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.

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.

There are more than 100 millions of blogs in the blogosphere. If you own a blog, you definitely want to drive as much traffic to it as possible to make it visible in that huge list.

The following are effective blog marketing methods to capture more visitors and traffic to your blog:

1. Optimized your blog posts, title tags, headings, metatags and many other parts of a blog with popular keywords to maximize your search engine rankings. The higher your blog ranking in the search engines, the better you can gain traffic relatively quickly.

2. Pinging your blog, whenever you post new content, is an efficient technique to improve its popularity and helps search engines to crawl and index your blog properly. Pinging notifies all the major blog directories of your updated content to make it available for a larger audience.

3. By adding a Google sitemap to your blog, you can more easily submit your site to the Google search engine spider. You get better coverage by the spider, than by simply submitting your blog to the Google search engine.

4. Contributing valuable comments on relevant blogs can also draw visitors to your own blog. As long as you post well-written and informative comments, chances are, people would want to know further about your expertise and be clicking on your link.

5. Search for link partners and build quality, relevant links to your blog. Quality of relevant links are far more important than quantity. Having other sites linking to your content is a sure fire way to get readers from that blog

6. To increase your blog’s “clickability”, place Adsense units in strategical places within your blog. Cluttering your blog with Google AdSense units will leave a bad impression on your readers and drive them away.

7. Post quality, original content to your blog often. The more quality content you provide for your readers, the higher the chances that your audience will link to you and share the information you are presenting to others. Great content is what makes readers stay and keep coming back for more.

Whew! The hard work is done right? You’ve put blood, sweat, tears and cash into the creation of your video content and now it’s up on the web. If you publish it, they will come right? Wrong! You’ve got some more work that needs to be done before the masses come rushing to watch your videos and the first thing you need to do is to get the search engines indexing your videos. So here are a handful of tips so get reading already because time is a wasting.

Keywords “If you don’t have good keywords then you might as well quit now. These are vital pieces of information that will help categorize your videos and make them findable in search engines. When people search for video what do they do? They put words into a text box on a webpage and that’s how they search. So make sure you choose specific words that correctly describe your video and then use those words in the title, description and the keyword areas when you post the video up on the web.

Video Sharing Sites “You will not be surprised to learn that YouTube gets more traffic than your website does. So why not put your video where the most people can find it? YouTube is one of the most popular sites on the web and one of the great things about it is that you won’t get hit for duplicate content in Google’s index when you post your videos up there. A pretty cool advantage for a small amount of work really. Making a channel to group all of your videos together will also help to strengthen brand awareness as they will be easier to find.

RSS and MRSS “These two protocols allow you to tell the search engines when your site updates and when you post something new on the web, specifically for MRSS a media file. There are very specific formats required for these files but they’re easy enough to research. Many CMS software packages even make them automatically so you don’t even really need to worry about making it, just submitting it. This will really help the search engines find you content when you tell them where these files are and soon your videos will be shooting up the search engine results charts.

Three simple things you can do to help get your videos noticed by the search engines. No they’re not the only things you can do but are more like the tip of the iceberg. These are probably three things that you will most often see suggested by SEO people. They are not the only things you can do and others include good content that’s interesting and easy to share with others.

E-books are the future and the future is now! The printed word on paper and bound into books used to be the main way information was given and received. They were great…. you could take them with you and put them on shelves. Books still exist and will continue to for the foreseeable future but the time of the E-book has arrived.

The marketing E-book is slightly different from just an E-book. Marketing E-books contain text, images, links to web pages and navigation controls. The marketing E-book has become a very important part of marketing on the Internet.

With a marketing E-book you present your story in an effective way and include links to your web sales pages. Your E-book can become your best salesman.

Your E-book needs to be interesting and informative. It always has links back to your web site and to your sales page.

Make sure that you have a prominent section telling readers that they are free to give your E-book away. Let them know that they can post it on their site as a free download, that they can use it as a bonus, and that they can bundle it with other products. This is the way to create viral marketing for your products or services. Remember those links back to your site contained in the E-book?

Finally, before you send your E-book out to the world, double check spelling and grammar and be sure that you have tested every link to verify that it goes where it is supposed to go. Obvious errors will reflect badly on you and will not be of much value to you, it could even by damaging.

Post your E-book to some of the E-book directories. Many let you post it for free, or will let you post a link on their site to your E-book.

Each year, thousands of companies consistently raise prices to increase margins and offset growth in various costs. For anyone working in corporate America, you are quite familiar with this tactic. For marketers, rising costs are always a challenge.

Price increases can negatively impact the sales and marketing efforts for today’s busy marketing professional. A price increase on products or services that haven’t changed creates a difficult scenario for current customers familiar with a lower cost. This is especially true when we hear objections from our customers expressing their dissatisfaction. With few or literally no changes to a given product overcoming objections is difficult.

One of the biggest concerns that marketers have about price increases is that of customer attrition. This is especially true in markets where your competitor is priced are lower or about the same as your offering. There is always someone else that your customer can buy from. A recent study I read indicated that even though price can be an obstacle to buying, current customers are less likely to leave you after a price increase.

There are a number of reasons why customers do not jump ship so quickly. The bottom line is that switch has costs associated with it. These costs are both and emotional as well as financial.

Your customers, and all consumers for that matter, have been conditioned to find the lowest price possible for any given product or service. When rolling out a price increase, customers do not want to pay full price. This is why they continue to ask for discounts even after a price increase has been put into affect.

Here are some ways to overcome objections related to price increases:

Add value that is greater than or equal to your price increase. Customers do not want to pay more for the same old thing. When they do, their perception of value diminishes. Provide additional services, support, or terms to deliver additional value that is substantiated by price.

Focus on switching costs. If a customer has to leave you, there are direct and indirect costs associated with doing so. Make a list for yourself. By moving to a new vendor, does you customer have to pay a new fee of some sort? Will they lose money by canceling with you or your services? How much time and effort do they need to put into finding a new vendor?

Not all customers are equal. I know that saying so is not going to be popular but its the truth. Your customers are different shapes and sizes and mean different things to your company and organization. Price increases should reflect the individuality of your customer base and be designed for maximum impact.

In closing, one thing to keep in mind is that you should really understand who your customers may consider purchasing from if you weren’t providing them products or services. Then, be sure to understand what their pricing structures look like.

If you have a stronger package at a better price than you competitors, switching is not an issue. If your offering is less valuable and more expensive, then perhaps you need to reevaluate your pricing. As a marketer, your job is to create a perception of value or remedy for a given need. Identify that need and focus your messaging on meeting that need. When you do, price is rarely an issue.