Article Marketing Resource Box Tips and Tricks
Article marketing is a great way to promote your business IF you know what you are trying to accomplish! Using your resource box to generate the action that you want is vital to your article marketing success.
When you are using a high quality article site like Ezine Articles, it is best to put no more than a couple of html keyword links in the body of your article. Additionally, you are prohibited from selling in the body of your article. So what are you doing all this writing for then? If you do not know how to make a hyperlink, please visit our page on Top 10 Internet Tools – Learn to make hyperlinks.
What you are doing article marketing for is to have the resource box at the bottom! This is the area that must be copied along with the rest of the article when people post it on their websites. In the resource box you CAN sell but make sure that your goal is clear. DO NOT use your phone number as a call to action if you are like me and hate to talk on the phone. If you are great on the email, use your email as a way for people to reach you.
Here are some top resource box tips and tricks for action items!
- Add your phone number (I KNOW, I already said that but some people skim and I did not want them to miss it)
- Add a link to your newsletter signup page
- Offer a free ebook or whitepaper if they sign up for your email list
- Send them to your sales page with your products and services listed
- Sent them to a page on your site with affiliate links (most quality sites do not allow direct linking to affiliate pages)
- Shoot them over to your facebook page to get more fans or likes
- Ask them to follow you on twitter
You can obviously see a theme here! Somehow you need to use the article to get them to a place where they will allow you to continue to “market” to them on an ongoing basis going forward.
What NOT to include in your RESOURCE BOX from Ezine Articles:
- A listing of every website you own. There is no faster way to dilute your credibility than by posting a half dozen irrelevant URLs that have nothing to do with each other. Best to only post ONE URL that is related to the topic of your article.
- A listing of every accomplishment you’ve achieved to date. No one cares. Keep your resource box brief and to the point. Yes, your resource box should be benefit oriented so that the reader finds value in reading it rather than your ego being justified.
- Advertisements or pitches for products that are not relevant to the topic of your article.
- Keep the size of your resource box so that it’s no larger than 15% of your total article size. Too often I see resource boxes that are 50% of the size of the total article and this is abusive.
Information about what not to include comes from the article Article Marketing 101: The Perfect Author Resource Box by Christopher Knight. When I was just starting with article marketing I used many of these tips and was happy to share Christophers tips with you!
Using Articles to Drive Website Traffic
Filed under: Article Marketing, Article Marketing Ideas
Using articles is a great way to drive website traffic! You’ve probably heard the online blurb that says, “Content is king.” Well it is, most definitely. No website can ever thrive without content and much of that belongs to the text that can be read inside it. Although people’s attention is often initially grabbed initially by the graphics display and flash animation used on the site, it is the text that they read that makes them stay longer. People come to the aid of the Internet because they usually need to find solutions and those solutions are usually found online through the help of articles.
Articles voice out what your website has to offer. Articles explain what your website’s purpose is about. When setting up an online business, your articles will be the ones to explain to your existing clients and targeted customers what it is that defines you from your competitors. Here are some more ways in which you can possibly use articles to increase your website traffic:
1. Use of SEO – One of the biggest innovations in online article writing is search engine optimization or SEO. This article strategy makes use of keywords and displaces them within the article for search engine spiders to crawl. People often find themselves using search engine portals when they need to search for information on the web. In response, these search engine portals make use of spiders to crawl hundreds of websites and retrieve pages that match the keywords typed in by the user. However, only those that utilize the right keyword density will be the only ones to appear among the top search results.
2. Link building – Often times, link building is used alongside SEO. Sometimes it might not be enough to stick with obvious marketing strategies right on your website. Through link building, you can create other sub websites that can eventually market your main business site by leading your readers to it. Link building is often used in blog sites and websites that provide an informational or how-to approach to getting its traffic. This system makes use of HTML codes embedded within the words in the articles which, when hovered over by the mouse, show a website where further information can be read. Link building can be used as an effective teaser for business offerings.
3. Submission to article directories – You can also create relevant articles about your business, use both SEO and link building, and then submit it to other online portals such as article directories. There are lots of free article directories online and these are the usual places where people search for the information that they need. Should they click on your article and become interested, then the links you’ve placed in them will direct them right to your business site. This strategy can help you target people who are really in need. My favorite is Ezine Articles where I am an Expert Author!
4. Social book marking – Ever heard of Stumble Upon, Reddit, and Digg? These are just some of the most popular social book marking sites which people also frequent. These sites compile a database of articles that have been rated by Internet users. Once an article is marked through these sites, it also increases its hits and possibly comes up as one of the top results in a search engine portal. The beauty of using social book marking is that your articles get rated by internet users for free. You no longer have to pay for a person to write you a good review. All you have to do is create a really good article and attach social book marking buttons below it or submit it to these sites so people can read and refer it.
How To Find Hidden Article Ideas
Filed under: Article Marketing, Article Marketing Ideas
Are you ever stumped on what to write about? When you’re doing article marketing to drive traffic to your website, you need to be submitting articles consistently month in and month out. That means that you need to have a steady stream of article ideas, and that can be a challenge sometimes!
I’ve got some good news for you though: You have more article ideas than you realize. Most likely, you have several article ideas right under your nose on your own website or in your business.
Here are some tips for finding hidden article ideas:
1) Look on your own website. You probably have content that would be perfect for one or more articles. For example, if you are a business coach, you might have a page on your website called “Why use a business coach?”. That sort of topic can be turned into an article.
2) Your old newsletters. What messages have you been sending your list? If you have a list you’ve probably been in steady communication with your subscribers. You send them helpful tips, observations, anything that will provide value to them. If you have any teaching topics from old newsletters you’ve sent, you can use them as an article. You may have to rework things a little to meet word count requirements and make the newsletter content article worthy, but you’ve got a great head start on the writing process.
3) Written any e-books? An e-book is a great source of article ideas because you already have the content broken into chapters. When using content from an e-book, you can extract whatever material you would like to use, and then add an intro and concluding paragraph to form an article.
4) Your blog. If you have a well-tended blog, you have a continuous source of article ideas at your fingertips. Look for posts that teach: how to’s or list posts are readily adapted to be articles.
5) Audio interviews that you’ve done. Listen to old interviews you’ve done and write down the questions you were asked and a synopsis of your answers. You may be able to get several articles out of one interview.
6) Your replies to questions from your customers. Sometimes you’ll get a great question on a general topic from a customer that necessitates a more involved reply. As long as you’ve taken the time to explain things, why not use your reply as the foundation of an article that answers the same question?
Here’s what to do when you’ve found hidden content that you can morph into articles:
*Rework the content if it is appearing on your own site. It is beneficial that the content on your own website be original, so you wouldn’t want to submit anything verbatim from your website. This is not necessary if the original content was in a newsletter, audio interview, or a customer support answer. Only content from your own website needs to be reworked to be unique.
*Remove all promotional references from the content–that may be appropriate on your own website or in a newsletter, but trying to make a sales pitch in an article is not appropriate. Save that for the resource box.
*The website content should be used as a general guide for your article. Don’t try to reword the content line by line–it’s too easy to copy the original content. Instead, look at your original work as an outline for your article and write the article fresh.
*Write for newbies and for more advanced audiences. You can cover the same topic writing on different levels.
Did you find any article ideas that were hiding right under your nose? It’s a great feeling when you do. Remember, when you feel like “there’s nothing to right about”, look at your website and your business from a fresh perspective, and you’ll be surprised at the article ideas you find.
Article Submitter Software
Should you use article submitter software? This is a big question for marketers! On one hand it may seem a little disingenuous, on the other hand there are like a gagillion article sites and who could possibly write that many articles or have the ability to submit them and still have time to run their business?
If you don’t know, article submitter software takes your article that you have written and “spins” it by allowing you to replace words with other words that are similar in meaning. If I was going to write an article about “small business marketing” I could confidentially replace “small business” with entrepreneur. What these kinds of software do is replace LOTS of different things in the article so that the search engines think it is new content and not slap it for being duplicate.
I use article submitter software AND I write stand alone articles. Both have their place and I can say I have gotten incoming clicks and sales from both.
Here is a company that provides this service if you would like to find out more:
Mass Article Control – #1 Article Creator And Submitting Solution
Writing Great Articles Marketing
Filed under: Article Directory, Article Marketing, Article Submit
Writing great articles for marketing is easy if you know what your core keywords that you want to focus on are! If you are actually trying to use your article to drive traffic to your website or affiliate link, it is mandatory that you be laser focused on your objective.
Step One – Make sure your article topic is correct
For this post I am targeting the keyword “articles marketing”. The number of people searching for that term monthly is 40,500 and there are only 393,000 sites with that exact match in the title. That means that if I do a good job of writing relevant info and have great SEO I can rank highly for that term!
Step Two – Make sure to use your keywords
Use your keywords in your title, description, keywords and also at least every other paragraph of your article. DO NOT “stuff” your keyword by using it over and over again. You can make it sound normal by changing up how you use it.
I did say in my title “Writing great articles marketing”, but then I could also use it in my content by saying “there are many great articles, marketing experts say”. That puts the two keywords right in a row in a way that humans will not notice.
Step Three – Write for people
This is super important in article marketing! Real people will be reading your article and deciding whether to click on the link at the bottom. Give them a reason to click by writing great content that they will enjoy reading.
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