Ever Enterprise Marketing

5 Ways That Articles Can Grow Your Business!

In today’s highly competitive online community, the importance of attracting highly targeted traffic to your website cannot be overemphasized. Driving visitors to your site can be your only means of survival, especially in the cutthroat world of online marketing.

However, getting a high search engine ranking can be very difficult. Fortunately there is an almost unlimited number of strategies you can use to drive traffic to your site.

These strategies include anything from ezine advertising to affiliate marketing, however the downside is that most of these techniques come at a cost. Nevertheless, there are ways to promote your website and increase your traffic without spending anything.

Writing articles is without question one of the most effective web site promotion strategies you can use and I strongly suggest you seriously consider using article as part of your overall marketing plan.

Here are the top seven ways in which writing articles can help improve your web traffic and grow your profits:

1. More Reach…

You can post your articles on your website or you can submit them to other sites such as ezines directories to leverage your reach. Submitting your articles to these sites gives exposure not only to your ideas but also to your website.

You can also submit your articles to popular ezines and take advantage of their popularity. Other sites who find your article relevant may also link back to you. Thus you increase your link popularity, which is one of the most important strategies in the internet world.

Remember that most people are looking for information online and by filling this need with your article you may reap the benefit of more exposure and higher web traffic.

2. Effective No-Cost Advertising…

Submitting your articles and allow other site owners to publish your work presents an opportunity to advertise your website without paying exorbitant fees.

Although you should avoid marketing language in your articles and make it informative and useful to your readers, you can always include your site’s link in the resource box. In addition, by making your article relevant and helpful to your readers, you are branding yourself as an expert in your niche, which could ultimately lead to a visit and hopefully a purchase.

Good quality content in an article is far better and more effective than a few lines of ad space as you have a very special opportunity to pre-sell your product or service to your prospective customer.

3. Higher Search Engine Rankings…

It’s no secret that search engines love fresh unique content. If this content is on your site and it’s highly relevant to the topic of your niche, then the search engines will reward you with a higher ranking.

So while your main aim is to make your article as informative as you can for your readers, you should also optimize it so that it acts as spider food for the search engines.

You can do this by including long-tailed keywords in your article and by fully utilizing all your on-page techniques to attract the search engine spiders.

Making your article keyword rich you can greatly improve

the search engine ranking of your site. Remember that keyword density is one of the most important factors that search engines use when determining the search engine ranking of site.

However, you should always provide relevant, useful and pertinent information. Avoid the temptation of overusing keywords just to gain a high ranking as this may turn off most web surfers.

Relevance and quality is still the most important things to consider when writing articles and it will be doubly useful to your site if you make your articles attractive for the spiders.

Never forget that content that is optimized for the search engines is a very effective strategy to gaining higher rankings - so use it to your greatest benefit whenever you can!

4. Increases Your Link Popularity…

Link popularity is one of the factors used by search engines in determining search engine rankings. In simple terms, link popularity is measured by the number of pages linking back to your site and articles are a key method of getting one-way links to your site.

But instead of looking for other sites who would want to establish reciprocal links with you, simply submit your article to other sites. When websites pick up and publish your article, you automatically get a link partner.

The key is to make your article especially useful and appealing, so that more websites will be encouraged to publish it.

5. Build Your Reputation and Credibility…

By writing excellent, original and relevant articles you not only give your site exposure, you are also creating a good impression on your prospects. Encourage more people to visit your site and do business with you by establishing an impressive reputation through your articles. Be seen as an expert in the field and your will ultimately gain more customers eager to do business with you.

In this highly competitive world, excellent credibility and trust may be the only things you need to attract new customers or make loyal patrons out of your existing customers. Original, relevant, useful and pertinent articles are important tools you should utilize to improve and grow your business.

Technorati Tags: marketing, online marketing, article marketing, generate traffic, web site traffic, classifieds

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How To Sell More To Your Existing Customers

Regardless of all the different traffic techniques in the world, even with proven sales copy and conversion methods in place, even with years of studying and applying various direct and indirect marketing approaches, the one thing I have found that brings in the most money to my business is the ability to upsell each individual customer on an additional item they did NOT intend to originally purchase.

For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the term “upsell,” let me use an example from one of the world’s most famous companies to illustrate this point:

When people walk into the fast-food giant, McDonald’s, to order a simple hamburger or a Vanilla shake, without fail they are presented with the phrase that has helped this company dominate the fast-food market:

“Would you like fries with that?” Other fast food outlets will ask you, “Would you like a drink or an apple pie with your meal?” This is another very effective example of an upsell.

These fast food giants sell millions of dollars worth of extra food and drinks worldwide every year because they know how to effectively use an upsell. So now you may be saying that that is all well and good for McDonalds, but I am in a totally different business. I don’t sell fast-food.

It doesn’t matter! Upselling your customers is simply providing the next logical solution to your customer’s next logical need. It’s your job to always create that next logical need and continually sell and sell. There’s always one more thing to sell.

One of the major mistakes I find in dealing with small businesses is that they believe once their business has provided their product to the customer, that’s the end of the process. There’s nothing that could be further from the truth.

Every sale needs another sale because every need that’s satisfied will create still another need sometime in the future. The conclusion you should draw is that you need to create the upsell and continue creating upsells as a neverending logical step in the launching of an effective marketing mission.

You might say, I don’t have any product or service to sell as an upsell. My answer to that is, develop one.

Even if you don’t produce the product or service, someone else does and that someone else gladly will pay you to allow them to have access to your client base so they can upsell your customers. There’s always something else to sell them.

The practical implications to upselling will most likely result in forming joint venture relationships whereby you devise a win-win for all parties.

Another key is finding your “Business Within Your Business.” A real powerful concept is to challenge yourself, your clients, vendors, and employees to constantly search for new businesses within your business.

There are an unlimited number of offshoot businesses you can create. You can have an offshoot of consulting to those people you sell to. You could then communicate and market and also do seminars and workshops.

For car dealers, they can provide extended warranties and insurance to new car owners. For a contractor, whether it’s heating and cooling, pools, pest control, or whatever, they can also provide annual service contracts.

An example would also be a pool contractor, who for instance, might use upselling through the offering of an annual service contract to clean and service a pool four times a year. This can dramatically improve his bottom line. In fact, this can actually double the value of your customers by an added income of 40% when they sign an annual contract.

Let’s say the service call for a pest control or pool service call is $100 and there are 100 customers per year. There’s a gross of $10,000, which is $100 per customer. The upsell strategy is an annual contract where you’re going to visit four times a year. The cost for each visit to the customer is $100, so the total cost at this point is $400 (before giving a discount.)

If they buy today, you give them a discount of $150, so $250 is the cost to the customer. If you close just 40% of these people, your new revenue is $10,000. 40% of 100 is 40 people times $250 which is the cost of the annual contract.

So, the new value of these 100 customers is $20,000, $10,000 for the service call ($100 x 100 customers) and another $10,000 for the 40 people who paid $250 for the annual contract. The value per customer is now $200. You made $20,000. You still have the same 100 customers. They’re now worth $200. That’s double the value.

What service can you upsell to YOUR clients? Virtually every business can add a newsletter or an extra month of a diet plan for half the original price. Maybe a consulting service could be provided. The possibilities are endless. Let your creative mind work for your business instead of limiting it to just one product or service.

Technorati Tags: online marketing, marketing, upsell, oto, one time offer, backend sales, business, classifieds

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A Better Strategy - SEO or PPC?

Which is the better strategy for your online business - SEO or PPC?

The simple answer is if used correctly, both strategies can help you build a very profitable online business. Each technique has it’s own advantages, so you need to balance the two to gain the maximum benefits each offer.

SEO is more of a long term strategy so you shouldn’t be kick-starting a new business and expect an instant flow of traffic from the search engines.

On the other hand, PPC is an excellent short term strategy as you have the ability to laser target your visitors and instantly drive traffic to your site - so this is a great method that you can use until you start to see traffic flowing in from other methods, such as SEO.

Now with SEO you don’t always have to wait months and months before receiving traffic. With the proper niche research and marketing you can start getting visitor within days. Once your site is crawled regularly, you can put a page up and have them indexed in days.

While it can take longer that other methods, SEO is definitely not a waste of time, unless you don’t plan on being in this game for a long time. You just need to implement the right measures and be patient.

SEO is a tough game no matter how you look at it. You can be at the top of the search engine results pages one month and drop out of site the next. In fact, I’ve seen people who have held a #1 position for their keyword for years and suddenly disappear all together overnight.

Now this hurts at the best of times, but it’s even worse if you place 100% of your efforts in this one area and depend on it for your entire income. As they say, diversification is a good thing and online marketing is no different.

Of course SEO and PPC aren’t the only ways to market online… some people do neither and still make a ton of money.

There is no predicting what the search engines will do. They will always mess with their algorithms to try to give their users the best experience they can by providing the most relevant results for their searches. So you need to factor this into your marketing.

It’s not uncommon to one day have 50 keywords ranked high and the next day they disappear. Then two months later you will begin to see visitors from those keywords when your keywords get re-listed again.

SEO has changed a lot in the last 12 months and will continue to evolve in the future, so it is very risky to rely on it for your revenue. I’ve seen it happen - huge revenue generating websites dropping out completely and being placed in the “sandbox” - what a bummer that has to be!

It’s not my intention to discourage anyone from practicing SEO. I probably made it sound impossible. It’s not. It certainly is an incredible way to get free traffic. And any free traffic is good traffic.

You just need to use a range of marketing methods to limit your risk and protect the long-term sustainability of your online business so that you can endure anything the search engines throw at you in the future.

Technorati Tags: online marketing, search engine optimization, marketing, ppc, seo, internet marketing, classifieds

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How to Keep Your Visitors Coming Back for More!

In today’s online environment where content is king you have to continually provide fresh unique website content that is relevant to your topic in order to achieve any reasonable search engine ranking. This is where blogging can form an important strategy in your overall marketing.

Including a blog as part of your site structure has proven to be a very successful strategy as it allows you to provide fresh unique content on a regular basis to act as search engine fodder for the spiders. Plus it gives your visitors a reason to keep coming back to your site to see what new content about their niche subject has been added.

However, you need to ensure that the information your provide is both informative and useful to your readers, otherwise it defeats the whole purpose of the exercise.

So with this in mind, today we’re going to discuss the type of content that is most suitable for your blog in order to make it profitable and to keep your visitors  coming back for more - day after day after day!

First off, you need to understand that there is no fixed framework that your blog should follow. This is a personal choice and therefore you can write about whatever it is you’re interested in.

However, the difference between a successful blog and a blog that bombs out big time is the style in which your content is written. For instance, would you prefer to read an article on quantum physics or the latest fishing magazine? 

More than likely you would prefer to read the fishing magazine because it appeals to your interest or because it is far less mind-numbing than a boring lecture on quantum physics. (I’m sorry if you’re a science geek, but most people fall asleep reading this kind of stuff )

The point I’m trying to make is that most people don’t like to read anything that is too “heavy”, so you need to write in a style that is “light” yet informative.

you see, when your visitors reach your blog they are not only looking for information - they are also looking for information they can obtain easily and in a relaxed manner.

So to attract more visitors, as well as to keep your site sticky to entice your visitors to keep coming back for more, it is very important to add a human touch to your blog posts.

This can be done by simply imagining you’re talking about a certain topic one-on-one with your personal friend and to include a light-hearted sense of humor in your writings. So don’t be afraid to add funny comments in your articles where they are appropriate

Another important key point is to avoid addressing your reader in the third party, i.e. you should not write as if you’re preparing a speech to a crowded room.

You need to write as if you’re having a face-to-face conversation with a friend. This will make your visitor feel as if they are actually part of the conversation, rather than reading a robotic comment from a person who is trying to sell them something.

Besides that, it is also very useful to establish your own personality through your comments. Human beings are very curious creatures, so naturally your visitors would want to know as much about you as the information you’re offering them.

Just being yourself, rather than trying to be too official, can make a huge difference as it can make you stand out from your competitors. This is a lot like creating your own brand name, where people immediately think about you when they need to find out information about their topic - just like how people immediately think about Coke when they are thirsty or Nike for sportswear.

So in summary, only ever provide unique fresh content on your blog, structure your comments in a casual manner as if you were talking to a friend and write in a face-to-face  style to establish your own personality on your blog.

Doing this will not only get the spiders interested in your blog, it will also entice your visitors to keep coming back to your site to read the latest news or information on your chosen topic.

Technorati Tags: blogs, blog marketing, marketing, online marketing, online business, work at home, classified

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How to Write Articles Using Proven Successful Models!

Writing articles is a fantastic way to brand yourself, plus it’s a great method of sending traffic to your chosen website.

But you need to understand that articles aren’t ads. Writing an article that is full of ads promoting your product simply doesn’t cut it. It needs to contain quality content that is both informative and entertaining.

An article’s true purpose is not to sell product., it is to promote your website and position you as either an expert or a person to be trusted within your niche market (preferably both).

No matter what your internet business is, you are in a crowded field. There are dozens, even hundreds, of other websites offering products or services similar to yours. Providing knowledge in the form of articles helps people realize that you know what you’re talking about, and gives them good reasons to buy from you rather than your competitors.

So remember - an article is not an advertisement!

With this in mind, you may now be wondering exactly what it is you should be writing articles about.

Here’s the good news - articles are flexible. You can write an article on just about any topic, as long as you can relate it in some way to your website and your products or services.

Following are just a few examples of the many forms an article can take.

- How-to:

Perhaps the most popular type of article is one that explains how to do something, get something, use something or find something.

For example, if you’re running an Internet business you could probably write an article giving people advice on how to start a small business from home. Think about your area of specialty and list some things you can do that most people might not know, but would like to learn.

- Opinion:

Whatever industry or type of business you work in, there are always breaking developments, new products, or business advances. You can write an article focusing on an emerging aspect of your business, and offer your opinion on how it will affect the industry.

- Personal/inspirational story:

Almost everyone has a compelling reason they went into business for themselves. Consider writing an article or series of articles about why you chose the path you did and what problems or successes you had on your journey.

You can make it humorous, or inspirational, or both. Human interest stories are a popular article format.

- Book excerpt or condensation:

If you’re selling a book, ebook or ecourse you’re in luck, you have articles built in to your product. You can offer your website visitors a free sample chapter, or write a condensed article based on one of the ideas in your book.

Book excerpts also make great articles and if you use PDF format to post an excerpt it can easily be passed around via email.

- Top ten lists:

Many engaging articles are centered around a list concept. And you don’t have to use the number ten; any number will do. A couple of good examples are   “The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People” or “The Five People You Meet in Heaven.”

Yes these are books, but the concept for articles is the same. Fore example, if your website is geared for business people, you might write an article about the six features you need in a good PDA or SmartPhone.

You can write articles on any subject to get people interested in finding out what else you have to say. But always remember…

…people read articles to be entertained, get ideas or learn something they didn’t know before, so stay away from making your articles sound like advertisements!

Technorati Tags: article marketing, marketing, online marketing, articles, classifieds

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