All Entries in the "Reputation Management" Category

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.