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The Secret to Creating an Effective Article Marketing Campaign

Blogged under The Secret to Creating an Effective Article Marketing Campaign by admin on Tuesday 18 November 2008 at 3:09 pm

It would certainly be a wonderful thing if the world was filled with predisposed buyers, but this isn't reality. Most people, though perhaps leaning in one direction or another, usually need some extra convincing before they commit. So how can you create the most effective article marketing campaign that might nudge these people to follow your recommendations?

The fact is, a "target market" is made up of people who are at a wide range of dispositions, from pre-educated and ready-to-buy, to moderate uncommitted interest, and even to mere newbie curiosity. But regardless of where they're heads are at, they still should be considered as a viable part of your market, because there's really no way of segregating the most likely to buy from the window shoppers.

And there's no real reason why you should try to make any distinctions between the various mindsets. Unless of course, you're looking for the least effective way of marketing to these people.

If this is where you want to go, then you'd be just as likely to make sales by using classified ads instead of articles to promote with. Articles should always be viewed as a teaching tool, thus if you're only interested in targeting the pre-educated, then you'll be wasting valuable time writing a 500+ word document.

But if you're going into article marketing wholeheartedly, then you'll want to play to your entire audience.

Let's look at the economics of taking this approach . . .

No matter what you write, you're going to grab some of the predisposed who are already set to buy. However, it's not going to turn them away if you give them more convincing information than they need to take the plunge. It'll only serve to enforce their decision.

So that means it's perfectly fine to present an argument geared toward the uncommitted, yet interested portion of your market. Your predisposed readers will be thrilled to know how much they already comprehend, and you'll be teaching these interested readers how they can make the move toward an educated decision.

Likewise, by laying out your argument as simply and as plainly as possible won't upset this moderately interested group, but could move the curious newbies into an appreciative band of regular followers.

Thus, to be the most effective, any article marketing campaign should play to the least likely to purchase.

>From a time economics standpoint, you can reach a much larger base of readers that could be ushered into the realms of committed buyers with just a little extra effort by moving your articles into a teaching rather than a promoting form.

Then, from the perspective of niche economics, targeted markets being naturally smaller, demand you play to the entire market to draw as much income as possible from them. Working from the "ground up" will help assure your time is well spent.

And finally from the economics of credibility and branding, the larger your reader base is in any niche will increase the value of your position as a viable teacher and expert. Having articles on the web that considers all levels of interest will continue to draw people to you. The more a wider range of people can learn from you, the more they'll want to follow through.

So really then, the secret to creating an effective article marketing campaign is to forget about the certain or likely buyers, and focus more on reaching out to those in your market who may be just testing the waters for the first time. By "digging deep," your time can be spent much more wisely cultivating a market and creating more likely buyers than what may be apparent on the surface.

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Competing in Today’s Article Marketing Arena

Blogged under Competing in Today's Article Marketing Arena by admin on Wednesday 5 November 2008 at 12:38 pm

As is usually the case with every form of marketing, there's a period of time when anything works. New stuff always gets attention. But now that article submission to promote products and brand oneself as an expert has been around for a while, there needs to be more effort involved to compete in today's article marketing arena.

Just the sheer numbers tells us there requires a shift in promotional thinking. The thousands of article directories, the millions of article submissions going on every week, and the billions of interesting topics and sub-topics makes it mandatory to beef up the quality of content, not only grammatically, but also in regard to over delivering fine information that can be used right at the starting gate.

Gone are the days of content for the sake of content if one wishes to compete for readers' attention. Gone are the days when any posted words, tied to a link, giving one a significant back link supply. Semantics now plays a major role in content placement and quality of weight and value.

What you say in a piece of content is now far more important than how many articles you have out there. The competition is just too fierce to rely on "ho hum" marketing.

There needs to be more care taken in the over all quality of an article, both in the flow of the message for understandability's sake as well as for the value of information offered. Articles need to teach something significant to catch the eye.

The value of your expert status depends on how effective a teacher you are. If you give more than you expect to get, the greater weight your words will carry, and the larger a following you'll receive in the long run.

There's no quick and easy way to accomplish this level of respect. One article won't do it regardless of how well written it is. You'll need to bring to light a complete argument for your position before people see you as someone to listen to. The search engines will need to see the relevance of your arguments before they recognize the advantage of putting your content in the forefront of their listings.

The good part is that anyone can do this. You don't have to be a scholar to win an argument. You just have to make your content reasonable and understandable.

So to compete in today's article marketing arena, you need to put aside the usual "tomfoolery" of spewing useless content thinking that it'll do you any good, and settle down to creating convincing arguments for things you yourself believe in. It's really that simple. If you don't fully believe in a product, then don't try marketing it.

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There Sure Are a Lot of Article Directories Out There!

Blogged under There Sure Are a Lot of Article Directories Out There! by admin on Friday 10 October 2008 at 10:13 am

There was a time when you had a choice of about ten article directories to submit to. Now there's at least 1,400 to 2,000 of them, not counting ezines and email groups. Sure there are a few of these article directories that get virtually no traffic, but the vast majority have rather large and constant viewers all looking for new information. So how do you determine which of all these to submit to?

Some will say to just continue submitting to the top 10 that have been around for years. It's true these do get more traffic, however they also get more submissions, meaning you'll have much more competition for the viewers they receive every day.

And the fact remains, some of the newer article directories, not counted among the top 10, get a fair share of traffic too. And there's indications that traffic to these "lesser" directories are growing due to visitors looking for articles that benefit less from the directory's page ranking.

So the trend shows that people who understand how article marketing works, and go looking for articles to reuse on their own site, tend to go looking in article directories with a lower page rank so they can grab more of the value for the information. For example, if you found an article on a PR7 directory and your site had a PR2, the weight you'd receive for that information posted on your site would be much less than if you had taken the article from a PR0 or a PR1 site.

To explain this from a listing perspective, if you take an article from a directory with less page rank value than your site has, the likelihood of the article being listed in a search from your site rather than from the directory is greater.

You'd actually be stealing the "thunder" and adding the value to your site over the directory's.

Now from an author's perspective this is also good news, because if you submit your articles to a variety of page ranked sites, you'll have both the directories and those who seek to reuse your articles competing for top listing in a search. With your link back to your site securely set in your bio box, no matter who gets top billing, your link is in plain view for people who want more info on the topic.

Thus if you submit to high ranking sites you benefit from their value, but by also submitting to lower ranked sites you benefit from the page rank of those who go there to bolster their own page rank which in turn adds value to your article and link as well.

It's a win/win situation for those who submit articles!

So yes, submit your articles to the top 10 article directories. But don't leave all that potential traffic and page rank value on the table by not submitting to the lesser directories used more by people looking for content rather than information.

The key to success is exposure, so dig deep!

By utilizing everything available to you from an article marketing perspective, the viral quality of your campaigns will grow significantly.

So always keep in mind, attracting people who seek to reuse your content can be just as powerful as attracting readers. It's like handing them an email promoting your product and asking them to spread it out to their lists for free.

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Getting Your Articles to Stand Out in the Crowd

Blogged under Getting Your Articles to Stand Out in the Crowd by admin on Thursday 9 October 2008 at 12:15 pm

There's no doubt about it, article marketing is an extremely popular way to promote. But because its so enthusiastically used, there's also the risk your articles could get lost in the crowd. With virtually thousands of new articles being submitted every single day, how can you better your chances of getting seen and read?

To give you a visual example of how fast and often articles are being submitted, go check out Propeller's "Just In" section and sit back and watch. Though Propeller isn't an article directory in the pure sense of the term, it'll give you some idea of how actively submissions are made on a minute by minute basis.

Today there's well over 1,000 article directories on the web ranging on all levels of popularity and page rank, with millions of articles being submitted to them on a weekly basis. And now we have automated article submitters, content creators, article spinners, outsourcing, and you name it, all designed to pump out articles at mind boggling speed.

So how can you compete for readers in a scenario like this?

The late Silvia Ashton Warner, a well known novelist said this to put us on the path of understanding what an article needs in order to stand out:

"It is not so much the content of what one says as the way in which one says it. However important the thing you say, what's the good of it if not heard or, being heard, not felt."

What this means is, you have to go beyond the reader's eyes and reach their hearts. To put it bluntly, you have to reach the parts of them that triggers desire. They have to "feel" what you're telling them.

You have to engage them!

Of course this starts with supplying useful information, but even more so, the reader needs to see how that information applies to them and how it'll help move them from their current position to a "happier place."

Scientifically, humans understand things through pictures. Our memories are all pictures stored away for future reference, and when something new happens to us, our minds revert back to past memories to determine the next course of action. Naturally, we don't all have the same memories, but there are certainly commonalities to memory that can be tapped into to set a scenario most readers could understand.

This is why storytelling is so effective. Telling a story in your articles, whether it be generic or a personal experience creates that experiential environment that forces a memory based reaction, especially for those who are naturally drawn to your topic. Once you've tapped into a reader's memories, it's almost effortless for them to continue to the end of the story.

Now a story doesn't necessarily have to be a full blown narrative, and in some cases it might be inappropriate to use a lengthy "play by play" description. However, a simple analogy or two can have the same effect.

For example, supposing you were writing about balancing food cost with nutritional concerns. A very frustrating situation to say the least. Most "cheap" food is usually not very good for you, yet in this financial environment, there may be a need to cut budget costs at the grocery store.

Your goal would be to get your readers to "feel" the frustration, so perhaps you could use a "rock and a hard place" analogy to relate how difficult it is to find the middle ground between what's in your heart and what's in your wallet.

So you could explain that it's taking longer to shop because you find yourself pacing up and down the aisles comparing nutritional labels with your eyes while manning the calculator with your hands. And in spite of all that, you still don't come home with what you truly wanted to buy.

Having to feed your family foods that you'd rather not feed them can be a real crisis for many people, so highlighting the dilemma will bring them to the exact place you want them to be.

Of course your ultimate goal is to bring relief from the frustration with a real viable solution, or at least a lead in for hope to bring them to click your link.

So we could go on and on with other examples, but hopefully you get the drift. The thing is, you have a solution to a particular problem, and you want your readers to go for the solution, right?

Getting them to "feel" the problem and "see" how you personally understand it, will make them much more liable to follow through with your suggestions and recommendations. So when you sit down to write your next article, think of it as if someone is asking you, "so how do you feel about this and why?"

What a story that'll make!

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Does Substance in Your Articles Matter?

Blogged under Does Substance in Your Articles Matter? by admin on Tuesday 23 September 2008 at 2:07 pm

The argument between quantity and quality has raged on for quite some time in the article marketing arena. Some believe most readers will look at an article title and scroll down to click the link, much like most people do on a sales page. So it really doesn't matter, in their opinion, if any reasonable substance goes between the title and the link in a bio box or not. But is that true?

The problem with this theory is, most people who make it to a sales page just want to know what the "bottom line" is. They want to know how much of an economic investment they'll have to make to commit to the product being offered.

This stands to reason because, why read about a product and get all excited about it, if you can't afford to get it? So many will scroll down to the bottom of a sales page to see how much something will cost before finding out exactly what it'll do for them.

But articles aren't sales pages. Or at least they shouldn't be.

Articles are bits of information much more likely to be read thoroughly. People read articles to learn about a topic, often with little thought of commitment, so they aren't interested in what the bottom line is. They want to know what the author knows, and that means reading every word.

It also means substance matters greatly if a reader can be expected to follow through with a link click once they read through the article. And if there's still a question about it, getting people to click through is ultimately the main reason for writing articles in the first place.

Another reason the "quantity first" proponents give for mass producing articles is to get the search engines to list multiple times on a search query. Whether the latent semantic indexing the search engines are doing now will catch the ruse, is likely, but hardly the most important downfall of this idea.

The truth of the matter is, search engines don't buy products!

Designing an article campaign to appeal to search engines may get you listed more than once, but for what? Poorly written articles generally won't appeal to readers, and so the odds are they won't click through. No click throughs then, makes getting listed pointless.

So in the end, writing good, substantial content with the appeal of the reader in mind will get you a lot further than mass producing. Not only will you impress your potential customers with quality information, but you'll also be playing into what the search engines are really looking for, solid and coherent viewpoints.

Next we'll talk about how to make your articles pop in the highly competitive market of article promotions.

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