All Entries in the "Reputation Management" Category

Why You Should Use HubPages For Article Marketing

HubPages is a great way to market your business through articles. Unlike traditional article directories, when you publish an article at HubPages you are given a ranking based on several criteria that are important to the HubPages team. They look at traffic of your article, the traffic sources for your articles, the length of your article and uniqueness of the content, the number of thumbs up received from other Hubbers, and the overall HubScore of the author. Take a look at my HubPages profile page and you’ll see that I’ve earned the reputation of “Prodigy” with just three articles.

These are important criteria because they determine your reputation and trust factor at HubPages.

There are plenty of reasons to use HubPages for your article marketing. Besides building a reputation for yourself, HubPages articles are viewed by a lot of traffic. Because a lot of other people are using HubPages, you can build a solid reputation by networking with other Hubbers. But you’ll also build link popularity and inbound links to your website from your articles. Unlike traditional article directories, HubPages does provide link juice and every article is a potential inbound link for your website. And another reason to add to these is the ability to earn income through AdSense from your articles as HubPages has a revenue sharing program with its authors. You can also earn affiliate income through Kontera, Amazon.com, and eBay using HubPages articles.

So how many reasons is that to publish your articles at HubPages? Let’s count them:

1. Build author reputation
2. Increase your link popularity through inbound links
3. Drive additional traffic to your website
4. Earn AdSense income
5. Earn eBay affiliate income
6. Make affiliate income with Amazon.com
7. Use Kontera for additional income opportunities
8. Networking opportunities

If you decide to use HubPages for article marketing, be sure to upload original articles. That will increase your author reputation tremendously. In fact, if you upload the same articles that you send out to article directories, HubPages will penalize you so make sure you are publishing original content.

I would recommend uploading your articles to HubPages first then sending them out to article directories if that is your plan. Though I haven’t tested this, I suspect that you may get a penalty after HubPages discovers your articles later. It may not be as big a penalty, but I think it’s possible that it will happen so you are much better off publishing original content always. But HubPages is a great article marketing opportunity.

How To Use Articles For Reputation Management

Reputation management is one of the up-and-coming niche marketing areas for online marketing. The necessity of it is growing and already important. If you have not put together a reputation management plan then you should seriously consider doing so. It should consist of more than just article marketing, however, article marketing should be a part of your reputation management strategy. Here are your important action steps:

• Set up accounts at as many article directories as you can, including distribution services like iSnare
• Write as many articles as you can and distribute them to the article directories (this should be an ongoing activity)
• Establish a Squidoo account on a particular niche and include information related to that niche; be sure to link to your website and blog from your Squidoo page
• Write original HubPage articles and publish them at HubPages
• Write original articles and submit them to other websites in your niche
• Use Google Knol to establish yourself as an authority on your subject
• Publish your articles on your own blog
• At popular social networking sites where you have an account, publish your articles wherever possible; for instance, Ryze allows you to publish articles and Facebook allows you to set up Facebook Pages

The key to reputation management is to start before you need it. Don’t wait until you have negative information about you online. Constant reputation monitoring and management is key to maintaining a positive image online. Articles can very helpful.

Where Should You Send
Article Marketing Traffic?

Article marketing is about building links, traffic, and reputation. If you do those three things well then you’ve got it down pretty good. But what pages on your website should you focus on for links and traffic?

One rule of thumb I like to keep in mind is to send people to the nearest page to where they will actually make a purchase. In other words, get them straight to your landing page with a “Buy Now” button if you can. That takes care of three things:

• It kills buyer frustration before it begins. No one wants to look for the “Buy Now” button. If you send traffic right to where you want it to go without anything in the middle then you are more likely to close sales.
• You build links to your most important pages and that increases their PageRank. Build those inbound links to your most valuable pages because that will make them rise higher in the search engine rankings and you’ll end up getting more organic traffic.
• Builds your credibility. When you make it easier for your customers to buy from you then they will trust you more. They will know that you know how to market your product and will be more likely to trust you and make a purchase.

Article marketing is pretty simple. Build links, trust and credibility, and traffic with carefully places anchor text links in your resource box.

Reputation Management: The Importance
Of A Multi-Tiered Approach

If you Google my name, you’ll find that there are more than 2 million search results for Allen Taylor. In the interest of fairness and full disclosure, I’d like to say that not all of them are me. There are thousands of people in the U.S. with my name. I’m just one of them.

But the interesting thing is that out of 10 page 1 results on Google, four of them are me. The No. 1 listing is my personal poetry blog. As a published poet who has been blogging daily for 11 1/2 months, I’ve got quite a following on this blog and I’ve managed to move it up to No. 1 for my name. Given that my name is a very common name, that’s a pretty good achievement.

In position No. 4 you’ll see our sister site, Blog Content Provider. No surprise since I am the manager of that side of our business.

Two steps down is my profile at EzineArticles, where I am an expert author. Though I do not have as many articles published at EA as I’d like, I’ve got enough there it seems that just by Googling my name you’ll find me there.

Fourthly, all the way down at the bottom of the line, is a link to an Internet radio show where I was interviewed by Belinda Subraman for creating my poetry toolbar.

On the next page you’ll find my StumbleUpon profile.

The Importance Of Reputation Management
I share all of this not to boast of my accomplishments, but to illustrate how important it is to do some reputation management on your name (as well as your corporate brand or small business identity) and to use social networking, article marketing, and blogging as search marketing tools. I use them all every day and you can see the results I get.

Now, will people search for my name? I think maybe some of them will. It depends on what they want to know.

As a published author and poet, potential publishers may want to know a little more about me. They’ll be able to find it easily. If I’m ever unemployed (God forbid) then future employers will want to do a background check on me. Employers are now Googling applicants’ names to see what they can find. Potential clients, too, might have an interest. They’ll want to know just who they are doing business with and if they find something they don’t like, it could be a deal killer. Or how about potential creditors? Hmmm?

All of this is to say that if you have not started your reputation management strategy yet, now is the time. Don’t just approach it from a single mindset. Articles are good; I recommend them. But don’t rely on them alone. Use a multi-tiered approach to SEM and reputation management and monitoring to move your personal name and your company brand to the top of the search results so that you promote yourself in a positive light and keep the reputation killers out of your field. You want to be in control of your own image – no matter what business you are in.

Using Articles For Reputation Management

ABC News is recommeding reputation management with guest author Andy Beal, only Andy doesn’t recommend article marketing. We do.

The reason article marketing is good for helping you manage your reputation online is because you can set up individual profiles in your name at each article directory you want to use. For every profile you set up you can establish a link back to your website. Although, I do agree with Andy’s suggestion to set up profiles in your own name.

People who are out to destroy your reputation online will likely use your name or your company name. That’s why it’s a good idea to have profiles at article directories for one or the other, or both if you can. Then, you want to submit regular articles to the directory so that your name is associated with a positive image as often as possible.

Micro Business Owners and the Annual August Downturn in Online Sales

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

Use Your Articles To Build Anchor Text Inbound Links

Article marketing is about two things:

• Building Links
• Driving Traffic

In both cases, the best tool for accomplishing the task is your author resource box. That’s the area at the bottom of your articles where you get to talk about yourself. It’s best not to write a book. If your author resource box is as long as your article then it’s too long. It just needs to be a couple of sentences. But what should go in it?

Obviously, you need your name. Also, a one sentence explanation of what you do. Follow that up with a call to action. In those two sentences, you should have two links. One of those links should be an URL – spell out your URL. The reason you want to spell out your URL is because your anchor text, which I am about to tell you about, may not be activated by some publishers. If a publisher doesn’t activate your URL then readers of your article will still be able to see your domain name and copy/paste it into their browser windows.

The second link in your author resource box should be your anchor text link. Whatever your important keyword is – the keyword around which you optimized your article – include it again in your author resource box and link it to the page on your website most appropriate for that anchor text. Hint: It should be the URL you spelled out in the other link.

If you do it this way then you are promoting one landing page for each article, but you are also using an important keyword phrase for that landing page to build inbound links to your website. Every time a publisher publishes your article, you’ll get a new inbound link. The most of those, the better. Even more importantly, the more high quality and relevant inbound links you build through article marketing then the better off your rankings will be. Anchor text helps you build your reputation online.

Article Marketing Can Be Your Best Reputation Management Tool

Reputation management is the process of monitoring what people are saying about you and responding to any potential public relations problems before they happen or in a timely manner as they happen. Here at Article Content Provider, we like to engage in what I call preventive reputation management. It’s much better to avoid a problem than it is to deal with one after it has happened. That’s the idea anyway.

Just for the record, I’m not talking about pre-emptive strikes. I’m talking about marketing your business with the end in mind. You should know what perception you want people to have of your business and act that way at all times. Articles can be your best tool for developing that perception.

Many new article marketers think that writing 5 or 10 articles and sending them out to hundreds of article directories at once is a neat trick. All their problems are solved for the rest of their lives. Well, not quite.

Article marketing relies on a persistent strategy of delivering a valuable and positive message that keeps your company in the spotlight and associated with helpful content. You want people to perceive you as an expert in your industry. By writing valuable articles that help them understand your business better and the concepts that you want them to know, you can present yourself as that expert.

One of the most important aspects of article marketing is your author resource box. That’s where you tell your readers all about you. Think through this section carefully. You only have a little bit of space – about 300 characters. You must be concise and tell potential customers why they should visit your website. While your article is the place where you give freely, the author resource box is the place where you ask your readers to “give” back to you. Give them good enough reasons and they won’t let you down.