How
Marketing Articles can Kickstart Your Business
By
Charlie
Cory Copyright © 2005
Marketing is a funny old business,
especially Internet Marketing. The size of the market is so huge that it
is difficult to know where to start getting your word out, no matter what
business you are in. Email marketing, Safelist Advertising, FFA Advertising,
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Pay Per Click .... I could go on. All of
these are valid forms of advertising, and all work if carried out
correctly.
However, this is about marketing articles, or writing articles about your
niche, and submitting them to appropriate sites.
What Constitutes a Good Marketing Article?
There is an element of SEO about your articles. At least to get the full
benefit of your work there should be. In simple terms, I mean that your article
should be themed. There should be a focus to the article, and you should
try to stick on theme. If you are creating web pages for submission to
directories, (which is something that you should be considering), then you
should consider optimising your pages on the theme (or keywords) of your
page. The specifics of doing this are outside the scope of this article,
but you should try and get a very basic grounding in SEO.
-
You should also try to keep your
article informative and useful to the reader. They are, after all, potential
customers, and you want to get them coming back to you for more.
-
You should try and break your article
up into easily digestible paragraphs. This makes the whole thing much easier
to read.
-
Your article doesn't need to be more
than a few paragraphs in length, but it should be on theme.
So far so good, this does not seem
too hard, does it?
How Can An Article Bring Me Business?
OK, now we come to the nitty gritty.
Considering how big the Internet is, and how many people search for information
each day, it would be pretty foolish for any businessman to discount the
value of the Search Engines to their business. But getting your information
in front of the right eyes (targeted visitors) is not that easy.
Or is it?
One of the key elements of SEO, is the links that appear on 'important' sites
(important in the eyes of engines like Google for example).
Once you have written your article, you need to submit it to some important
sites, and if accepted, your article will be a very valuable source of traffic.
The reason is that these important sites receive millions of visitors, and
if your site is listed there, it will get crawled by the search engines.
This means that you will have a bigger chance of featuring in the listings
of the search engines for the keywords that you choose.
And you will get traffic directly from the site itself of course. Here are
two sites that you might consider submitting your article to:
The DMOZ Project -
http://www.dmoz.org
Yahoo Groups Article Announce -
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/article_announce/
In addition to all of this, these articles provide a valuable link back to
your site. This is something that most search engines look for in assessing
how your site should be ranked.
How Easy Is It To Get Your Article Displayed In Search Engine Listings?
We come to the subject of Niches, which is a big buzzword on the Internet
today.
So what is a niche?
A simple example would be Marketing. Marketing itself is a huge subject,
and if you did a search on the Internet for the subject of marketing, you
would find millions of pages of information. This is great if you are looking
for information, but not so great if you are in the business of competing
for 'Marketing Business'. There are just too many pages of competition for
you to win against.
So what do you do?
Hunt Down The Niches.
The answer is to look for Niches within your broad target. So, instead of
Marketing, you could perhaps focus on 'Internet Marketing', which is a niche,
or subset of 'Marketing'. So, we have narrowed down our focus and reduced
the number of competing site such as say 'Newspaper Marketing' or similar.
Narrowing down the focus in this way has improved our chances of success
significantly.
But, the Niche that we have found is possibly still too broad. Take a look
in Google, and you will see that there are still hundreds of thousands of
sites competing in this Niche. So what do you do?
The answer to that is to research.
Use a product such as Adwordiser, will look at the searches being carried
out for a given keyword, and give you a list of similar (or niche) keywords
that you could look into. Very useful. So you end up finding Niches that
are not so heavily targeted and which give you a much better chance of success.
Write your articles around the themes of the niches that you find and you
will soon start getting results.
Can I Use My Articles Anywhere Else?
Yes of course. Once you have created your article, start circulating them.
Write to owners of ezines and offer your article for the next issue of their
ezine. All that you have to do is to add a resource box to it, with your
copyright and a link to your web site, and you will get lots of publicity.
Some people make a living by doing this alone, and not advertising anywhere
else.
About the Author:
Charlie Cory
CEO Magical Marketing
mailto:articles@magical-marketing.biz
"Magical
Marketing is once of the most innovative products I have seen online.
Charlie has given everyone the chance to have their own marketing resource,
tutorial and help desk site, as well as step by step instructions on marketing
your business using the techniques outlined here." |
Web
Development
