High Quality Articles for Maximum Effect

Writing quality articles or ad-copy pays huge dividends in the Internet Marketing world.  Writing good copy, however, takes some know-how. Here are some useful tips.

Set Specific Goals

Your overall marketing efforts will  payoff  if if they align themselves to specific goals.  First off: Set time management goals. Concentrate on the amount of time you spend each day on writing as opposed to to focusing on the number of articles you want to crank out each day. Quality versus quantity.  This will alleviate any stress and anxiety over how many you’re writing.  

Secondly, always make your content super easy for anyone to read and understand. The best way to accomplish this is to use an outline – short  sentences and paragraphs. That basic format will greatly help your readers to understand your points and the content will be able to be read  quickly. For length, a general rule of thumb of about 4-5 sentences.

Ideas for new copy may pop up from anywhere, anytime. So keep a log where you can write down any and all ideas you get.

Article writing isn’t as complicated as it sounds. If you’re like most people, you already know how to create great content, copy that sells because it solves a problem, right? You just don’t try because you are afraid to fail. As long as you can keep in mind what subject you’ll cover and what points you’ll discuss, good copyarticle writing should be.

Selecting The Right Search Engine Keywords

Think of the right keywords as the “Open Sesame!” of the Internet. Find the exactly right words or phrases, and presto! hoards of traffic will be pulling up to your front door. But if your keywords are too general or too over-used, the possibility of visitors actually making it all the way to your site – or of seeing any real profits from the visitors that do arrive – decreases dramatically.

Your keywords serve as the foundation of your marketing strategy. If they are not chosen with great precision, no matter how aggressive your marketing campaign may be, the right people may never get the chance to find out about it. So your first step in plotting your strategy is to gather and evaluate keywords and phrases.

You probably think you already know EXACTLY the right words for your search phrases. Unfortunately, if you haven’t followed certain specific steps, you are probably WRONG. It’s hard to be objective when you are right in the center of your business network, which is the reason that you may not be able to choose the most efficient keywords from the inside. You need to be able to think like your customers. And since you are a business owner and not the consumer, your best bet is to go directly to the source.

Instead of plunging in and scribbling down a list of potential search words and phrases yourself, ask for words from as many potential customers as you can. You will most likely find out that your understanding of your business and your customers’ understanding is significantly different.

The consumer is an invaluable resource. You will find the words you accumulate from them are words and phrases you probably never would have considered from deep inside the trenches of your business.

Only after you have gathered as many words and phrases from outside resources should you add your own keyword to the list. Once you have this list in hand, you are ready for the next step: evaluation.

The aim of evaluation is to narrow down your list to a small number of words and phrases that will direct the highest number of quality visitors to your website. By “quality visitors” I mean those consumers who are most likely to make a purchase rather than just cruise around your site and take off for greener pastures. In evaluating the effectiveness of keywords, bear in mind three elements: popularity, specificity, and motivation.

Popularity is the easiest to evaluate because it is an objective quality. The more popular your keyword is, the more likely the chances are that it will be typed into a search engine which will then bring up your URL.

You can now purchase software that will rate the popularity of keywords and phrases by giving words a number rating based on real search engine activity. Software such as WordTracker will even suggest variations of your words and phrases. The higher the number this software assigns to a given keyword, the more traffic you can logically expect to be directed to your site. The only fallacy with this concept is the more popular the keyword is, the greater the search engine position you will need to obtain. If you are down at the bottom of the search results, the consumer will probably never scroll down to find you.

Popularity isn’t enough to declare a keyword a good choice. You must move on to the next criteria, which is specificity. The more specific your keyword is, the greater the likelihood that the consumer who is ready to purchase your goods or services will find you.

Let’s look at a hypothetical example. Imagine that you have obtained popularity rankings for the keyword “automobile companies.” However, you company specializes in bodywork only. The keyword “automobile body shops” would rank lower on the popularity scale than “automobile companies,” but it would nevertheless serve you much better. Instead of getting a slew of people interested in everything from buying a car to changing their oil filters, you will get only those consumers with trashed front ends or crumpled fenders being directed to your site. In other words,consumers ready to buy your services are the ones who will immediately find you. Not only that, but the greater the specificity of your keyword is, the less competition you will face.

The third factor is consumer motivation. Once again, this requires putting yourself inside the mind of the customer rather than the seller to figure out what motivation prompts a person looking for a service or product to type in a particular word or phrase. Let’s look at another example, such as a consumer who is searching for a job as an IT manager in a new city. If you have to choose between “Seattle job listings” and “Seattle IT recruiters” which do you think will benefit the consumer more? If you were looking for this type of specific job, which keyword would you type in? The second one, of course! Using the second keyword targets people who have decided on their career, have the necessary experience, and are ready to enlist you as their recruiter, rather than someone just out of school who is casually trying to figure out what to do with his or her life in between beer parties. You want to find people who are ready to act or make a purchase, and this requires subtle tinkering of your keywords until your find the most specific and directly targeted phrases to bring the most motivated traffic to you site.

Once you have chosen your keywords, your work is not done. You must continually evaluate performance across a variety of search engines, bearing in mind that times and trends change, as does popular lingo. You cannot rely on your log traffic analysis alone because it will not tell you how many of your visitors actually made a purchase.

Fortunately, some new tools have been invented to help you judge the effectiveness of your keywords in individual search engines. There is now software available that analyzes consumer behavior in relation to consumer traffic. This allows you to discern which keywords are bringing you the most valuable customers.

This is an essential concept: numbers alone do not make a good keyword; profits per visitor do. You need to find keywords that direct consumers to your site who actually buy your product, fill out your forms, or download your product. This is the most important factor in evaluating the efficacy of a keyword or phrase, and should be the sword you wield when discarding and replacing ineffective or inefficient keywords with keywords that bring in better profits.

Ongoing analysis of tested keywords is the formula for search engine success. This may sound like a lot of work – and it is! But the amount of informed effort you put into your keyword campaign is what will ultimately generate your business’ rewards.

A Great Deal

Who doesn’t want a great deal? “The Great American Coupon is making a big comeback, thanks to the Great American Recession” said the Wall Street Journal.  Americans redeemed about 3.3 billion coupons last year, a remarkable 27% leap from 2008 and the first annual increase in 17 years, according to a report issued at the end of January by Inmar, a coupon-processing agent.

Because coupons “pull in the business” they have gained remarkable acceptance and popularity among astute marketing managers. The reason is simple really – it’s their overwhelming acceptance and use by the consuming public. In fact, Advertising Age (the Bible of the advertising industry) reports that 87% of all shoppers use coupons. And who doesn’t want to save money? I try all the time. I just saved $50 on a laptop with a coupon at Staples (thanks @numerati for the tip), on top of the $100 off promo the store had! And the wife loves to save on everything – it’s like a game to her.

Moms make the effort to save. 96% of Moms have used a coupon to purchase a brand they would not normally buy, and 74% visit more than two stores weekly to redeem coupon offers.  As technology pushed Moms online, marketers followed, offering exclusive downloadable deals through couponing sites and, more recently, by using social media in the hopes of making these deals — and their brand — go viral. Today coupons have proven themselves to be highly effective sales tools for every conceivable size and type of business.Though most still prefer clipping coupons (72%), marketers should diversify offers both online and off as 70% of Moms find coupons online and 73% subscribe to couponing emails or newsletters. Integrated campaigns combining viral distribution of paper coupons through offline influencers with online promotion on couponing websites and blogs enable Moms to find the deals that best fit their shopping habits, ultimately supporting long-term redemption.

And as coupon sites become more competitive, many are diversifying their offerings to remain competitive.  Take for instance Savings.com a full scale resource for everything-online coupons. This site in particular not only offers coupons, but has an Answers page which allows you to ask questions about anything you want to save on, and the Savings.com community will respond in real-time with answers to your question.

Businesses are in business to make money.  Consumers want keep more of it in their pockets when they buy stuff.  Coupons make it all possible. Now that’s a great deal!

4 Secrets to Turn Any Business Into a Successful Web Business – Part 1

There are a few secrets that I’d like to share with you.  You may have been privy to a few of them before.  Actually you may have heard of all 4, but I can promise that you will finish each article with a fresh perspective.  I will show you how 4 simple secrets can create a powerhouse web business.  This is the first part of the 4 article series.

Before I divulge the vault of successful web business secrets I must warn you of one thing.  All the information in the world will not take the place of determination and persistence.  A web business is just like an offline business.  It takes hard work and resolve to succeed.  However working smart is heads and tails better than plain old working.  These 4 secrets will turn any smart working, dedicated average Joe or Jane into a successful web business owner.

Web Success Secret #1) Content is king.

Heard that before?  I know I have.  The thing I never knew was how to use content to my advantage.  Content is useless unless it is optimized for the search engines.  It must also be optimized for your reader.  You have two customers- readers and search engines.  You must satisfy both with the same exact content.

Content is king only if you have exact and highly specific keywords placed in correct locations.  Unfortunately the hard part is determining what keywords to use.  A keyword can be a single word or a phrase.  It is the term that web surfers use to search for information.  Place yourself in their shoes and try to discover what search terms they use.  You must then evaluate the search term.  How many people search using that term?  How many sites already deliver information on that search term?  Simple demand and supply rules.  The more demand with the less supply equals more profitability.

You have several options for determining keywords and their profit potential.  Search yourself, pay a company to search for you or have your hosting company do a complete keyword search for your niche or web business topic.  If your hosting company does not offer this service I recommend you switch to a plan that does.  This feature alone can make or break your business’ future.  If you would like my recommended hosting plan, please contact me.

Without a proper keyword search and analysis you may as well forget about becoming successful with an Internet business.  Investing in this one secret is literally the start of planning your website.

Your next action step is to plan your site layout based on the 50-175 high-demand and low-supply keywords. Your site should be structured in three tiers.  Tier one is your home page.  Tier two is made of all of your main topics and also constitutes your navigation bar buttons.  Tier three keywords are sub-topics of tier two pages.  Organize your 50-175 keywords into three tiers.  Doing this makes it easier for visitors to navigate through your site and it makes it easier for search engine spiders to find all of your pages.

Search engine spiders do not like to fish around for all of your pages and links.  This is why many sites offer a “site map”.  A site map is one page that contains links to all of the content pages.  This is a fine route to take; however most people agree that pages with a lot of links on it are valued less than content pages that casually link to other content pages.

Using three tiers allows you to go from topic to sub-topic to sub-sub-topic all by natural in-content links.  For example, tier 1 is the homepage on a fitness site.  Tier 2 is a page all about cardio activity and its benefits.  A tier three page off of that tier 2 page is about different treadmill routines.  Do you see how the site visitor would like this structure?  They click on “Cardio” and are given links to more specific pages about cardio topics.  Search engine spiders like the three tier structure too.  It means they do not have to dig through layers and levels of useless links.

There is even more to content than finding profitable keywords and structuring your site into easy-to-navigate tiers.  You must optimize each and every page on your website to perform well and rank high at search engines.  Many people devote their working life to optimization secrets.  A full length article just on optimizing is possible.  Heck, a full length book is possible.  My recommendation is to use a hosting company that automatically teaches you how to optimize web pages for the engines.  Doing that will cause less headache and frustration and it will keep you focused on building content.

A quick education in optimization: place your specific keyword in the file name, title, description and keyword section of your page.  Then sprinkle the keyword throughout the content.  Also provide a link using your specific keyword in the link text.  If all of this has you spinning your head, I recommend going the hosting company I use.  They literally teach you to build a website using blocks.  It’s all simple and easier than you think.

There is one last piece to content.  It must effectively pre-sell your product or service and position you as the expert in your field.  When your website has 50-175 optimized pages for your visitors to read through it will start to position you as the expert.  Your site will become known as the place for information about (insert your niche).

When visitors find your site through search engines they are seeking information about a problem or question they have.  If they land on your site and you try to sell them something right away one thing is sure- they click the back button and find another site that will give them information.  This is why pre-selling your product or service is paramount.  Give your visitors what they want.  Answer their question and in the process let them know about your services and products.

All of the information develops rapport and trust with your site visitor.  It positions you as an expert.  It keeps your visitor on your site longer since they are actually reading content.  Search engines notice this and rank you better.  How well your site can keep visitors is known as “stickiness.”  Your site must attract and keep visitors for as long as possible.

Provide content that pre-sells your products, positions you as the expert and focuses on highly profitable keywords.  You cannot go wrong with your web business if you do those things.  The secret to content is to satisfy both your visitor and search engines.  Lose one or both and you are doomed.  As I mentioned earlier, it is best to work smarter and not harder.  Your hosting company should be providing most of these services to you free of charge.  There are a small few that do this, but it is well worth the investigation.

Contact me for further resources and information.  Having a successful web business starts with effective content.  Stay tuned for parts 2-4!

SEO Doesn’t Translate

SEO is a laborious and, to be frank, rather tedious task.  Fortunately once you have SE-optimized your Web site in English, you can just have it translated without the need to repeat all that effort in foreign languages, right?

Unfortunately, no.  Robert Frost’s definition of poetry as “what gets lost in translation” could apply equally to SEO.  It is sadly not possible to pre-optimize your Web copy before translation — it has to be re-optimized as part of the translation process.

First and foremost, SEO is about the democratic use of language. What matters is not how the advertiser likes to talk about its products, but how customers actually talk about them. So when producing foreign versions, the trick is not to find the words that most closely correspond to the English original, but the words most commonly used by the target audience in the countries in question.

Our experience of working on a major SEO project for a budget airline suggests that from a translation point of view, search terms fall into three broad categories: directly translatable, freely translatable and non-translatable.

Firstly, there are terms that have direct equivalents in the target language that are equally widely used as search terms.  So where English Web users will Google “flights,” French users search for “vols.”  The word means the same thing and is used in the same way.  The world would be a simpler place if all terms were like this!  (Although in fact, even here, things are not as simple as they look.  Only once we have tested the seemingly obvious translation, to verify that it is indeed widely searched for — by actual users in relevant contexts, can we confirm that directly translatable terms fall into this category.)

Secondly, there are terms that can be translated in a number of ways.  Here the challenge is to think of all the possibilities, so we can test them to see which ones are actually searched for.  An example is the seemingly straightforward “cheap flights.” With typical Gallic contrariness, there is in fact no French word for “cheap,” so various different wordings have to be tried – “vols pas chers” (not-expensive flights”), “vols bon marché” (“good-bargain flights”), “vols à bas prix” (“flights at low price”), “vols a petit prix” (“flights at small price”) to name but a few.  None of these expressions sounds a likely search term when rendered back in English, but all of them are viable options in French.  Much to the chagrin of the guardians of French linguistic purity, even Anglophone borrowings such as “discount” and “low cost” also turn out to be worthy of investigation.

Moreover, finding the most appropriate translation(s) is only the first stage.  They then have to be optimized syntactically for a search context, where people tend to use shorthand or elided forms.  So whereas “cheapest flights” would be “vols les moins chers,” in reality French Web surfers would never use the article “les“, they would just search for “vols moins chers.”  Similarly, while “vols à bas prix” (“flights at low price”) is the grammatically correct expression, a far more common search term would be just “vols bas prix” (“flights low price”).

Finally, the third category is terms for which there are no relevant equivalent in the target language.  For example, “flight deals” is a high-ranking search term among budget airline customers in English, but the word “deal” in the sense of “arrangement” does not translate naturally into French.  While an equivalent could be found, it is not something that French people would say, and therefore not something they would search for.

However, conversely, there may well exist some terms that do not appear in the list of most popular searches in English, but would be very relevant in the target language – what Donald Rumsfeld would call “unknown unknowns.”  An example of such a term from the airline project would be “vols secs.” Literally this translates as “dry flights,” but it has nothing to do with alcohol-free travel (as if a budget airline would pass up the chance to sell you four-euro tins of lager!), it means flights that are sold on their own without accommodation, car hire, travel insurance etc.  You could never find these terms through a pure translation process, but that does not mean they are any less useful for generating traffic.  Indeed, they may be more useful than many translated terms.

And of course, identifying the most profitable search terms is not an end in itself. These terms are merely the raw materials, and a skilled copywriter is needed to assemble them into a convincing message in the foreign language.  SEO copywriting is hard work in any language — but if you can find the right way to tackle it, then it’s much more likely that potential customers will find you.

Former ad man Guy Gilpin is co-founder and manging director of Mother Tongue Writers.

Email Marketing – Tips To Boost Your Open Rates

Several email publicists repeatedly crash to realize that their member’s email application preview window is the first chance their subject matter has to attract the attention they need. And unfortunately people who don’t permit for a snapshot preview in their content style fall victim to less than desired open rates as their subscribers are less probably to open the message in full. In the instance that you probably would like a total  strategy for email marketing examine my Epic Traffic Systems Bonus package.

Here are four simple steps you’ll to require to confirm your subsequent email message preview pane design becomes all the eye it should:

Initial, remember that prior to Outlook 2003, the preview your subscriber sees runs horizontally along the foot of their monitor. In Outlook 2003, this read could be a vertical slice conveying the left hand facet of your content.

As a tip take a bare sheet of paper and then expose the prime third of your subsequent message and then the left third. Does what you see in each times appear interesting sufficient to lure your members to click on?

Second, by permitting for the thinnest of newsletter mastheads, you should cram into these viewable snippets as much contents as you be capable of. Plus, if this content tells your subscriber exactly what your message contains, then the chances of them gap it amplify even further. In the event you might  like to encourage  targeted traffic to your web pages and also  accelerate your internet based profits  as soon as possible utilizing email marketing  and also a self  contained traffic  scheme peruse the things Keith Baxter and Jon Shugart and Joey  Smith are actually  saying in my Epic Traffic Systems review.

Third, don’t have too several images cluttering the preview space. By default, my version of Outlook 2003 suppresses all pictures sent to me in HTML messages. All I see is a sea of red crosses, that informs me nothing concerning the message. (I tend to leave these messages until later, which CAN become NEVER! Your subscribers might well do the same.)

And finally the sensible newsletter designers use images sparingly during this prime part. Even higher, they build their masthead utilizing not images, however HTML text and color to effectively get across their message. As a shopper, I’m so much more tempted to break my train of consideration and dig down more into that juicy portion of content I can perceive.

Therefore, by treating the preview pane of your news letter as a fast-peek mini-outline for your members, you are on the correct track to grab a replacement client!

It’s straightforward extremely–the more rapidly your readers are interested by the very first lines of your email, the more they will browse them. In the instance that you should like  additional material on email marketing marketing  systems and search engine marketing strategy please study my blog.

Small BIG things

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Print24. All opinions are 100% mine.

So I was recently approached about doing a post about Business Cards. Traditionally these small, rectangular-sized printed media pieces have been the networking tool that kept your business-contact list growing. But fast forward to today. Are business cards still needed in the digital age?

The answer is – Absolutely Yes! Although it may be true that many of us interact less with people face to face, especially on the Affiliate Marketing side of things, business cards are still a great marketing tool for one reason – Networking.

Networking affords us the ability to create and maintain relationships. Take my esteemed colleague, local Orlando blogger Ashley Edwards. By leveraging his local relationships, he gets invited to many cool venues (for FREE) and therefore has 1st dibs on what’s happening in the Orlando area. By having the inside scoop, he’s 1st to break the story on his hip blog about things to do in Orlando: “Pulse of Central Florida”.

Recently Ashley mentioned a venue he was attending and was in need of new business cards. So we hopped on the interwebs and landed at our sponsor Print24. We played around with some templates (he’s a real simple, down to earth guy), picked a simple one he liked, added info and had them delivered in a few days (see pic). He loves his new cards and they will serve him well.

Regardless of the size of your enterprise, business cards tell people who you are and what you do. So instead of asking others to write down your contact info (which is a lame time-suck BTW), give’em your card! It will leave a better 1st impression as well as get you noticed. And remember, although you personally made the initial contact, it’s your business card that may get you the sale/job/promo, etc. later on.

Need new cards? Head over to Print24 and make your own. Yes, some small things come in small packages, but can pay BIG dividends.