Helping Others with Article Marketing Helps your Website

Article marketing that helps others will help your website. Internet users seek solutions and advice. If your article marketing strategy provides for solution-oriented content, your marketing strategy will turn into a strategy for success.

Article marketing has the potential to help others. Writing article content that provides a solution to a problem is a classic article marketing strategy – and with good reason. The majority of internet users made the initial choice to go online for personal reasons, such as socialising, solving problems, and receiving help – and a significant portion of internet users switched from dial-up to broadband to find the solutions to their problems faster. (Pew Internet Research 2008). An article marketing strategy that includes problem-solving article content is highly likely to become sought-after content and build up your website traffic.

To successfully implement an article marketing strategy using problem-solving content, it is first necessary to narrowly definite your target audience. Research demographics, incomes, lifestyles, internet usage and behavior of customers before you begin to write article content to appeal to the reader, and you’re likely to boost your return rate. MarketingVox reported that Snapple saw a 29 percent increase in purchasing intent, a 73 percent increase in brand favorability, and a 56 percent increase in awareness when they focused on behavior targeting within demographics. In this study, Snapple not only targeted diet-conscious women who visited a prime social networking website, but they refined the target market by limiting the audience to women who had the additional criteria of having also paid a visit to other health and dietary related websites.

Snapple had success because they chose to concentrate their marketing efforts on those that were most likely to buy. In the same sense, your article marketing strategy should be targeted towards submittting articles to websites that will have readers most likely to follow through with your preferred action. As you are researching your target market, you will begin to see a pattern of behavior that will lead to an endless stream of topics for writing solution-orientated articles. In the Snapple case, it’s quite evident that a series of articles written on how to battle weight loss would be a relevant article marketing strategy. Conflicts, struggles and lack of knowledge within your target market produces opportunity for relevant and appealing article content. Each problem and each solution has problems and solutions within themselves. A series of articles to submit can easily be produced from one common problem your target market faces.

Article marketing strategies that spend time to research the target market will have a significantly higher return from article submission techniques. Conflict, struggle, and lack of knowledge should be investigated when writing articles for article marketing venues, such as article submission directories and social bookmarking websites. Readers want solutions. Articles in any article marketing strategy must be written to appeal to the reader. Write to give the reader their unfulfilled needs and your article marketing strategy will attract readers and click throughs. Your article marketing strategy will build an essence of trust and helpfulness, and your readers will begin visiting your website directly to read the solutions to their problems. As long as there are problems in the world – you’ll always have topics for your article marketing strategy.

How Search Engine Optimization Will Help Your Business Significantly

Search Engine Optimization is a term that has gone from being almost completely unknown to being one that is very frequently used in the business world in less than a year’s time. The reason behind its popularity is the fact that a whipping eighty percent or more of the market is searching Google, Yahoo and similar search engines for all of their products, services and needs before they look in the Yellow Pages or anywhere else!

This has sparked an enormous demand for SEO services; with business owners realizing that they are going to have to optimize their websites for the search engines before their competition beats them to it. Nobody wants to leave money on the table by neglecting to perform a simple, basic and fundamental task. The increase in demand has been clear to see, as business owners scramble to find professionals who can optimize their websites for them.

How SEO Will Help Your Business

The way it works is simple. When your website is optimized, it will show up on the search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, MSN, Etc.) when someone types in a keyword or keyword phrase that is related to your business. There are thousands of different possible keyword phrases and variations that people may type in when searching for something that your business offers. For instance, think about how many different ways there are to search for a restaurant in New York City.

You can type in “Restaurant in New York City” or “Places to eat in New York City” or “Restaurants NYC” and so on. Then there are the plural versions of each word such as “restaurant” or “restaurantS” etc. As you already know, the first page of any search only displays 10 results. In many cases there are hundreds of thousands and even millions of pages of search results for a given keyword phrase.

In order to guarantee that your website will show up on the first page or first few pages of results, you would have to pay some pretty large fees (per click) to be there. Plus, unless you know exactly what you are doing with PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising, you can end up wasting a fortune on clicks that don’t even convert into customers. Also, many prospective customers won’t click on search results that they know are paid for (because these listings show up on the right side of the search results under “sponsored ads.”

The more commonly known SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is also referred to as “organic” or “natural” SEO which means the website gets optimized to show up in the natural search results; on the left side!

If you improve your business website’s Google ranking, you are also increasing the exposure that your business will get substantially. Especially considering how much of the market share is using the internet and the various search engines to find what they are looking for — whether it be for a product, service or information.

SEO is perhaps one of the most profitable and worthwhile investments that a business can acquire. Although it requires an initial investment, it can bring you targeted traffic to your website for years to come, without paying a single penny when people find your website. The people who find your site, will be people that are looking for exactly what your business offers which means they are very likely to become a customer.

Some big companies and major corporations are investing millions of dollars in SEO and other internet marketing consulting services. However, on the local level it is a lot more affordable to get these services performed for you, since the target market is not as wide as some international companies.

By securing an organic search engine listing and improving your search engine positioning overall, you will get laser targeted traffic to your website and you will not have to pay a hefty fee every time someone clicks on a link to your website. Your business will gain more online exposure and it will have a fighting chance to compete with the other businesses in your niche market, ensuring the survival of your business into the coming years.

This review is my personal opinion of ‘The Article Marketing Handbook’ I’ll tell you:

1) What it’s about
2} Did I learn anything?
3} Is it worth the asking price?

I’ve read a lot of articles, ebooks and forum posts about article marketing and have found that the information and advice offered can be conflicting and confusing to new article marketers. As an article marketer I have studied the results from my own campaigns and come to my own conclusions. As an article directory owner I can see from studying the site stats month after month which articles are working for the authors. I can also see from Google searches which articles have been found on my site and republished on blogs or websites.

With the double insight of article marketer and directory owner it can be frustrating to see articles being submitted that you know will not be effective for the authors. On the other hand you learn to recognise articles that are going to do well for the authors and your directory.

With this in mind I was curious to read ‘The Article Marketing Handbook’ written by Allen Graves – an experienced article directory owner and article marketer. I’ve come across Allen in forums and have to admit that we don’t always agree, but it is plain to see that Allen cares about article marketing. Because Allen has been involved with article marketing longer than I have I hoped that I would learn something from his handbook. I also felt that as he had the same opportunity of double insight as I have albeit for longer that ‘The Article Marketing Handbook’ should be as good as if not better than anything that I have previously read. My expectations were high so lets see if the handbook lived up to them.

The Content

At first I was impatient to get to the ‘meat’ of the ebook and wasn’t happy with the long introduction and theorising in the first couple of chapters, but then I saw that Allen was expressing why it is important to get your article marketing campaign right. It isn’t just information – it’s plain common sense that every article marketer should consider before embarking on a marketing campaign and worth reading.

Allen then guides you through selecting your niche, ways of discovering what information your readers are searching for and spending money on and how to find the best keywords. All useful information and if used correctly should help you to write more effective articles.

You learn why you should use pen names and how to select them. How to write titles that grab a reader’s attention while appealing to search engines. How to best summarise your articles and how to format the article body to capture the reader’s attention and keep them reading. Some tips are also included on how to write your author resource box to gain higher click throughs to your website.

Did I learn Anything?

Yes I did. I was particularly interested in a chapter explaining how to find the best places to submit your articles to and why. Also how to get more click throughs by promoting your articles after your submissions have been accepted. Both ideas are so obvious that I wondered why I hadn’t thought of them.

There are several more article marketing tricks that I have noticed used by authors who submit to my directories and hadn’t really thought about. To find out if they work I checked my site stats and sure enough those articles were getting more than the average hits. That could be a coincidence or those tricks could be working for the authors and my directories.

What I Think

There is a whole lot more information but now I’m going to tell you what I think about ‘The Article Marketing Handbook’. The ebook is well written and in a no BS style that I personally like. For anybody familiar with article or Internet marketing it’s easy to understand, but those new to the field may struggle without more basic information about for instance the importance of keywords and phrases. But, that and other basic information can be readily found with an Internet search.

Is It Worth The $47 Asking Price?

For most ebooks I would say absolutely not. That is because there are thousands of ebooks available on the Internet free or at incredibly low prices and that muddies the water on perceived value. The Article Marketing Handbook is different in that it provides a lot of information and advice that I haven’t seen before in any article, forum or ebook. Information and advice that I know from experience is correct even if I hadn’t thought about some of it before reading the handbook.

The Article Marketing Handbook is by far the best guide I have read on the subject of article marketing, so I wasn’t disappointed. As Allen will be providing updates as the market changes I would consider the one off $47 payment to be a good investment for ongoing success in the article marketing field.