Article Marketing Business

August 21, 2009 By Lisa Angelettie 1 Comment

Did you know that you can quickly learn how to carve out a living on the web when you build your own article marketing business? There are several reasons why…

First – people love to read new and useful information. You have an audience of hungry readers.

Second – When you write articles, you can begin to build a “following” of folks who will read your content over and over. These are the people who you will market to and you will eventually buy.

Third – articles have a high perceived value. Better then banners, classified ads, and spammy emails. When you give people real information they can use, you begin to build credibility and your content builds value.

So while those are some very strong reasons why you should start your own article marketing business, the bigger questions many people new to article marketing ask is “how do can I make money exactly?”

Here are my Top 5 ways to make money from the article marketing business…

1. Write articles that teach the reader something of value, but also refer a product or service within the article. Make sure you sign up for the affiliate program of the product or service you are recommending or mentioning so that you get your cut if an affiliate sale is made.

2. Use articles to promote a free offer such as an ebook, ecourse, or video series that will funnel the reader into a paid offer (either your own or someone else’s as an affiliate).

3. Get paid to write. There are a lot of paid writer sites such as ehow.com which pays you to write how-to articles, and the examiner.com which pays you to write articles on a specific topic.

4. Repackage a series of articles into a small report and sell it.

5. Repackage a series of articles into a mini e-course. Make sure that you refer an affiliate or pitch something of your own in each lesson or every other lesson.

**To learn other ways to make money from your articles, read more about the Articology article marketing course.

Write Your First Article Today

August 18, 2009 By Lisa Angelettie 2 Comments

I know what you’re thinking. You have this great business. You have a wonderful product or a fabulous service, but you don’t know how to express just how great it is in words.

You want to try article marketing. You’ve heard the success stories. Zero cost. Steady traffic. High visibility. You’ve also heard the horror stories. How on earth will you find the time? How do you know people will want to read what you’ve written. Article submission is long and tedious.

But think about this when you go to write your first article today…

How did you find the last product you bought on the web? The last marketing list you signed up on, how did you find that expert? I bet you that it was either directly or indirectly from an article.

Articles establish authority, visibility, traffic, and sales. That’s a fact.

Best of all they do it at zero cost to the writer. So of course every REAL earner on the web uses article marketing.

Top internet marketers aren’t telling you that because of course they are selling you a “different” or “newer” internet marketing strategy. But the truth is – they are using articles on their sites and blogs, over at directories, as affiliate tools, in their newsletters — they are everywhere.

So when you go to your “to do” list of marketing activities, I strongly urge you to add:

To Do: Write Your First Article Today

It’s as simple as these three steps:

1. Pick a topic that is a source of pain for prospects in your niche

2. Write a 400-500 word article on the solution to that pain

3. Publish the article on your site, in your ezine, and/or a high-traffic article directory

Need more help with this? I will hold you by the hand and help you write articles by the dozen when you enroll in my weekly article marketing course.

How Do I Improve My Bounce Rate?

August 8, 2009 By Lisa Angelettie 2 Comments

Once you start writing and regularly posting articles to your own website or blog, you can take your article marketing to the next level by constantly tweaking your site to improve your website’s bounce rate.

I explained how to understand your bounce rate statistics in a previous article, but to describe it in its simplest terms – your bounce rate is the number of people who visit and leave your home page in one single visit. They come, they scan the page, they leave. That’s a bounce. But that’s not what we want. The higher your bounce rate – the worse that is for you.

Instead, we want visitors to come by our home page, read and click, read and click, and get deeper and deeper into our site. This keeps our visitors reading, engaged, and learning more about us and what types of information we are “experts” on. Plus – it of course increases your chances of the visitor buying from you in the future. When people stay on a site and read deeper into your articles — that is what’s called a “sticky site”. You’re keeping visitors glued into the site. Now that’s what we want!

So how do I improve my bounce rate, Lisa?

Well, there are several really easy things you can implement today to improve your site’s bounce rate and keep visitors on site:

1. Make sure you have implemented the “similar posts” wordpress plugin, if you have a wordpress blog (and you should:) You can tell this plugin in the settings to add similar post titles at the bottom of each post or in the sidebars. I actually do both.

2. Add interactive features such as polls or surveys on your site. I like to use PollDaddy made by the creators of WordPress. It’s free and pretty powerful. You can create polls for your site to keep it nice and “sticky” or survey your list. (To improve your bounce rate, you will actually need to link to your poll or survey from the home page so that visitors go deeper into your site).

3. Add links to related articles in the body of your article. For example, in the second paragraph of this article, I mention another article which I wrote about understanding what a bounce rate statistic is. Folks who click on that link will be reading another article I have written and then probably come back to this original article. That’s how you keep visitors on the site longer and improve your bounce statistic. As long as they have left the home page to visit another – your rate improves.

4. Make page titles in your navbar enticing. They typical home and about us navigation links aren’t going win you any additional clicks – but simple changes can improve that. Making your about link more personal can entice a click (Meet Lisa vs. About Us). You can do the same thing with other links in your navabar as well.

5. Something I am working on, and that I’ve seen work really well, is grouping articles together and promoting them on the home page as a quick start guide – or intro guide. Sometimes visitors to your site are very new to your topic and can be overwhelmed with the information. They want to be directed on where to start first. I’ve seen this done really well on the problogger and GlazerKennedy sites.

Do you have some keeping your site “sticky” suggestions. Share ’em with us…

Article Marketing Campaign: 5 Step Path To Building Traffic

August 5, 2009 By Lisa Angelettie 11 Comments

If you have read any of my articles or other content, you know that I often use the term “article marketing campaign“, and it wasn’t until a member asked me in an email to define what exactly I meant by that term – that I realized that I should define the term for everybody and also give you an outline or map on how to create one that builds you traffic.

Q: So What Is An Article Marketing Campaign?

A: When you create a writing and publishing system in your online business to attract traffic and build your list, you have created and are executing an article marketing campaign. Here’s an example of the system:

1. Write an article on a regular basis. That could be daily, weekly, bi-weekly or monthly. Whatever is a realistic and consistent time for your schedule. But make a decision on it, don’t sit on the fence, this is a crucial part of your campaign. Consistency.

2. Publish your article on your site, an article directory, or third party site/blog. The more established, higher quality, and more traffic the site has – the better.

3. Promote your articles via social networking, email, newsletters, etc.

4. Profit from your articles by promoting affiliate links or through promoting your own products and services. Depending on where you publish, do this within the article and/or the resource box.

5. Repeat the above four steps over and over so that it becomes a natural part of your marketing schedule.

The act of completing and repeating the above steps is what makes you a full fledged article marketer, executing an on-going article marketing campain.

Now you can also set up mini article marketing campaigns that are niche specific. For instance, as the creator of the article marketing course, Articology – I could write 10 articles all related to steps in that course and make my call to action be something related to Articology. This would be considered a niche article marketing campaign, and these work really powerfully.

In fact if you are planning on launching a new product or service soon – start writing. Publish articles about your new product (in a trickle fashion – not all at once) before you release your product and get crawled in the search engines. Now you can release your product already having laid an article and backlink foundation to your product.

This is how I like to launch a new product or service. And it works. Interest and anticipation is naturally built via the articles. Now all you have to do is wait for people to take the next step.

Hate Writing Articles?

August 2, 2009 By Lisa Angelettie 5 Comments

I want to know if this is you…
Do you hate writing articles? Does writing make you break out in a cold sweat? Do you rarely know how to get your thoughts organized enough so that they are written and understandable? Do you cringe at the very idea of keywords and titles?

Do you hate writing articles so much that you just don’t do it, therefore missing out on goo gobs of traffic?! Yikes!

If this is you, then you are virtually leaving money on the table when there is such an easy “fix” for this.

For example, I don’t like cooking very much, but I do it because I have 3 small children and a husband. Our family would not run as efficiently and happily if they were not given “fuel” on a regular basis in our home:-) And not just any fuel like fast food, but high quality fuel such as home cooked meals.

The same goes for writing articles of your own. If you run an online business, you may not enjoy or rather you hate writing articles, but trust me when I say that when you do it – you truly start to see the benefits: more traffic, better list building, more visibility, more sales.

Now who wouldn’t want all of that at ZERO cost? I think anyone would jump at that chance.

I believe that part of the reason why you may hate writing articles, is that you always found it a bit difficult to get started and then keep up a consistent writing schedule. Perhaps some of you have no idea what to write about, or question whether what you are writing is even worth reading?

Don’t Give Up!

All major marketers on the web who are making money at it have used article marketing and I would bet $100 bucks are still using it. This I know for a fact. Think about it – how did you find the last information product you bought? You probably made an organic search for something in the search engines and stumbled upon information regarding that search. Information probably written by the author of that last infoproduct.

So now that we’ve established that you hate writing articles, but know that it’s an absolutely essential part of any internet entrepreneur’s marketing plan, this will help you get started…

Read These:
1. The Real Reason Why You Aren’t Writing Articles
2. How To Write More Articles
3. What Is The Biggest Article Marketing Mistake?
4. Learn more about the #1 52-Week Article Marketing Course on the web – Articology!

Article Marketing Success: Put The Pressure On!

August 1, 2009 By Lisa Angelettie 15 Comments

Here is a little article marketing success secret that I don’t often share…

As a psychotherapist I have studied the topic of human psychology over the years, and sometimes it comes in quite handy in my online business. And not for examining clients, but for increasing my own productivity.

There is something very psychological about having to complete a task in a specific period of time. While a few of us may fall apart under the pressure, most of us tend to fall in line and produce when we are under pressure to do so.

Think about writing papers in school – didn’t most of us procrastinate until the last minute but always got it done? Or what about your last project at work? Didn’t you get it done because you only had a few days to do so? Plus – I don’t know about you, but amazingly enough I seemed to write “better” when I had the pressure of a deadline. I always got a “Great Job Lisa!”

Well the same principles can be applied to your business and especially in your marketing tasks. Now while you have to put the pressure on yourself rather than an outside force doing it – I find that it still works.

In order to give myself a strict timeline, I like to use an old standard – a kitchen timer – when I sit down at the computer to write my articles for the day or for the week.

Kitchen timers are virtually indestructible and are loud! They also are portable, so you can travel with them and are very inexpensive to buy. I love them.

This is why I look at my kitchen timer 3 times while I am writing an article…

1. First I set the timer. I usually give myself about 30 minutes per article. You may need more or less depending on how many words you write. A good rule of thumb to follow is 300 words in 30 minutes.

2. I always get to a point in an article when I’m either tired, stuck, or thirsty! I take a look at the timer around this point in the writing process to see how much more time I have. I usually learn that I have about 10 more minutes, and then I get to furiously writing and “closing” the article.

3. I hear the timer go BUZZ!!! or DING! DING! Time’s up. I may have to close out a sentence. Then I save. Do a quick read through and then start the article submission process, or I save it for submitting another day.

Bottom line? Put yourself on a self-imposed deadline and watch your article marketing productivity soar!

Get your own Kitchen Timer and get started putting the pressure on!

Article Writing: Writing Effectively Online

July 30, 2009 By Lisa Angelettie 5 Comments

The web is full of content, so it’s more important than ever for your writing to effectively stand out among the crowd. And that goes for any sort of online writing: articles, sales copy, blog posts, newsletters, information products, books.

Yet there are two very different distinct readers in the universe – online readers and offline readers. I am a member of both clubs, as both a reader and a writer. So I have seen how truly a distinct skill it takes when writing effectively online. Online readers require different things from their authors.

1. Writing Effectively Online – Tip 1

When writing almost anything online, you should not write anything that is too long. A lot of words on a computer is difficult on the eyes and online readers cannot stay reading something on a computer as long as they can something in print. If your article is over 1000 words, it’s too long. You need to break it up into two separate articles. 400-500 words is great. Search engines love them at that length, and so will online readers.

2. Writing Effectively Online – Tip 2

Write from the heart and add some personality. All too often readers will search their favorite niche and find a lot of empty, meaningless articles void of real information. This is where you have chance to shine and stand out in your niche. While everyone is writing straight forward articles about how to crate train a new puppy, you are going to write an article on how to do it along with your personal experience on doing it yourself. Maybe with even a funny anecdote about housebreaking. A picture of you doing it along with the article would be even better. Anything you can use to make the article a more personal experience for the reader, and you are effectively reaching the reader. Not talking over or around him – but to him.

3. Writing Effectively Online – Tip 3

Write often. You cannot expect to really break into your niche without having a decent amount of content written and published on your topic. It’s just a numbers game. The person who is writing more useful stuff is the person who is going to be considered the resident expert. Or one of “the” experts in your niche.

4. Writing Effectively Online – Tip 4

Use white space. When writing articles, ebooks, or sales letters for your website, it’s very important that there are “visual breaks” for the reader. So do not write really lengthy paragraphs. Break them up if they are too long. Remember that every new thought or concept should be a new paragraph. I think of paragraph breaks in terms of where I take a breath when telling a story. Too many sentences in one paragraph online start to look like one big run-on sentence. So remember – it’s fine to have white space.

5. Writing Effectively Online – Tip 5

Spread yourself around. It’s important to spread your content around to gain maximum visibility. Sure it’s great if you are columnist on a high-traffic site in your niche, but that’s not the only place that people can find you. Not every search on keywords in your niche will lead your prospects back to one site. That’s why it’s important to spread your content around and increase your chances of being found. Now keep in mind this does not mean to publish on every Tom, Dick and Harry article directory out there. That can possibly dilute your message. Focus on several lucrative high-traffic sites in your niche, as well as your own, and you will do well.

Related Websites

Article Marketing Tip: Are You Highlighting Your Keywords?

July 29, 2009 By Lisa Angelettie 9 Comments

When you write your articles, hopefully you are using good search engine optimization strategies by making sure that your main keyword phrase is being emphasized and highlighted throughout the body of your article.

While this won’t guarantee you the #1 spot in the search engines, research has shown that by highlighting your keyword phrases in a natural way, that they carry more weight and more clout in the search engines.

Article Marketing Tip 1 – Use html to make your keyword phrase bold or strong. The proper form for the html would be:
 BOLD or STRONG .

Using either bold or strong will make the text in between the html code above look bold in an article. You just have to take a look at what kind of html the site your are submitting your article to permits. Some allow the and some only permit the .

Article Marketing Tip 2 – Use html to make your keyword phrase italicized. The proper form for the html would be:
 ITALICIZED

The use of italicizing words permits you to highlight your keyword phrases subtly without being too obvious, but still giving them weight in the search engines.

Highlighting I Avoid:

I usually avoid highlighting keyword phrases with header html code such as <H1> <H2> and so on. The reasons why are that many article directories do not permit the use of heading html code and publishing formats such as wordpress don’t format the header codes well within a post body, and so your posts start looking a little “funky”.

Most places that you are submitting your articles to have all of the header code set up already. For example, the title of this blog article will have an H1 heading automatically – and that’s good enough. There’s no need to add a bunch of additional header codes in the article – because while they do hold some weight with the search engines, it starts to make your articles look a little unnatural. And appealing to your readers is what’s most important.

Do you have any tricks of the trade for making your keyword phrases stand out in the search engines?

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