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Posts Tagged ‘article marketing’

Just exactly how do you start a Web business? That’s a question I get asked all of the time – and I guess it’s probably a question that most people who run their own Internet business also get asked on a regular basis.

I actually think that the answer should be the same whether the person asking the question is looking to start an information-based business where they are going to be supplying their own info products – ebooks etc. or those of others via affiliate programs, or whether the person asking the question is looking to supply physical products of their own or physical products via affiliate programs.

The best way to start an Internet business of either of the above types is by giving information away for free as an incentive for people to join your list.

You basically need three things to put this strategy together:

1. A ‘special report’ to give away as your freebie, which can be as short as about ten pages, so it need not be onerous to write – it should, of course, be of interest to the people in the market you are aiming at.
2. A squeeze page spelling out why your target audience should want to download your free report. This page will have a sign up form for collecting the name and email address of the prospect.
3. An autoresponder system to store the names and email addresses so that you can follow up with them over and over again.

Whatever the latest flavor of the month Internet marketing system may be that you’re getting bombarded with right now, just remember that the above system, and variations of it, have stood the test of time and form the basis of all solid Online businesses now and will continue to do so in the future.

When you have the above components in place all that remains is to send traffic to your squeeze page. You can use various methods to do this, but the best one to start with – and another one which has stood the test of time – is by writing articles containing links back to your squeeze page and submitting them to the top Online article directories.

The above is a pretty simple system – no rocket science there – but it is solid, dependable and will continue to work when lots of the latest whizz bang techniques have fallen by the wayside.

I’ll be bringing you more details of the above system – including downloadable reports – in the future, so remember to keep checking back.

And stop being attracted to the latest shiny object!

Are you in a niche market that is difficult to keep coming up with new articles for? If article marketing is your chosen – or one of your main – traffic-generating techniques, and you’re in a niche where you find coming up with new articles on a regular basis to post to ezinearticles and goarticles etc. difficult, then I’ve got a technique to give you that you may not have thought of.

With your typical article marketing, if you’re promoting, say, waffle makers on the site that you’re sending traffic to, then you’ll be writing articles on various aspects of waffle makers right? In your resource box you can then hyperlink the keywords you’re targeting to your Website home page or a specific page on your Website that’s dedicated to selling waffle makers.

Now, the problem with the above scenario is that after a while it can be difficult to come up with new angles related to waffle makers to write about. Also, for most of us, waffle makers would be a pretty boring subject to write about on a regular basis. And so we stop writing the articles and the traffic to our Website dries up as a result. So what do we do?

Well, I have a solution. You can write articles that have absolutely nothing whatever to do with the subject of the Website that the link(s) in your resource box point to. Sounds daft? Well, let’s clear up a couple of things.

There are two main benefits of writing articles and submitting them to Online article directories. The first one is to get direct traffic to your Website as a result. I.e. your banking on the people reading the article, enjoying it and clicking through the link to your Website as a result.

But there’s another reason to be submitting articles to article directories and that is to get backlinks to your site. And we all know the importance of backlinks in the eyes of Google, don’t we? Yes, they count as a sort of vote for your site, and help to push your site higher in Googles search results for your chosen keywords that you’re using as anchor text in these links.

Now, writing an article that’s on a completely different subject to the Website that’s linked to in your resource box isn’t going to do much for your direct traffic from people reading your article, but it works just fine as a backlink method to count towards the overall number of backlinks your site has.

The best policy to follow for this method of article marketing is to choose a subject that you’re interested in to write articles about, because that way you’re probably going to be able to write lots of articles without running out of ideas and you’re not going to get bored witless in the process.

In fact, for this process to work at its best you really must make sure that the keywords you’re targeting in your resource box are not mentioned at all in your article – we won’t your own Website to rank in the search engines for your chosen keywords, not the articles you’ve submitted to the article directories.

So, in a nutshell, the articles you write can be about any subject you care to think of that is in no way related to the subject of the Website that you’re going to link to through your resource box.

Give this a try, I’m sure you’ll be delighted with the results.