One Stop Web Support Newsletter #74
September 21, 2008
Looking to attract more visitors to your site? One of my favorite ways for attracting visitors is by placing quality content on other sites. Over the next six issues, we'll look at:
- What article marketing can do for you
- Where to get ideas for compelling articles
- How to write a visitor-attracting article
- Basic ways to syndicate your articles
- How to target your articles to specific sites
- Repurposing your articles to get even more out of them
We'll start this week with what article marketing can do for you.
Driving Visitors to Your Site With Articles -- Part I -- What article marketing can do for you
Visitors are the lifeblood of your business. Without them, all you have is a lot of random pixels ready to display themselves on somebody's browser.
The biggest question that most business owners have is, "How can I get more visitors?"
So, over the next six issues we'll look at one of my favorite ways of getting visitors, article marketing.
Why article marketing?
Article marketing gives you two major benefits:
- Increased visitors from improved search engine rankings
- Increased visitors from sites that display your articles
Improved search engine rankings
The search engines basically use two criteria to determine your rankings for your target keywords:
- How well your site itself communicates its relevance for your target keywords
- How relevant other sites see your site as being for those keywords
How do the search engines determine how relevant other sites consider you to be? By looking at who links to you and what they say about you with the words they put in the link to your site.
Article marketing focuses directly on getting you those incoming links. And it works to make the links you get as valuable as possible.
The goal of article marketing is to write articles that you can then syndicate to other sites.
If you're not familiar with article marketing, don't worry about that word "syndicate." It's not some technical, mysterious process that you'll never be able to master.
In future installments of this series we'll cover where you can place your articles and the fairly simple process of how to do it. We'll also cover how to get the most bang for your effort with your submissions.
Visitors from other sites
As beneficial as improved search engine rankings are, article marketing also helps you become less dependent on the search engines for visitors. By placing your articles on other people's websites, you create new sources of targeted visitors.
A well-written article on a site that typically attracts the kind of visitors you want can bring you interested visitors directly from your article. When your article shows your grasp of the subject and your "About the Author" box at the end provides a compelling reason to click on your link, you can attract visitors who already see you in a positive light. This is a big improvement over having them come to your site with a "prove-you're-worth-my-attention" mindset.
Over the course of this series, we'll also look at how to write the kind of compelling articles that draw people to your site.
The importance of being persistent
Be aware, though, that article marketing is not a one-shot deal. You can't submit a single article to a dozen sites and expect a sudden boost of a thousand visitors a day.
Article marketing is a cumulative process. Its power is in being persistent.
If you do it right, you'll see the number of sites that link to yours multiply beyond the number of sites on which you yourself have placed your articles. I've sometimes seen articles that I submitted to 50 sites multiply onto 2000 or more sites.
You intensify those affects, though, by keeping at it. Syndicate your articles regularly over the course of six months, a year, and more.
Get help, if necessary, to keep the flow of articles or the flow of submissions going. Get a relative, a friend, or an inexpensive high school or college student to keep the submissions going if you don't have time to do it yourself. Just keep building momentum.
Like most marketing strategies, article marketing is like building a skyscraper.
In building a skyscraper, once they dig the initial foundation, it can takes months of work in which no visible progress is evident. It seems like absolutely nothing is happening as they lay the foundation. Once that foundation is laid, though, the skyscraper shoots up at amazing speed.
It's the same with article marketing. It takes a lot of initial effort before you start seeing signs of progress. But once that progress starts, the gains can become dramatic.
Q and A with Jeff
In this section, Jeff answers your questions about starting a business online. Here's this week's question.
How do I use my knowledge and skills to build a profitable business?
Last week we looked at finding what is best for you to sell by building a product line off of your own skills and interests.
If you followed through and made the list I encouraged you to make (you DID do that, didn't you?) you probably have a much larger list of skills and interests than you ever gave yourself credit for.
If you haven't already made your list, here are the questions I asked last week so you can do it now:
- Skills you've learned from the jobs or volunteer work you've done
- Sports, hobbies, and special interests you enjoy
- Special knowledge or skills you've developed because of your job, volunteer work, or life situation
- Things for which you've won an award or received special recognition
- Things for which others have complimented you for doing them particularly well
- Things you would do if you have unlimited money and a whole week free to do them
- Subjects you like to learn about in your spare time
- Challenges you've faced and overcome
- Accomplishments you're proud of
- Things you've learned from raising children or having pets
- Things you've always wanted to learn more about, but haven't had the time
Now let's look at how to boil that list down into profitable products.
The first thing that should strike you as you look at your list is, "Wow, I have a lot more to offer people than I thought!"
And if you don't have that impression, work on your list a little more. Dig deeper. Everybody -- including you -- has a lot more to offer from their experience and interests than they think.
Everybody -- including you -- has knowledge and skills that a surprising number of other people would love to have in that area.
Look within the areas where you have strengths rather than picking an area you need to learn from scratch in order to succeed. In doing this, you immediately cut in half the amount of learning you need to do in order to succeed in your business.
Organizing your list
Now take your list and organize it. What knowledge, experiences, and talents translate well into being able to recommend either physical products that someone has already manufactured or information products that someone has already created.
For example, if you have a passion for home decorating or fashion, consider how you can use the resources you have inside you to connect people to the kind of items that will suit their tastes. If you have experience surviving a bankruptcy, consider the sources of help that you discovered along your journey.
Take note also of knowledge, experiences, and talents that are totally within you -- things you've learned for which you are better suited to lay out advice in a personal manner rather than referring them to someone else.
For example, if you have extensive experience caring for a parent with dementia, or a large collection of innovative crafts that you have created out of your imagination, you have personal experiences that can help others who have a similar need but lack your level of experience with it.
Areas like that have good potential for creating an infoproduct of your own. The idea of creating your own infoproduct may be a little intimidating at this point, but store these areas that have potential for infoproducts away for a later date.
Rather than putting pressure on yourself to create a professional level infoproduct right out of the gate, you can experiment with other people's products in those areas while you learn the basics of starting a business. Then, once you have a little experience at selling other people's products in that market, you can work on adding your own.
At any rate, get yourself thinking about what needs your skills translate into.
Next week
We'll continue this next week by looking at specific resources that can help you turn others' needs and your skills into the products you can sell.
Hottest Offers
Each issue, I feature what I consider the best offers available each week on worthwhile business-building tools. Check here to see what's hot this week.
http://www.OneStopWebSupport.com/hot-offers.htm
Or check to see my growing selection of ebooks and training tools that you can use for free to build your Internet business.
Free Ebooks:
http://www.OneStopWebSupport.com/dir-ebooks.htm
Free Training tools:
http://www.OneStopWebSupport.com/ongoing-bargains.htm
Success quote
'The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender.'
Vince Lombardi
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