Article Marketing Strategies

Article Marketing and content creation should be a part of your marketing arsenal.  If done right, one can generate long term traffic to their websites, gain a cult like following and generate hundreds of leads for next to nothing.  I don’t like to use the word free because, NOTHING is free.  When people say they generate free leads, they obviously don’t put a dollar amount on their time.

Take the amount of money you make every day and divide it by 24. That is what each our of your time is worth.  If your going to write articles and use the article marketing strategy’s I go over in the video above, remember that you have to be consistent and persistent in your efforts.  It’s a long term strategy that won’t get you results tomorrow, however, over the course of a 60-90 day period, it can create MASSIVE results for you.

The four most dangerous words are, “I already know that!”

My step-father used to call me Mr. Know-it-all as a kid growing up.  I hated it, however it was well deserved.  I thought I knew everything.  Can you imagine? 11 years old and I thought I had everything figured out.  Boy was I wrong.  The best part about it, was that my step-dad was a doctor.  Yep, he practiced psychology.

Fast forward a bunch of years, now I am 37 and I know a little more than I did at age 11, however I realized that life is a constant education.  In relation to the amount of knowledge one can aquire throughout a lifetime, I know absolutely nothing in comparison.

I have learned that I never tell anyone, “I already know that”, or anything like that phrase.  Why? It only shows ignorance.  If you already knew everything, there would be nothing left to learn.

I am constantly reading books, buying courses, attending conferences, webinars, conference calls and associating with as many brilliant people as possible. Why do I do this?  Because I always want to be expanding my knowledge.  What do you have to offer other people?  Are you a giver or a taker or both?  These are questions only you can answer.

One of the lessons I have learned over the course of time is that in order to receive, you must first freely give.  It is a universal law.  Call is sowing and reaping, call it Yin and Yang, eb and tide, etc.  For every reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction.  I have always been a giver, therefor I have always had. I did not realize this working in my life until later on in life when I looked back at all of the circumstances to turned out very positive in my life.  It was due to the giving.

OK. enough of that, let’s get back to business.

When I started marketing online a little over a year ago, I knew nothing.  I knew how to google something, send an email, log onto Myspace, Facebook, etc.  I had no clue what AWeber, Squeeze Pages, SEO, Monetization or anything else to do with Internet Marketing.

I had, however studied attraction marketing years prior.  The first online course I ever bought was Mike Dillards Magnetic Sponsoring. This course was the launching point to everything I have done online and was the incubator for me learning how to attract rather than repel people to and from me.  That course changed my life.

The fact is, I realized that if I was going to go where I had never been, I knew that I was going to have to do things I have never done.  That meant, if I wanted to make millions online, be free from my job and out of financial bondage, I was going to have to study the people that had went before me.  I invested thousand of dollars in my education.  Books, e-courses, videos, software, etc.  You name it, I aquired it.  Some of the stuff I could have done without, but I realized that it was all a part of the process.

Most people getting started with an online business or any business for that matter needs to totally humble themself.  They need to realize that they don’t know anything.  The good news is, information is accessible these days to learn just about anything.  Everyone wants the quickest way to rich’s and freedom. The truth is, there is no quick way, however there are shortcuts.

It takes hard work to become a success at anything and don’t let all of the Internet Hype fool ya. “I made $386,000 in 3 days and you can do it too!”  I bet you see that everywhere you look don’t you?  Is it possible? Yep.. Will it happen for you? Maybe.  See, that is just marketing and who ever wrote that ad is feeding on your brain and appealing to what may want.  What you dont hear about is the ten years that person spent online, struggling, spending money they didnt have, foreclosing on their home because they just sunk their last $10K into a botched Google Adwords campaign.  You dont hear about the struggle, but it’s there.

“I already know that” ~ has now disappeared from your vocabulary.  You are now a new person, learning new skills that are going to take you to new places. Don’t be a Mr. Know-it-all like I once was.  You can learn something about anything from anyone with a real dream.

There tons of ways to generate internet leads for your business.  I am going to go over what I feel to be the top 7.

I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat after waking from a dream about how all of my traffic (leads) had disappeared.  Why?  I had gotten away from the basics and was marketing using some played out tactics that no longer worked.

In today’s day and age, you need to use a variety of marketing methods.  Get really good at mastering 2 of them.  Notice I said 2 not seven.  To find the two, you are going to have to use 7 to see which ones generate the most leads and traffic.

The 7 venues I feel are the best of the best are Blogging, Article Marketing, Google Adwords, Video Marketing, Banner Advertising, Forum Marketing and Direct Mail Postcards.

Blogging

There are tons of blogging platforms on the web.  Word Press, Blogger and Type-Pad are just a few.  Blogging has become very popular in todays day and time and a lot of people use it to brand themselves with.  It is a person’s hub or home base if you will.

Blog posts can show up in search engine results on Google and many other search engine sites for the specific keywords that were used in your post.  For instance, if someone did a blog post on “The Top 7 surefire ways to generate leads for your online or offline business”, and someone types in “surefire ways to generate leads”, your post could show up.

Some of the benefits of blogging are very easy to publish.  If you can type, you can blog.

Blogging allows your audience to easily find your content or the content they are looking for.

It’s a very social way for you to become a part of the online community and share your thoughts, feelings or attitude with your audience.

Blogging is viral.  It makes your message available to countless people around the world.

It allows ease of linking.  It is easy for people to link to and from you.

It is easy to take a blog post and then turn that post into an article and post it in article directory’s, blog directories, etc.

Article Marketing

Article writing and marketing is a very cheap way to drive highly targeted traffic to your website.  It helps build trust between you and your reader and allows you to establish credibility.  By no means to you have to be an effective writer to have a killer article campaign.

Once you write an article, it is important to get it out there to as many sites as possible with different variations of your article.  My favorite program to do this is Automatic Article Submitter, which blasts your article out to over 200 article directories.  This drives mad traffic to your site and creates backlinks to your original content, which creates very relevant information for Google to index. I go more into this process on a previous post on my blog.

You can optimize your articles with relevant keywords that people search for and your article will then show up in the search engines when people go searching for them.

Next we are going to discuss the God Father/Mother of Internet Marketing and Lead Generation.  Google Adwords.

Google Adwords

Google Adwords is the fastest way to get immediate traffic, HANDS DOWN!! It can also be the most intimidating of methods.  You don’t want to just dive right in.  You want to at least read Perry Marshal’s definative guide to Google Adwords.  You want to make sure that you are putting your marketing dollards where they count. Google is the place to generate hoards of traffic, however, it’s not the place to sling mud against the wall and hope something sticks, cause you’ll go broke quick.

If you want to know where people are creating 7 figure incomes online, it’s done through GOOGLE, PERIOD! Case Closed! People are always searching for what you have to offer online.  If they click on your Google Ad, you are one step closer to having a lead and new business partner or whatever it is your selling or offering online.

The next way to generate leads and traffic is through video marketing.

Video Marketing

This is my absolute favorite way to market online.  I love it and I am damn good at it. I use a FLIP cam for all of my vidz ,but there are hundreds of cams you can use that work just as well. Right off the bat I will tell you, if your going to do videos, you need Traffic Geyser.  Yep, you get it 30 days for free (I think). Then it’s $97 a month and well worth it. I don’t know anyone who has had success with videos without using the Traffic Geyser software to blast the videos and content everywhere on the web.

Here are the stats on who watches videos:

• 71% Employed, 15% are students
• Median Income $75,000
• Almost 50% are married
• 70% are college educated That is a GREAT audience!

People like to watch things rather than read them and videos gives them a chance to see and feel who you are as a person.

Next, I will briefly discuss Banner Advertising.

Banner Advertising

Banners are the little or sometimes big squares or rectangles that you see on people’s websites like such:

The awesome thing about banners is that you can target the exact person your looking for, right where they hang out online.  You simply put your banner ads on the websites that your audience is looking for and presto. Banner ads provide a consistent flow of traffic and you can plan your advertising in advance.

Another free source of traffic can come from Forums.

Forum Marketing

Forum marketing is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to generate traffic as well as brand yourself as an expert online.  All you have to do is participate in the discussions that you are interested in and provide value to the “threads” in the forums.

Keep in mind. This is not the place to pitch your business or you will get eaten alive and lose all credibility.  It is a place to learn, share knowledge and gain trust, period!  I recommend The Warrior Forum.

Last but not least is direct mail.

Direct Mail Postcards

A lot of marketers are missing a whole market here.  Direct mail is not dead and can be an awesome source of leads and new business.  It can be quite expensive, so this is not for the person on a budget. We have a company that does the printing and mailing of them.  You will have to shop around.  I highly recommend a campaign, meaning, don’t just send out 10,000 postcards.  Sent out 3 waves of 10,000 postcards about 2 months apart. This is the drip method and your recipients will start to remember you.

Well folks, I would have liked to be more specific for each of the 7 traffic methods, but that would be like a course and I would have to charge you for that. So for now, you just got like thousands in information for FREE so enjoy it and put it to work.

Sure Firely yours,

Article Syndication in 4 Steps

Writing is a Skill. Syndication is an Art.

Anyone can sit down and start writing, Anyone. But when it comes to getting your article out there into mainstream Internet land, it becomes an art form.  I am going to go over the critical elements.

There are three things you need when writing so that Google and the other search engines will give you first page ranking.

1. Relevancy -  How relevant is your content to the keywords your trying to rank for? Is your content going to connect with your audience?

2. Popularity- This one is important and I will give you an example.  He with the most youtube videos gets the highest ranking.  This goes with content as well.  You are going to want to Social Book Mark your articles.  Some people like using Onlywire but I prefer to use Social Marker . This, with the click of a button, bookmarks your article on like 30 bookmarking sites for social marker and like 20 for onlywire.  Dont quote me on those numbers, its a lot. Sites like Digg and Furl will help your popularity greatly.

3.Unique Content- This is critical. The search engines and especially Google do not like duplicate content.  A lot of people make the mistake of taking articles from syndication sites that allow you to take them and then repost them as their own.  That is Plagarism and can not only get you banned from the engines, but legally in a mess.

Be Creative, be original.  You have something to share with the world around you that will touch that special person on the other side.

Ok, so anyways, there is a formula for driving traffic to your articles and sites.  There are 4 basic steps to this:

1. Create Original Work – People need to get to know you, your style and what your all about.  Create a character for yourself and then get on stage.

2. BookMark Your Article – Bookmarking is king.

3. Promote content through Youtube or Traffic Geyser- If your not using TG and your doing video marketing, your NUTS!! It’s Crazy and also has an option to have your video transcribed into another article as well as blasts your vid out to like 50 sites.

4. Do an article submission using Automatic Article Submitter – and no, it’s not an affiliate link and yes it costs about $127 bucks. Well worth it.  It will also spin articles for you so that you can make like 4 articles out of one.  It then blasts your article out to 400 directories with the click of a button.  Don’t worry, it automatically registers and confirms your log in info for all of the 400 sites with the click of two buttons.   Pretty Amazing isnt it?

Well, there is the 4 step process, use it in good health.

Ok. here is the kicker so PAY ATTENTION: Always choose a hub for your articles.  One main place you write all the time.  I recommend your blog or maybe EzineArticles. That is your home plate.  When you take that same article to Automatic Article Submitter and spin it, make sure that in the Author Signature Box, you put an anchor text back to the original article.  When you make a video about the article you just wrote, link back to the orginal article.  You will start owning the #1 spots for the keywords you are using in no time.  Backlinks are everything. Google looks at the content and decides it’s very relevant and Shazam, you have massive traffic.

To Your Article Success,