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How Marketing Articles Can Kickstart Your Business
By Charlie Cory
Copyright © 2005
Marketing is a funny old business, especially Internet
Marketing. The size of the market is so huge that it is difficult to know where
to start getting your word out, no matter what business you are in. Email
marketing, Safelist Advertising, FFA Advertising, Search Engine Optimisation
(SEO), Pay Per Click .... I could go on. All of these are valid forms of
advertising, and all work if carried out correctly.
However, this is
about marketing articles, or writing articles about your niche, and submitting
them to appropriate sites.
What Constitutes a Good Marketing
Article?
There is an element of SEO about your articles. At least to get the
full benefit of your work there should be. In simple terms, I mean that your
article should be themed. There should be a focus to the article, and you should
try to stick on theme. If you are creating web pages for submission to
directories, (which is something that you should be considering), then you
should consider optimising your pages on the theme (or keywords) of your page.
The specifics of doing this are outside the scope of this article, but you
should try and get a very basic grounding in SEO.
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You should also try to keep
your article informative and useful to the reader. They are, after all,
potential customers, and you want to get them coming back to you for
more.
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You should try and break your
article up into easily digestible paragraphs. This makes the whole thing much
easier to read.
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Your article doesn't need to
be more than a few paragraphs in length, but it should be on theme.
So far so good, this does not
seem too hard, does it?
How Can An Article Bring Me
Business?
OK, now we come to the nitty gritty.
Considering how
big the Internet is, and how many people search for information each day, it
would be pretty foolish for any businessman to discount the value of the Search
Engines to their business. But getting your information in front of the right
eyes (targeted visitors) is not that easy.
Or is it?
One of the
key elements of SEO, is the links that appear on 'important' sites (important in
the eyes of engines like Google for example).
Once you have written your
article, you need to submit it to some important sites, and if accepted, your
article will be a very valuable source of traffic. The reason is that these
important sites receive millions of visitors, and if your site is listed there,
it will get crawled by the search engines. This means that you will have a
bigger chance of featuring in the listings of the search engines for the
keywords that you choose.
And you will get traffic directly from the site
itself of course. Here are two sites that you might consider submitting your
article to:
The DMOZ Project - http://www.dmoz.org
Yahoo Groups Article Announce -
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/article_announce/
In
addition to all of this, these articles provide a valuable link back to your
site. This is something that most search engines look for in assessing how your
site should be ranked.
How Easy Is It To Get Your Article Displayed In
Search Engine Listings?
We come to the subject of Niches, which is a big
buzzword on the Internet today.
So what is a niche?
A simple
example would be Marketing. Marketing itself is a huge subject, and if you did a
search on the Internet for the subject of marketing, you would find millions of
pages of information. This is great if you are looking for information, but not
so great if you are in the business of competing for 'Marketing Business'. There
are just too many pages of competition for you to win against.
So what do
you do?
Hunt Down The Niches.
The answer is to look for Niches
within your broad target. So, instead of Marketing, you could perhaps focus on
'Internet Marketing', which is a niche, or subset of 'Marketing'. So, we have
narrowed down our focus and reduced the number of competing site such as say
'Newspaper Marketing' or similar. Narrowing down the focus in this way has
improved our chances of success significantly.
But, the Niche that we
have found is possibly still too broad. Take a look in Google, and you will see
that there are still hundreds of thousands of sites competing in this Niche. So
what do you do?
The answer to that is to research.
Use a product
such as Adwordiser, will look at the searches being carried out for a given
keyword, and give you a list of similar (or niche) keywords that you could look
into. Very useful. So you end up finding Niches that are not so heavily targeted
and which give you a much better chance of success. Write your articles around
the themes of the niches that you find and you will soon start getting
results.
Can I Use My Articles Anywhere Else?
Yes of course. Once
you have created your article, start circulating them. Write to owners of ezines
and offer your article for the next issue of their ezine. All that you have to
do is to add a resource box to it, with your copyright and a link to your web
site, and you will get lots of publicity. Some people make a living by doing
this alone, and not advertising anywhere else.
About the
Author:
Charlie Cory CEO
Magical Marketing mailto:articles@magical-marketing.biz
"Magical Marketing
is once of the most innovative products I have seen online. Charlie has given
everyone the chance to have their own marketing resource, tutorial and help desk
site, as well as step by step instructions on marketing your business using the
techniques outlined here." |

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