The Power Of Article Marketing

Article marketing can increase your business prospects, publicity, and profits. Writing compelling "how to" articles will educate and inform your target market, transforming you into a trusted source of information.

It's a powerful way to go from a relative unknown to an expert in your field virtually overnight.

How does this help your bottom line?

Chasing clients is a tedious and often unrewarding exercise. Instead of chasing them, you can win them over by sharing your knowledge and expertise.

For instance, you can write short "how to" articles of 250-700 words related to your industry. Then submit them to various article directory sites for wide exposure to hundreds or thousands of online publishers.

By allowing them to be freely published by website owners and newsletter publishers, your articles could be viewed by millions of Internet users who might otherwise never have heard about your small business.

This is an incredible, low-cost marketing tool that generates targeted website traffic and helps build your mailing list.

Articles as Free Advertising

Posting free-reprint articles on reputable article websites such as Ezine Articles (http://www.ezinearticles.com ) and Idea Marketers (http://www.ideamarketers.com ) will save you a lot of money on advertising. You'll gain publicity and a lot of credibility for your business.

Of course, your article submissions should be purposeful and beneficial to those who will be reading them. After all, the whole point is not only to attract the attention of potential clients but to engage them with your ideas and information.

First, identify your target audience and think about what they'd like to read about.

How To Use Your Blog to Market Your Business

Have you just started blogging? Or have you been blogging for a while? As you may already know, a blog is an excellent tool to let the world know about your business or your product, to connect with potential customers and promote your expertise. But how can you maximize your blog's impact? Here are five tips to do just that:

- Blog Consistently. Many business owners get excited about blogging, post 3-6 times, and then promptly forget about the blog. I have seen many blogs that were started a year or two ago, have a grand total of five posts, and haven't been updated since sometime last year.

To get the desired effect (search engine and human traffic), you need to update your blog on a regular basis. Search engines love new content and keep coming back to index it. Potential customers also like new content; it's what keeps them coming back to read your blog.

- Use Your Blog For Branding. Your blog is an extension of your business, so make your blog have a look and feel that mirrors that of your business web site.

If your blog is hosted on the same domain as your web site, you should match the look and feel of your web site exactly. This will be more difficult to achieve if a third party provider hosts your blog. However, you should still aim to present the same brand image.

- Use Search Engine Optimization To Optimize Each Blog Post. The purpose of your blog is to get people who are in your target market to read your posts and enter your sphere of influence. Traffic from search engines does not cost any money, and it is a great way to get potential customers to your blog.

Basic Search Engine Optmization (SEO)

Search engine optimization is not as difficult the way many people make it out to be. It seems mysterious, but let me reveal how this simple thing can be done without a line of code, without breaking any law, and still generate a ton of extra traffic to your site.

Basically, search engine optimization is about getting higher rankings. But that's beside the point. That's the end result of what you DO that actually gets you those rankings. In Singapore SEO trainings are hardly seen but I often do it for my clients on a private basis. 

There are basically 5 things you need to do in order to accomplish better search engine rankings, even if you are complete novice at it. I call these the 5 Pillars of search engine optimization.

Pillar #1 - Multiple Backlinks

Create as many links back to your site as possible. How? You can use submission software that post to multiple websites all at the same time. I prefer to use those that are a little more reputable and I do not spam, especially blogs. Backlinks can come easily, but you will need to do it properly to prevent the backlack. The easiest way to do it is to collect a list of places where you can submit to. I have a directory listing of ping servers that you can find at www.StuartFreeTools.com. That should get you started. The rest need to be Googled as "submit your url" or "submit your article". The more backlinks, the better.

Pillar #2 - Frequency

Even if you are building backlinks, you need to have a regular frequency. If possible, every day, if not every other day. You need to be consistent in your efforts to build backlinks. Now, this may be tedious, but it probably won't take you more than an hour a day to maintain this. You don't have to write articles at all. You only need a robot that works 24/7 for you. I've got some recommendations that I've put up on my blog at www.InternetMarketingSingapore.com/blog and you can see how in Singapore, SEO elements are just as easily implemented by me compared with experts who have many years of experience.

Pillar #3 - Multiple Hosting Accounts

I recommend this because search engines look at IP addresses. with multiple hosting accounts, you get better inbound links from your own site. If you're smart, you'll start creating a whole ton of these to boost your own link popularity from other sites.

Getting Blog Visitors

This article will cover one of the unique methods of getting traffic to a blog that doesn't work for regular sites. Remember that every blog is a web-site, but not every web-site is a blog. My top methods of getting traffic to a web-site are still my top methods of getting traffic to a blog. Those include: article marketing, link building and content creation/ranking factors.

But blogs are a special breed of web-site. There are additional methods of getting new visitors to your blog that are very effective. The first one I played with was linking to others. For your blog marketing efforts to work, you must understand that bloggers are part of a community. Those of us old-timers on the 'net remember when the entire 'net was a small, close-knit community… when it was OK to send an email telling others in your topic area that you just set up a site and would like a link on their site.

That isn't what I'm suggesting with the blog community. The days of sending even a personal email to someone you haven't met are nearly over. The spam problem has made that more and more difficult. However, it is still OK and still rather expected that you introduce yourself when you come into a community. It is also a good idea to let your new community know that you are a friendly guy and are willing to help out in the community.

This post will tell about one way to do that when you enter the blogosphere. First, you should find your neighbors. The Alexa toolbar is going to help you find out who the leaders are in your new community. Start by searching for "______ blog" on Google, Yahoo or your favorite search engine. Fill in the blank with the topic of your blog. Take a look at the blogs you see.

Do you like them? Good; these are leaders in your new community. Link to them in your blog roll. Read them daily to find out what is going on in your community. Do you not like them? No problem. Don't link to them then. Don't read them. Don't introduce your visitors to them. It isn't required that you like everyone in your new community, but you do want to be a part of the community you now live in…

Now as you read those blogs daily, notice their blog rolls (links they have to other blogs in your community). Go visit them. This is where the Alexa toolbar comes in. You will find some new leaders (those with blogs showing less than 100,000 on your Alexa toolbar). Check out their blog and if you like it… add it to your own blog roll.

I recently moved to a town of about 300 way up in the top of the Utah mountains. It was a new community. I had never lived in a rural area before, so it was critical for me to go through this exact same exercise as I became a part of my new community up here in the mountains. Sure; it didn't involve Alexa or linking to others… but the concept is the same. When you enter a community and want to be a part of that community, get out there and get to know people. This is one way to do that in the blogging community.