Historically, August has always been a slow month for online marketers. I look at my own businesses and historically in 2007, 2006, 2005 and 2004, my wife was always on edge thinking I need to quit my online business and get a job. But in every year, September is also my bounce back month. By the middle of September, my wife forgets about all of the “job” talk.

In 2007, I learned something that may be of interest to you. All of my businesses took a sales down-turn in March of 2007 and bounced significantly in September of 2007. In October, it was reported that “consumer sales” had dipped from March to September of 2007.

You know I had never thought of my business as a business driven by “consumer demand”. I had always thought of my business as a business-to-business (B2B) provider. Since I sell services that other businesses use to promote themselves, why would my business be “consumer-driven”? But now it all makes sense.

Most of my customers have daytime jobs, and they work their online businesses on a part-time basis. My customers are small business owners, but many are “micro business owners” or one-person, part-time operations.

People who work a business part-time from home, are people who still have jobs and are swayed by factors in the “consumer market”.

2007 was defined as a down-turn, and 2008 is frightful. When gasoline prices passed $3 per gallon and kept on climbing, the writing was on the wall. People currently have less spending money than they did during the 2007 downturn. As a result, “micro business owners” are struggling to figure out how they can pay for the advertising services they need for their business. (Tips for Improving Gas Mileage)

Article Marketing is important for many businesses, as it is a method to provide large numbers of inbound links to the Author’s website. Links are the tools that drive new visitors to websites of interest.

When I first started in my online business, I was also one of the “micro business owners”. I struck on a concept that changed my life and my financial future. I had an online newsletter. I created a new issue on a weekly basis. Many people republished the information contained in my newsletter in other newsletters and on various websites. (It was good information that many people appreciated having access to.) One day I was searching on a search engine to figure out how my website ranked for the keywords important to my newsletter subscribers.

I realized that although my website was not on Page One of the search results, information that I had created was in 6 of the Top Ten spots in the search results.

I suddenly realized that it did not matter if my website was in the number one spot or not. What mattered most was if people who linked to me were in the the top spots in the search results. This way, I did not have to spend all of my time trying to optimize my website for the search engines. I could simply provide my content to people who had already been optimized for the search engines, and they could provide a link to me.

For example, if you go to Google and type in the search term “article marketing”, I am not on page one or two of the search results for that keyword phrase. I am actually on page three of the results in spot #24. But the website which firmly holds the #1 spot in Google for “article marketing” is a web page that links to my website!

It is not always important for me to be ranked on page one of the search results, but if the folks on page one link to me, and people continue to see my name in connection with the top results in the search engines, then people will start to notice me and remember my name.

See the trick of article marketing is to get your articles in the top results for relative keywords, when your articles link back to your website. If you are not in page one of the search results on a specific keyword phrase, you can actually accomplish page one results with your articles.

Here is another example. I wrote an interesting article one time that got a lot of publication in high-powered websites. The article was talking about one’s “SEO Linking Portfolio” and was published in SEO-News.com, among other reputable websites. If you do a search in google on the search term “linking portfolio”, you will find that although my website does not rank for that keyword phrase, links to my article hold three spots in the top five search results.

My website does not rank well for “linking portfolio”, but that is okay. It is not a term that will make or break my business, but in the same breath, it is a key term that may be important to the people most likely to buy my services.

That is one of the keys to successful article marketing: write content that may be important to the people most likely to buy your products or services.

While August is typically a down-month for online businesses, it is also an ideal time to develop new content leading into the sales growth cycle of the fall and winter.

Gas prices are still high, so people are not buying much now. But it is also the month people have to buy school supplies for their children. That is the primary reason why August is typically a slow month. Any business that caters to the “consumer market” has to deal with the reduced money availability as parents are spending money on school supplies and school clothes.

But, if you take the opportunity to get ahead of the pack, you can have new content going out onto the internet while other people are starting the content creation process. If you were to make the investment in your content creation in August, you could find yourself light-years ahead of your competition as they begin to think about gearing up for the Christmas season.

Bill Platt – owner of The Phantom Writers

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