The Secret To Promoting Sites With Articles – Writing-Articles
The Secret To Promoting Sites With Articles
Publishing articles on the Internet is a tremendous way to increase the number of inbound links to your site. As articles are assimilated into search engine indexes, they also begin to act as landing pages generating traffic for your site. Whenever possible, you should publish articles to promote your site.Article ContentThe content of your articles should be directed to the most basic elements of your product or service. Whenever possible, try to write "how to" or "introduction to" articles. Topics like these will garner the biggest interest and be picked up by other sites. Articles that cover finer points of a subject work as well, but you should expect a smaller readership.Article ToneYour articles should be packed with information, not sales pitches. When writing articles, one tends to concentrate on how to get potential readers to visit your site. This approach is a mistake. You have to think of both the readers AND webmasters that will be looking for articles.Image you are a Webmaster that needs content for your site. You go to one of the article directories looking for material to add to your site. Are you going to select articles that are sales pitches designed to take your visitors to another site? No. You are going to select articles that provide your visitors with some valuable information. Don't write sales pitches!LinksArticles are a great way to quickly build the link counts for sites. The search engines universally appear to like them, a rare event these days. So, what's the best strategy for using links in your articles?The best linking strategy for articles involves putting not more than two links in your byline. This is admittedly a personal preference, but I find more than two links looks "clunky" and many depositories won't allow any more than two.Regardless, the two links in the byline of your articles should go to two distinct pages of your site. The first might be to your home page, while the second goes to a page that is related to the subject of the article. With each new article, you should change the links to new pages. This allows you to build link popularity for both your home page and internal pages of your site. I have found Google, in particular, heavily favors sites that multiple pages with high link counts.HTML v. Text LinksWith some depositories, you have the opportunity to place html code in your bylines. This, of course, lets you avoid typing out the URLs for your site pages, but should you? I would encourage you to type out the URLS for one reason. It is important to make it as easy as possible for Webmasters to republish your article on their site. Don't make them figure out the domains of your hyperlinked text, particularly sub-domains.In ClosingI have used article campaigns to market many sites. As long as you go about it correctly, you should be able to do the same thing for your site.Halstatt Pires is with MarketingTitan.com - http://www.marketingtitan.com - an Internet marketing and advertising company. Visit our article section - http://www.marketingtitan.com/internet_marketing_articles - to read more internet marketing articles.
Improving Your Conversion Reduces the Need to Constantly Promote Your Sites – Internet-Marketing
Improving Your Conversion Reduces the Need to Constantly Promote Your Sites
I just got off the phone with Michael Fortin, one of the top copywriters and conversion experts on the web.We were doing a teleseminar for our members on conversion and testing for website owners wanting more out of the traffic they already enjoy, rather than constantly having to promote their sites to support low conversion rates. Specifically, we were talking about all the things you can do to test different "calls to action."A call to action is anything you are trying to get people to do on any particular site or page of a site. It could be buying a product or service, getting people on an announcement list or newsletter, or getting people to click on your advertising links.Most web publishers are so happy when they finally have a site up that they consider their work done and get right to marketing it. Once the traffic rolls in, they enjoy whatever sales or clicks they get and try to make more money by driving MORE traffic to the site.Then they start building another site. And another. And another.This is a disturbing trend that is creating a massive amount of waste. Both in resources and time. Especially when it comes to niche publishers who are building massive networks of sites on different topics in order to capture emails, generate advertising revenue, sell affiliated products and services, or to build their lists to generate backend sales to their subscribers.The waste is generated when people are in too big a hurry to build more sites, add more products, and get more traffic to sites that can convert sometimes 1000% BETTER than they do now.They are moving at a hectic pace, in this scenario, to build build build, when their income goals can most often easily be met without so much waste.One example of waste is when someone builds a content-dry site that has nothing but Adsense and some links on it. People hit that kind of site and can't wait to find a reason to leave. The thinking is, "Great! My 'click thru ratio' is sky high! I am getting almost everyone to click on my ads!"But here's what's happening in reality: you are working VERY hard to get traffic to such a site, only to "burn" it on a 35 cent click! No email capture, no followup, and most importantly no desire on the part of the visitor to EVER see your site again!Would you rather have someone come through your site and click immediately on an advertiser's link, never to return? Or would you rather have someone come to your site, read some great content, sign up for your list and not click on ANY links that first time?I will take scenario #2 any day of the week. And I won't have made a single penny off of that person with that initial action. But I will in the future!If you have a site that you constantly test and tweak for performance (beyond its ability to repulse your visitors into clicking on an advertisement just to get to a QUALITY site) then you have a real business.You can test and track SO MANY variables to make a site more profitable than it is now. Every site on the web can perform better than it does right now. Every single one!The people who understand this never stop testing their calls to action to get their visitors to do more than something that results in a one-time action.Traffic is the most expensive thing on the web both in the time it takes to get it and the resources you have to use up for each and every hit.The traffic you have now might be all the traffic you EVER need on a daily basis to make a killing with your site. You will never know until you test and track everything about your site.The headlines, the offers, the opt-in forms, the guarantees, testimonials, bullets, adsense placement, followup... In short, every webmaster on the net has a lot of work to do on every site they own if they really want to reap the kinds of profits their sites are actually capable of pulling in.Most people get a site up and are happy with the sales or clicks they get and move on. NO! You are leaving so much money on the table thinking you are done with a site right after you put it up.That site is the worst it should ever be! Wasting another domain fee, hosting fee, bandwidth and the costs associated with getting traffic to a brand new site before you have optimized your current site for the very best conversion it can pull is NOT good business practice.I know people who have literally thousands of domains. And one thing I can guarantee you is this: They are making a pittance, even if they are making $60,000 a DAY, in comparison to what they COULD be making with far fewer sites and more testing and tweaking of that smaller group!And Fortin seems to agree. He is going to be at my seminar in New Orleans September 9th - 11th, 2005 to expose everyone who attends to just how much money they have left on the table over the years because they have never tested different aspects of their calls to action.It is enlightening, as well as depressing to find out how much money you COULD have made all this time had you tested from the beginning!But the point is, you cannot go back to get all those lost subscribers, sales, or clicks. You can only start testing today to capture more money from each site you own. Thereby alleviating the need to have a massive network of sites all performing at half their potential or much less!Copyright 2005 Jack HumphreyJack Humphrey is Managing Partner at Content Desk. He is also the author of Power Linking 2005, now in its 4th edition. http://www.power-linking-profits.com To learn more about the profitable niche publishing industry, check out http://contentdesk.com/mardigras
Free For All Sites: How They Can Actually Help Your Business – Internet-Marketing
Free For All Sites: How They Can Actually Help Your Business
Anyone whose been marketing online knows that generating leads can be a time consuming and expensive experience. It's something that must be done however if you expect to make it in any business. The money is in the list, as they say.There are many different ways to generate leads. Some companies will even give you leads for free when you join their corporation. The problem with free leads like this is that they can be old and possibly untargeted. I joined one network marketing company that gave members free names and phone numbers of people they said had requested information on working from home. Of the hundreds of numbers I was given a large number were disconnected or a wrong number, and even more had no idea where I could have gotten their name from, and weren't the least bit interested in working at home. Others still remembered requesting information, a year ago! As you can imagine these leads were no where near as great as they had been made out to be.If you want fresh leads, 1 to 2 days old max, you can pay for them, but they're going to cost you. Some places charge a dollar or more per lead, which can obviously add up very quickly. You'd better have an amazing sales pitch and be prepared to follow up with these leads if you expect to make your money back, and hopefully a profit.What if you don't have the money to purchase quality leads, and don't want the hassel of trying to sell to people whose names, numbers and email addresses have been given away for free all over the place? At best they'll hang up on you, or delete your email. At worst they'll be rude to you on the phone or report your email as spam. There is an easier way to build you list, that won't cost you a thing. In fact it has the potential to make you money. Free for all sites. Now before you say these sites are useless, and that no one ever sees your ads, let me explain. Of course these sites are worthless if you're posting to them, but what about the people hosting them? Not only do you get the names and emails of people looking to make money on the internet, but you can advertise to them as well. When they post their ad on your FFA site, they're required to confirm their post via email. You can put your ad in the signature line of every email you send to people, and then follow up with them in a day or two. Plus a lot of these FFA sites pay you when someone gets their own site under you. Depending on your marketing, this alone could bring you in a nice monthly income, on the side of your primary business.Every FFA site is a little different. Some cost more to own and run, and some are only good for generating leads, but they won't pay you. Usually you can sign up for free with an option to upgrade. Depending on what benefits they offer pro members, this can be a real advantage to have. You can upgrade at some sites for under $20 per month. That's pretty cheap when you think about everything you're getting in return. Finding these sites isn't hard either, just do a search on your favorite search engine for FFA's or Free For All, and start looking at what different ones offer. If you're not comfortable paying right away, sign up for free and get a feel for how the site works, and then upgrade if you're satisfied.http://www.your-cash.ws/page5.html