  Do you run a website or blog that sells a product, service, or generates income through affiliate links?  If so, you must double as an internet marketer.  Why?  Because marketing is vital to your success.  After all, you will not generate income if consumers do not know you exist.

If you are new to internet marketing, you will turn to the internet for research.  You will get many great ideas, including the use of article directory back links, buying advertisements on other sites, exchanging banners with other webmasters, and search engine optimization.  These are important internet marketing steps, but to maximize your results, think outside-of-the-box.  When you do, you will find Twitter.

Twitter is a social networking micro-blog.  Users can communicate with each other through updates, also known as Tweets.  Many Twitter members highlight their daily activities, but many also use updates to generate traffic to their websites or blogs and to increase sales.  Straight up advertisements are allowed, as long as they do not qualify as spam.  With that said, many find the best approach to be taking the roundabout way.  If your sell a product or service, drop hints and highlight what you do or what you sell.  Be sure to include a link.

As nice as it is to hear that you can use Twitter for internet marketing, as a newbie, you may have a few questions.  Continue reading on for answers.

Question:  Why use Twitter for internet marketing?

Answer:  The better question should be why not.  There are over 2 million members on Twitter.com.  You will not communicate will all members, but it gives you an amazing opportunity to meet and network with others.  By playing your cards right, you can find your targeted market.  For example, do you work as a freelance web designer?  If so, your target market is those who want to make money through affiliate links or business owners who want a professional website.

Question:  How much time does Twitter take?

Answer:  It all depends.  Like any form of internet marketing, the time and energy you put forth depends on you.  With Twitter, you want to take it slow and easy.  If you create too many messages directing your followers to products you sell online, your messages may be considered spam.  For that reason, send a few Tweets a day.  Since Tweets are 140 characters or less, this is easy.  The most time consuming part of Twitter is finding and adding contacts.

Question:  What can be marketed on Twitter?

Answer:  Just about anything.  As previously stated, it doesn’t matter whether you sell a product, a service, or if you generate income through affiliate links, you can market yourself on Twitter.  You can do so by sending carefully crafted updates.  @replies can be sent to members on your list or those you find on Seach.Twitter.com.  Look for members that ask questions you can answer.  Always provide a link to your website or blog.

Question:  Won’t people turn away from advertisements?

Answer:  Yes.  As previously stated, you want to carefully craft your Tweet messages and @replies.  Don’t just say “Come shop at my online store.”  Instead, send messages stating that you updated your store, got a new product in, or ask for feedback.  Always provide a link and those interested will click, but without feeling forced into doing so.

Question:  How much money can I make using Twitter?

Answer:  It varies.  Twitter is a service that is free to use.  You are not paid for using it, but there is income potential.  The first step is driving traffic to your website or blog, where you sell a product, service, or have affiliate links displayed.  It is, however, important to have something good to sell.  No matter how much traffic your generate, poor quality products and services will not sell.

It has been a while since I posted, as I have been very busy, and have been allowing guest authors to post. But as Marketing Quickies 3 is just about to launch I figured I better write something about it. As you can see from the title of this blog it was conceived for marketing quickies 2 which I had purchased the rights to sell.

Now marketing quickies 3 is a little bit different from 1 and 2. It does involve a similar format, at least in terms of the excellent video tips but how they are delivered is very different. Instead of providing the videos in a cd format this time around Andrew and Lee have stretched the envelope to the absolute limit by incorporating the videos into a membership site with 3 videos every month.

So now you are thinking well nothing very new about that, well there is one small difference. When you buy Marketing Quickies 3 you actually get the mebership site which you can make a recurring income from. The videos are excellent quality as you might expect from Andrew Fox and included in the price of marketing quickies 3 is the complete set up of the membership site for you, a private license to easymember pro, 36 videos in the first year and much more.

I have already told Andrew and Lee that I will be buying a copy so hopefully they have one put by for me as they are restricting the number of packages they sell and I am out of town on launch day. I made a lot of money selling marketing quickies and marketing quickies 2 and expect marketing quickies 3 to be no different

If you want to find out more now and get a free (totally crazy) IM report from Andrew Fox then just click on the link below and check it out for yourself.

Click the highlighted link to get your free report  Marketing Quickies 3

As with any business, publishing your own online newsletter a.k.a. eZine has its share of drawbacks, in spite of the several benefits it offer.

The purpose of this article is not to scare you away with the disadvantages of publishing your own eZine, as the benefits are often more attractive. However, I will also show you how you can easily tackle the cons.

One challenge most beginning eZine publishers face is the creation of eZine content. Creating your own content can be tiresome, especially if you are not a gifted writer. You can also run out of ideas often while your publishing schedule is threatening you.

Create your content in advance. You can compile 30 days worth of content in one day, for example. If you are not blessed with writing skills, you can broker the writing task to capable freelance writers which you can find at places such as http://www.elance.com/ or http://www.rentacoder.com/. While you need to pay for such services, you are at liberty to take the credit for written articles.

Alternatively, you can republish articles from article directories such as http://ezinearticles.com/. This is a free method you can use in making content, provided you include the resource box of the original author and that the article has republishing rights conveyed.

In conclusion, you can easily tackle the content creation challenge using the mentioned methods that do not require writing on your part, free or paid.

Article marketing is possibly the most cost effective way to generate fresh leads for your business. In fact, article marketing can be totally free.

Marketing with articles to gather leads involves simply submitting quality, interesting articles to article directories and databases. There are many great article directories online that serve to host thousands of articles on all different topics. Ezine Articles is one of the top directories and should be a focus for you as they receive a lot of search engine traffic.

It is possible to generate thousands of leads per month if you can successfully submit articles that rank high in the search engines and also lead people to click through to your website and then submit their email address through your opt in form.

So where do these articles come from, you ask?

There are several options:

- You can write them yourself – You can outsource the article writing

If you are a decent writer, then you can get away with writing quality articles yourself. They only need to be between 300 and 400 words, but should contain no fluff and only quality information that will lead people to become curious about your business (without being self promoting as that is not allowed), as well as determining that you are an expert on the topic.

Or you can pay someone else to write your articles. In some cases this works perfectly, but in others only you have expert knowledge on your business and what you want to convey within the articles. But if you can brief your writer on this, a good quality writer will be able to write from your perspective. Expect to pay $10 and upwards for a quality 400 word article. The top article writers will charge up to $50 per article, but this is generally not necessary just for submitting to directories. Save those higher quality articles for your own website.

The important part of the article is your resource box at the end. This is where you can link to your website, say a bit about yourself, and provide incentive for readers to click through. Often mentioning a free report or invoking curiosity by asking a question is a good tactic.

The beauty of article marketing for generating fresh leads is that it’s totally free, it keeps working long after your article is first published, and there is no limit on how far reaching your articles will go. Thousands of websites could potentially publish your articles and link back to your site, thus bringing you more fresh leads.