Article Marketing Initiation

When it comes to marketing your website, article marketing still holds a prominent and powerful place in the grand scheme of drawing online traffic. It is a valuable tool and here are some first steps you can take to get it working for you.

What is it about writing that makes some people cringe? First of all, it can seem like writing term papers in school. Relax. Writing articles is not as stressful as all that. Learn here how you can write an article in 7 minutes.

Here are some tips for writing those articles.

Write what you know – The articles need to be relevant to your online business. You wouldn’t write about gardening to promote a chocolate gift basket website, for example. Since you are creating a business that you know something about, the articles are merely an extension of that.

Do keyword research – People use certain keywords when they are looking for information on the Web. You can use free or paid keyword tools to find out the most searchable words in your niche. Use those words as the topics for your articles. Search engines do crawl website content so keep your keyword density (the number of times it appears in the article) at about 1% to 4%. Keyword stuffing is not going to net you any extra traffic.

Get to writing – An appropriate article for a website needs to be around 400 words in length. You want to give your readers valuable information without droning on and boring them. Depending on what you are writing about, it may be a couple hundred words longer to explain complicated procedures or recipes.

Create relevant content – To determine that, ask yourself a question: What do your readers want to hear about? Use that as your guide to choose topics that will be read.

Submit articles to article directories – These sites post your articles. There are free and paid sites. Both will review your submissions to see if they are relevant and comply with their guidelines. Most will give you a bio box to place a link to your site and information about you, the writer. If you are not sure what is out there, take a look at some articles on your subject in article directories. You don’t want to repeat the same old stale content.

People love to read articles. It contains information that they need. As long as you are providing it, you will have an audience. If readers know that certain sites can be relied upon to provide quality content, they will go there and search through their articles. You want them to find you there.

One click on your link in the bio box and they can be at your website reading more helpful content. These are just a few steps to get you going in the right direction with your article marketing efforts.

Resources for Article Marketing

Article Marketing 365

7 Minute Article Secrets

Article Marketing Mistakes

Article Profit Formula

How to Make Money in Your Local Market

There’s a gold mine of opportunity just waiting to be tapped into… And it’s sitting in your own backyard!

You have online marketing skills that business owners in your neighborhood desperately want and need.

Some of the things that you consider ridiculously easy – like setting up a blog – completely befuddles these offline business owners.

They want a web presence, and they want to generate leads online, but they have no idea where to start.

That’s where YOU come in.

You know a bit a about setting up websites, optimizing them for the search engines and generating leads using content marketing. And even if there are certain tasks you can’t do yourself (like designing a site), you certainly know how to outsource them.

Point is, offline business owners are willing and able to pay top dollar for you to use your skills and/or outsourced talent to get their sites up and running.

I just came across one of the most thorough, hold-you-by-the-hand courses on offline marketing that I’ve ever come across: this course shows you exactly how to build mini-sites for offline businesses and either sell your leads, or sell your sites… for a BIG amount of money.

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How to Create a Link to a Specific Page With CJ

A few days ago I wrote a post about How to Create a Link to a Specific Page With Share-a-Sale. Today let’s see how we can deep link for CJ merchants. A deep link is a link made to a specific product.

Most merchants selling products have deep linking set up already. You’ll see a “View Products” link as shown below. If you can only see “View Links,” deep linking is not set up for that specific merchant.

If your merchant does have deep links, once you enter your keyword you’ll see something like this:

Some merchants don’t have a list of their products, but you can build a link to specific pages on their sites in the CJ interface (not all CJ merchants have this option available). Let’s take a look at how you can do that:

Let’s say I wanted to create a link to Biozone 1000 Pure Home and Office Air Purifier. I’d click on “View Links” (shown below).

On the next page, I can see the offers from this particular merchant in the form of image links, as well as text links.

On the right side of the above page, you’ll see the option to get Java or HTML links. For deep linking, we use HTML. Click on “Get HTML”.

Next, you’ll see the following screen:

Fill out the necessary information here. First, pick the site you are creating your link for. In the SID field, you can create a tracking code so you know where your sales are coming from. In the destination URL field, paste the link to the specific product page. Lastly, click the “Update Link Code”.

Next, look under the “Update Link Code” and you’ll find your code. Click on “Highlight Code”, then copy and paste it into your page. If you look carefully at the code below, you’ll see that the text of the link is “CleanAir4Life.com.” Change it to your product name: in this case, “Biozone 1000 Pure Home and Office Air Purifier“.

That’s all. Questions? Feel free to ask.

How to Create a Link to a Specific Page With Share-a-Sale

I am sure you know that when adding links/images to your affiliate sites, deep linking is by far the most profitable to link. Just think about it: let’s say I am writing a post about marketing with door hangers, and I want to offer some resources to my readers. So, I go to SAS and find a program that is doing great!

They do offer door hangers, but they don’t offer an easy way to link to them. That’s not going to stop me from linking to that specific page. At the top of your SAS Dashboard you’ll see “Create a Custom Link to a Page” (see image below):

Click on that, and it will take you to a page where you need to enter some information (see below):

I picked the company I am creating the link for from the drop down menu, I added specific tracking for this link (I added the initials of this blog and the date), and then entered my destination URL. Make sure you remove http:// from the form, as it’s automatically added for you, and your link will be broken if you leave it there.

Once you filled out all the fields on the form, click on Create Custom Link , and you’ll be taken to another page where you can copy your link from. Here is what it looks like:

All you have to do now it copy and paste your link into your post.

Check out this link to door hangers to see where it will take you.

Do you have any questions? Please ask below.

Are You Making These Marketing Mistakes?

Business is a combination of talent and hard work. The talent can only take you so far, so begin by doing your homework. Every business benefits from advertising in some form or another. The key to becoming a name that people can trust is to let them know who you are and what you stand for. Here are a few marketing mistakes that, if avoided, will spare you much grief and money.

1. Not having a marketing plan. What is a marketing plan? It is the way that you will go about promoting your product or service. Just like you wouldn’t begin to get serious about your business without a definite plan, it is best not to approach the marketing of your product without a plan. When a product is promoted well, sales increase.

2. Putting all your eggs in one basket. This old saying seems to work in a lot of situations and marketing is one of them. You may find a strategy like email marketing that has been successful for you. But, don’t base your entire marketing plan on that one strategy. In order to grow, diversification is the answer. By not exploring other options, your business will become stunted in no time.

3. Ignoring the value of networking. For business, networking is invaluable. It is the way that entrepreneurs get together to pick each other’s brains. During these “meetings of the minds”, partnerships are struck. You can find someone who will complement your business with a new idea. Joint ventures mean more profits for everyone.

4. Working as a force of one. All businesses need support in some form. There are not enough hours in the day to do it all and still make money. Outsourcing can be your best friend. You can outsource for practically anything that you need. Hire someone to design your web page, answer your emails, and organize your invoices. When these tasks are taken care of, more time can be devoted to marketing the product in new and creative ways.

5. Cutting back on your marketing budget. When business is slow, we can panic unnecessarily. We want to save as much money as we can until things pick up again. Since business is down, we might decide that we don’t need to advertise as no one is buying. That is the worst mistake we can ever make. This is the time to use our extra minutes in the day to beef up that marketing plan to appeal to a wider net of customers.

Have you already made some of these marketing mistakes? In this world most things are fixable. Begin again, but this time with the knowledge of what not to do.