All Entries in the "Website Content" Category

What’s The Difference Between Articles And Web Content?

Is there a marked difference between an article for article marketing purposes and website content? It’s a question that we hear often enough that I thought I’d answer it here. While some of our clients use articles for website content, this is not the preferred method of building a website. Articles for article marketing purposes follow a specific pattern whereas website content is more free flow and open, custom-formatted to meet the needs of a specific client.

Of course, I’m not saying that articles are all “out of the box” and not customizable. They are customizable in terms of the content, but in terms of the format they generally follow the same structure. That’s not the case with website content.

When you write an article for article marketing purposes you are trying to give away your knowledge without giving away the farm. You aren’t trying to sell your services. Website content, on the other hand, is a direct sales pitch. You ARE trying to sell your services and you want a call to action on every page of your website where you expect your website visitor to interact with you. With articles, you just want your reader to click a link and visit your website. That’s the major difference.

So intent. Format and intent. Those are the two major differences between articles and website content. One is a sales tool and the other is a pre-sales tool. Articles tend to be a fixed length, but website content is as long as it needs to be to close the sale. Each page has its own necessary format and structure. You want your articles to interest your readers enough that they’ll visit your website, then you want them to buy something and you want your website content to close the sale.

For more information on articles or website content, contact us today.

How Repurposing Your Articles Saves Time And Makes Money

I know I’ve told you all this before, but now I’ll let professional article marketer Jeff Herring tell you:

Practical Article Marketing Tips – Benefit #3 of the Article-a-Day Strategy is Repurposing

By Jeff Herring

When I look at one of my articles or a student’s article I don’t just see an article. I see multiple marketing messages, multiple products, blog posts, e-courses, teleseminars, and on and on it goes.

You can take just one article and turn it into multiple marketing messages. What if you were able to do that and had access to that many articles where you wrote one a day?

Now, do I absolutely write one a day? Yes, most of the time, either for myself or someone else that I do article marketing for, but most of the time I write one for myself.

Some of you don’t see all of them. I still write a weekly column for the newspapers on relationships from back when I was a relationship coach. I usually don’t put those out on the internet, just in the newspaper. My standard is pretty close to one per day.

Then I can look at that article and ask, “How else can I use this?” I often use it as a blog post. I’ll look at it and then let it rock along for a little bit on EzineArticles and then I’ll look to see which ones are doing really well.

I’ll take those and repurpose them into multiple marketing messages and products. Folks, when you create an article a day you’re reaching repurposing heaven.

The two business sayings that I’m the most sick of hearing because they’re the two most popular and the two most likely for someone to never tell you how to do it. I didn’t say that very well, but these two business maxims, everybody says them but nobody tells you how to do it.

One is to think outside the box. I’m sick of that one. The second is to work smarter instead of harder. That sounds good, but how do you do it?

This is how. By repurposing your content you don’t have to create something huge and brand new all the time. You can take your articles, those 300-word samples of your expertise, and repurpose them all over the internet.

You can write many more articles for repurposing by claiming your Free Instant Access to 2 of my Instant Article Writing Templates when you visit http://www.TheArticleGuyBonus.com

From Jeff Herring – The Article Marketing Guy & The Great Article Marketing Network

Article Source:

target=”new”>http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jeff_Herring

There are a number of ways you can repurpose your articles. You can repurpose from print to digital and from digital to print. You can turn articles into blog posts or website content. You can even repurpose an article into a press release.

However you choose to repurpose your articles, make sure you are getting the most out of your article marketing all the way round.

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

How To Promote Affiliate Products With Articles

Did you know you can promote other people’s products with articles? You can do this even if you don’t have a website.

First, pick a product. Learn everything you can about that product. I mean, everything. Buy the product and use it so that you can talk intelligently about it. After your product knowledge is at a comfortable level then you can start marketing the product through articles.

Next, decide if you want a website. I recommend using a website for a number of reasons:

• You can also use SEO to rank in the search engines for keywords related to your product
• You can use the website to take opt-ins for a newsletter that you use to market your affiliate products
• You can add a blog to your website for better and more effective marketing
• Your articles can be used to build links to your website to increase its SEO benefits
• A website establishes you as an authority and increases your credibility with your target audience
• You can include contact information on your website

There are numerous benefits to owning a website, but even if you don’t own a website you can use articles to market affiliate products.

Make a list of topics related to your product. Brainstorm as many topics as you can. You should compile a list of at least 100 topics, 200 or more is even better. Make sure these topics are distinctive and easily defined. Also, try to make your topics related to keywords associated with your product, but I’m talking about general industry-related keywords, not product branding keywords.

Next, write an article for each topic, using your primary and secondary keywords several times throughout the article.

Write an author resource box that includes a link to your website if you are using a website. If you are not using a website then include a link to your affiliate product’s sales page using your affiliate ID. Note that some article directories don’t allow this, but some do so focus only on those.

After you’ve written your articles, begin to distribute them to article directories, but don’t do it all at once. In other words, don’t distribute 100 articles to 25 directories in one day. Instead, distribute one article per day for 100 straight days. That will do you a lot better in the long run.

Find out more about making the best use of article marketing for your affiliate products sales.

Cover Your Ass – Double Check Your Work Before Submitting Articles

I spent most of this weekend updating one of my side-project websites. To be frank, it is a site I built with HyperVRE. While the HyperVRE product is pretty good, it is not ideal for big websites. So long as you are sticking to 10-page websites, this is a good product. But the site I have working on is a 500-page website.

The problem with the HyperVRE comes to light when you are working sites in excess of 20-pages. It takes a long time to compile large sites, and updates and template changes can be very painful and time-consuming.

This is where I have been with my 500-page website, that I built in just a couple of days using the HyperVRE package. It simply takes too long to update with minor changes. What I did was to decide to hand-repair the site and convert it to my own operating system platform, so that future repairs and tweaks could be implemented easily. (If you are wondering, I believe that this may someday become a stand-alone product, but I am a bit too busy to aim for that just yet.)

So, my adapting of the website has been made much easier with my php knowledge. But, I am still having to edit each article display page and put it into my new template system. I have cleared about 100-pages in the last 12 hours, so progress is good. I only have 400 pages to go….

So here is my point.

I have been looking at each of the individual articles, as I am morphing them to the new system. Far too many of these articles from a wide variety of article directories have lots of problems. I am going to document for you here the major problems I have seen, so that you can prevent yourself from getting caught like a lot of these writers have been caught – fluttering in the wind, with their article marketing campaign in ruins.

Resource Box – General Notes – The whole point of putting articles into circulation is to get your link out on the web, in newsletters and on websites and blogs. Don’t forget to put your links in the authors’ resource box!

Resource Box – Link Specific – Make sure your links work! Far too many of these articles have inoperable links, because the HTML for the HREF tags are seriously hosed. Noted Tips: 1) Put a space between the A and the HREF, between the HREF and TARGET tags, etc.; 2) Make sure there are quotes on each end of the URL or not. The HREF tags will work, with or without quotes around the URL, but putting only one quote around the URL breaks the link; 3) Make sure to include a http:// version of your link in addition to your embedded keyword links; 4) Don’t put punctuation at the end of your URL, unless you are including just the domain name, with no deep links (links to pages within your website). Even if you are linking just your domain name, I solidly recommend that you do not follow the URL with any punctuation.

Use The ENTER Key Sparingly – You should only use your ENTER key to break paragraphs, and then use it twice, to put a blank line between paragraphs. DO NOT hit ENTER after every type-written line. It will hose the proper display of your articles — and it is really hard to fix at the webmaster end. (I actually did just delete some articles, because they were so full of mistakes that I did not want to invest the time to fix them.) If you absolutely have to… hit ENTER at the end of each type-written line (strongly recommended against), make darn sure that you hit the SPACE key before hitting the ENTER key. Some directory sites will strip your extra ENTER keys out of the text, but those same sites will fail to put a space in there for you at the end of the line. The result is wordsthatrunintoeachother. This is damn annoying to the webmaster who has to choose whether to delete your article, OR fix your mistakes.

Sub Headings

When you are including a sub-heading in your text, you should make sure that you do two things: put a blank line between the subhead and the next paragraph, and always cap the first letter of every word in your subheading. Extra Note: If the directory will let you include BOLD html, then be sure to bold your sub headings.

If you are going to put a numbered list in your article, please put a space between your number and the first word that follows it. It looks like crap if you don’t.

If you are putting an unordered list in your article, please separate list items with a blank line between them, unless you are going to include the LIST ITEM html coding.

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If you are using an article distribution service to get your articles out onto the Internet, then you generally have three kinds of choices:

1. Do-It-Yourself Software;
2. Low-cost and mostly Do-It-Yourself distribution service;
3. The Phantom Writers Article Distribution Service – full service.

Why do I mention this? For one, I own The Phantom Writers. But, I am not mentioning this to brag. The reason I mention this is because with my distribution service, we actually provide a full-service operation. We will put your articles together for distribution, and our team of experienced people will ensure that everything is working as it needs to work. We make sure all of your links are formatted properly and working. We also make sure that all of your T’s are crossed and your I’s are dotted.

My point, if the people whose articles were in my automotive website were distributed by us, instead of someone else, the multitude of problems I saw today would never have been, because my staff would have made certain that your article distribution went off without a hitch.

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If you are struggling with high fuel prices and trying to figure out how you will be able to pay for your online advertising endeavors, please consider getting a copy of my ebook, “How To Increase the Fuel Mileage of Any Vehicle.” By utilizing the gas-saving tips and gas-saving strategies I recommend, you should easily be able to improve your fuel efficiency by at least 30%! In these days of $4 per gallon gasoline, 30% will add a whole wad of change back into your monthly budget… just enough to enable you to build your income streams, so that maybe you won’t have to worry about conservation next time around.

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Bill Platt 405-780-7745 – 9am to 6pm CST