Lisa Angelettie

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What Does Your Article Resource Box Look Like?

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question-mark1aI was cruising around the web doing a bit of research for a project I am working on and decided to read a couple of articles. I noticed that while I read some great content out there, that a lot of folks were wasting the link in their resource boxes. So my question for the day is, what does your article resource box look like?

The resource box or bio box is that little section at the end of your articles where you write a little bit about yourself and are allowed to include a live link or two back to your website, squeeze page, etc. You wouldn’t use a resource box on your own site, just on articles that you submit to article directories and other 3rd party websites.

But there is something that a lot of writers and article marketers are doing that could be costing them link juice, take a look at your resource box and make sure…

1. That you do not link to your home page all the time.
There’s no crime in linking to your home page, but you should switch it up by linking to pages deeper into your site. If you only have a lot of links to your home page it looks “unnatural” to the search engines and you miss out on what I call your “google love”. Search engines love to see varied links as it doesn’t quite look so spammy.

2. That you do not use a url address as the linking text.
Example – do not use http://articlemarketingsuccesskit.com. Not unless you are forced to because you have to create a plain text resource box for an article directory. Instead you should use your keywords and link them to your url. Example – Article Marketing Tools is linked to the url I mentioned above.

3. Stop talking about all your wonderful degrees and stuff!
You have about 50-100 words in a resource box to convince someone who has just read your article that they may want to read more about you and your topic somewhere else – preferably on your site! So stop talking about what you’ve accomplished and spend those precious few words talking about how you can help the reader further. That gets you the click!

Article Marketing Works In All Niches

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When I worked for a weekly Travel Agent magazine back in NYC in the 90’s, I worked in two positions. First in sales/marketing, then in editorial. I was able to see first hand both sides of the coin, and why they actually worked hand in hand.

In fact, I was able to help create something in the business called advertorials which is a series of articles that are actually big ole’ ads for a travel destination or cruise ship.

Those advertorials were a big deal to the company because they meant big bucks. What readers would see is this big kind of glossy pull-out of a big long article or series of articles (with pictures) on one destination. What they rarely noticed though is that there was never a negative word said in those pull-outs. It was all good stuff. How great the cruise line was. How hospitable the staff was at a new Caribbean hotel. And how they could go on that vacation for less money then they thought.

Companies paid BIG bucks for these advertorials, so of course the magazine loved to do them. It was also a great way for me to get my writing experience in before I moved to editorial. My point here is that companies have been using article marketing for years because article marketing works in all niches.

Now most print magazines do not get to do these types of advertorials as much as the old days because of marketing dollars available, but they are still done. Sometimes it may be the one-page article with photos you see in the Women’s magazines that say in small print “advertisement” at the top. They look like great articles, and actually are, but in a disguise cloaking what it truly is – an ad.

While I tend to write articles that answer questions, list resources, or solve a problem — I think there is absolutely room for the advertorial. In fact, it is what article marketers are doing all over the web without even knowing it. That’s because we simply just call it article marketing. Why article marketing works, is not really a mystery. It’s because people love information. People love to learn. People love to be in the know. People seek help and advice through articles. It has always worked and will continue to work as long as people are interested in the things that we write.

The rule of thumb is: If it makes money – there is probably an article written on it somewhere.

Let’s test that theory. I had my daughter 10 year old Autumn just throw out some random terms.

Lip Gloss
After a female rapper’s video titled “lipgloss” this article came in second place during a Google search:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lip_gloss

The Clarinet
Wikipedia takes the top spot again, but there were several other links to Clarinet organizations etc. that
featured articles and content on their sites:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarinet

Tweens
Wikipedia again! So I left them out. Here is the next one on the list. Pure content.
http://www.parenting.org/tween/index.asp

My point here is that there is content written on almost any topic in any niche you can think of. So if you were ever thinking if article marketing could work for your in your niche, there is no doubt in my mind that it can.

Remember that it is your first job is to educate then entertain your prospects with information – then and only then – can you start selling to them. That’s why article marketing works!

Article Marketing Success: Write In The Style That Works For You

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There is an article marketing saying that I like to use with myself and especially with clients, and that is that you will find true article marketing success when you decide to write in the style that works for you. So what does that mean?

Well, I figured out a long time ago when I first started out coaching clients on how to write articles and information products that everyone wasn’t good at everything. Meaning that I may have 15 different article templates that my clients could follow to help them write easier, produce articles faster, etc., but that they really never had success with using all 15 of those templates. That’s because regardless of experience, aptitude, or willingness — everyone has a writing style that works better for them then may work with another person.

Some clients worked better creating a list. Ex. Top 10 List of Article Marketers

Others worked better with the How To formula. Ex. How To Build A Windmill

Some do better with the problem/solution format, and so on and so on.

The key is to find the writing style and formula that works best for you and use it as much as your heart’s content. There is no rule out there that you have to use a million different types of writing formats or styles. There is no law that says that every one of your articles cannot be a how-to or a list. That may be the way that you think an organize ideas. Some people design and live their whole lives based around “to do” lists. That may work best for you, and results show that readers love lists.

It is a much better idea to take a style that you can implement easily and run with it then to be “stuck” for days or weeks writing nothing because you want to write differently. Remember what I have said a million times before – article marketing is a numbers game. While I strive for high quality content with every article that I write, I know that it is more important that I write and publish content consistently. And for many folks out there – the key to that is to stick to what you know!

Do I Have To Submit My Articles To Google?

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question-markQ: I was wondering if I need to submit my new articles to Google if I want them to show up in the search engines?

A: No. There is no particular method of submitting your individual articles to Google. What you need to do instead is make sure that you are submitting and/or publishing your articles to high-quality, high-traffic, and info-rich, websites which are already being visited or spidered by Google.

When the search engine ‘spiders’ come to visit those sites, they will crawl the site and see your articles. That is when they will be naturally added to the search engine results. This is the method that works and that Google likes – finding your articles naturally through crawling the website it is published on.

What Is Article Marketing?

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I receive a lot of emails and messages via Facebook asking me the most basic question about what I do, and that is “Hey Lisa, What is Article Marketing and how can it help my business?” It really is a great question — because there is often a question about what the difference is between doing article marketing vs. writing articles?

THE PURPOSE

Well when you write an article, you want someone to read it and hopefully enjoy it. The end. But article marketing serves a higher power. When you use article marketing, you are writing articles that you intend to use to educate and entertain the reader with the additional goals of increasing your own visibility and credibility in your marketplace, while also sending new traffic back to your website.

So I guess you can say that article marketing serves both the reader and the writer equally.

PARTS OF AN ARTICLE

1. The Title – it’s very important to write an eye-catching AND keyword optimized article in order to entice the reader and the search engine gods:)

2. The Summary – For submissions to article directories and most 3rd party publishers, you will need to create a few sentences to serve as the summary of your article. You can use the first couple of sentences of your article or you could create a more enticing one of your own that will grab the reader’s attention.

3. The Body – Here is where you write the bulk of your article. You will want to write in small paragraphs to make the article easily digestible by readers, use bulleted or numbered lists, use some formatting like (bold) to break things up. Keep your articles about 400-500 words long.

You should also avoid writing promotion materials, press releases, or using any type of  “salesy” language in your articles. No one wants to be sold to via articles, readers want to be educated and entertained first. You must build trust and a relationship with your content. Trying to sell to a customer too early can mean poor sales for you.

4. The Resource Box – Here is where you write a few sentences about who you are and what you want the reader to do next. It’s important to get this part right so that the reader goes back to your website and opt-in etc. You will create a live link inside your resource box whether it is written in plain text or with html code for your reader to click on. Strive for simplicity in your resource box. You only get about 50 to 75 words for most bio boxes in directories.

FOUR PILLARS OF ARTICLE MARKETING

1. Write The Article

We talked about the essential parts of writing your article above.

2. Publish The Article

The next step that you need to make after you have written your article is to publish it. Article marketers tend to publish their articles on their own sites, article directories, ezines, and other people’s sites.

3. Promote The Article

The next step is to get the word out that your articles are published and live.  You can do this via solo emails, social media sites such as Twitter, blog and forum comments, ezines, etc.

4. Profit From Articles

You need to receive some sort of benefit from publishing your articles other then self-gratification that you are a published author. That includes generating some direct or indirect income from your articles. These profit sources could come indirectly from increase traffic or list building. They could also come directly in the form of affiliate article marketing, or repurposing your articles into small reports, ebooks, ecourses, teleseminars, membership sites, and more!

Want to learn article marketing from A to Z? You will when you take advantage of the all the free resources included in my article marketing success toolkit, including a trial membership into my article marketing training program – Articology!

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How To Add Links To Your Article Resource Box

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More often than not, many people’s articles get rejected by article directories because they have improperly added links to their resource boxes. Has this happened to you? Well that’s why this Article Marketing 101 lesson answers the question: “How do I add links to my resource box?”

First
It’s important to read the writer’s guidelines of every article directory you submit your articles to in order to properly write your links into the resource boxes. Some directories require that you use a plain resource box, other’s require that you use html code in order to write “live links”, and then others require that you have a version of both plain text and html.

Second
In an article directory that requires plain text links, once you write the urls and the article is published and becomes live, the links will be live. All you have to do is format the links in regular url format:

“Lisa Angelettie is a professional coach, published author, and article marketing specialist. You can grab her article marketing success kit full of over $300 worth of free tools here: http://articlemarketingsuccesskit.com”   <== (Here’s the link)

Third
In article directories that ask you to add your links using html code, you will write your resource box using the code, and the advantage to this is that your links do not have to be written in the typical url format such as our first example. Instead, you can use your keywords as “anchor text” for your links which helps you rank better in the search engines. For example:

“Lisa Angelettie is a professional coach, published author, and article marketing specialist. You can grab her <a href=”http://articlemarketingsuccesskit.com”>article marketing success</a> kit full of over $300 worth of free tools to get started instantly!”

As you see in this example, “article marketing success” is the anchor text back to my toolkit page, and anytime you are creating an html link, you want to always use:

<a href=”URL”> In front of the anchor text
</a> After the anchor text

Even if I wanted to use the full url as my anchor text, instead of keywords, I would use the same format:

<a href=”http://articlemarketingsuccesskit.com”>
http://articlemarketingsuccesskit.com</a>

*Bonus Tip
It’s best to create a file of several versions of your resource boxes in both plain text and html, so that when you go to submit your articles you will have ready-to-go resource boxes that you can just copy and paste.

Article Marketing Business

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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.

Article Marketing: How To Write More Articles

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As you learn and master article marketing for your online business, you will start to see really tangible results, ones that will get you all the excited to write more. The equation is simple: More articles = More Traffic.

So how do you effectively write or produce more content without sacrificing a lot of your valuable time? The answer is a trick of the trade many writers use – and that’s using something that I call article chunks.

Definition: Article chunks are paragraphs that are related to the topic of article #1. Ones that can be expanded into additional articles to create a series or set or perhaps more articles on the same topic later down the road.

I’ll use what you’re reading right now to explain further…
When I sat down at the computer to write this piece, I opened a second window on my text editor and wrote several chunks that were related to this one so that I could create a series around it.

This article is about how to produce more content in with less effort and time. My chunks include other types of content (ones that cover other article marketing basics).  These chunks include articles on resource boxes, article titles, writers block, article submission etc.

I wrote 1 paragraph on each of those topics. Usually – it’s easier for me to write the intro paragraph as my article chunk, and then I expand it later. You could do this or you could simply jot down a few notes or research facts you have about the a.c. topic. Just get something down that will make sense to you when you go back to expand the chunk into an article.

The reason why I recommend writing article chunks instead of writing an entire series or set in one sitting is because I think that sitting down and writing 3, 4, or 5 good quality articles in one sitting isn’t really a good or realistic idea for the average marketer.

This type of marathon writing can often lead to writer burnout, which is one of the major reasons that many marketers write about 10 articles and then quit (average stats on directory ezinearticles.com). Not a good recipe for success.

You can write your chunks in your favorite text editor or if you post your articles on your own blog first, you can create several drafts of blog posts that contain each of your article chunks.

Once you have published your first original piece, you can take a few days to flesh out and transform your next chunk into another article and so on and so on. Stagger the writing and publishing of the series or if you are feeling strong, turn all of the article chunks into whole articles but make sure to still stagger their publishing or submission.

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