All Entries Tagged With: "Article Writing"
Should Sales Reps Use Articles For Promotion?
Sales representatives have a myriad of ways of promoting themselves, online and off line. Savvy sales professionals can and should consider all the ways that Internet marketers use to build their incomes. And that includes article marketing.
How can an independent sales rep use article marketing to increase their business? The same way real estate agents do it. Start by building your own website.
Your website should be a presentation of what you have to offer your target audience. It need not be branded with your company’s branding images and messages, though it can be. Many real estate agents do this quite well. That’s a decision that you’ll have to make for your own individual situation, however.
But let’s say you decide to build a website around your product niche, widgets. You sell widgets, all kinds of widget. Automatic widgets, manual widgets, dual widgets, widgets with wheels, widgets with training wheels, circular widgets, and about 15 other varieties of widgets. Why not just build a widget website? You could, if you were really enterprising, build one around your company brand that also presented you as a sales rep and built another one that focused on generic widgets without the company branding element. But let’s keep this simple.
So you build a website about widgets. You don’t have to mention your company on this website. You are trying to help your target audience decide which is the best type of widget for them. So you have a page featuring each of the types of widgets you have to offer where each page tells your site visitors what the features of the widget that page is designed to highlight. After the website is built you need to promote it and you can do that with articles.
So you sit down with your list of keywords related to widgets and you write articles. Lots of articles. Or you could have a ghostwriter write them for you. But once they are all written you begin to distribute them to article directories. Over time, those articles will build inbound links to your website and drive targeted traffic. The next thing you know, your selling widgets online. Sound good? Learn more.
Should You Rewrite Articles You Submit To Directories?
A reader asked if I’d recommend rewriting articles that you submit to multiple directories. Generally, no. But there may be times when you’d want to.
If you write an article for another website within your niche, which I highly recommend that you do, then you don’t want to submit that article to directories. At least, not right away. This is what we calll guest blogging or guest article writing. The idea is you supply another webmaster with unique content for their website and get a link back. That’s an original article and should not be submitted to directories as it was written for the other publisher. But you can rewrite the article.
If you choose to rewrite such an article, be sure that you change it up enough that it isn’t recognizable by the average reader. The title has to change completely, though you can optimize the article and its title for the same keyword. Then you want to completely rewrite the article body. After an extensive rewrite, and you should probably run it through Copyscape to make sure that you’ve rewritten it well enough, you can mass submit it to your article directories.
Should You Buy That Article Marketing E-book?
In the past couple of years I’ve noticed that there are more and more e-books being published about article marketing. They range in price from $20 to $100. Some of them are good, but most of them just rehash what other books have said. If you’re new to article marketing and you’ve never done it then you might be tempted to buy the e-book. Even some veterans are tempted to buy them. But should you?
I can tell you everything you need to know about article marketing in about five minutes. That’s how really simple it is. The hard part is actually doing it. Nevertheless, here’s the gist:
- You need to write a lot of articles. Not just one.
- Keep your author resource box short and the links to a minimum (one or two)
- Make sure you optimize your article around a single keyword
- Don’t write more than 700 words
- Write at least 400 words in every article
- Self promotion within your articles will kill your credibility
- Distribute your articles widely
- Immediate results are almost non-existent
- But it shouldn’t take forever to see results either
- Ensure the highest quality of relevant content in every single article
That’s about it in a nutshell. You know the benefits: Traffic, links, SEO, authority. Now go out and start writing and distributing articles.
Why Your Articles Suck And No One Reads Them
Mack Collier writes a pretty decent blog. But he’s no Brian Clark.
Of course, neither am I. But I do agree with Brian (and now Mark) that an article title can make or break your traffic numbers as well as your credibility. Mark wrote in his blog that one simple change in his blog title increased his blog readership tremendously – and the best part is that blog post title isn’t even well optimized!
There are really two things that you have to think about when crafting your article title: Optimization and Impact. But which is the greater of the two? Personally, I think impact. Let’s boil it down.
Article A is well optimized to the hilt. It achieves the highest search rankings possible, but the title sucks. No one clicks the link to read the article. Why? Because it doesn’t capture their attention. Sorry, you fail big time.
Now article B, on the other hand, does not use your keyword in the title at all, but boy did you put some punch in that title. It can’t be found in the search engines anywhere, but Joe E-zine Editor went scouring the article directories for an article on the very topic that you wrote about. He noticed your title and just had to read it. He published the article in his e-zine because you wrote a great title and an awesome article. Jack the Reader reads the article in Joe’s e-zine, published on the Web as an HTML document, and he Stumbles it, Diggs it, and Twitters it. Within two hours now you’ve had thousands of people reading your article and Digging it. All because you wrote a kick ass title.
Trust me, your article title means everything.
Article Marketing Secret: Who Is Your Target Market?
Many people question as to what topic they should choose to write their articles… Fortunately, the short answer is simple… Write articles that appeal to your target market. But what does that mean exactly?
I always pose this set of three questions, when I am talking to clients about what they should write about:
- What do you sell?
- Who is most likely to buy what you are selling?
- How can you “answer a question” or “solve a problem” to help those people who are likely to buy what you are selling?
What Do You Sell?
Maybe you sell widgets, cell phones, car parts, or marketing services… It does not matter what you sell… There will always be a topic that you can write your articles about.
Do keep in mind that the point of article marketing is not to directly sell your products, but rather to educate, inform, or entertain your reading audience. So long as you stick to the idea of educating, informing, or entertaining your readers, you will never have a shortage of people who want to read the articles you write.
However, if you keep your focus on trying to overtly sell your products or services in your “article” copy, then it will be difficult to find publishers who WANT to publish what you have written.
This is important to note, in that publishers NEED content, but publishers tend to be very picky about the content that they want to share with their readers. In order for a publisher to become or remain profitable, he or she must always serve the desires of his or her readers. And readers do not want to be sold to, preached to, or criticized. Instead, readers want to improve their lot in this life and solve the problems that they face.
If you keep the needs of the publisher foremost in your mind, and the wants of the reader, then article marketing is a great tool that can help you to earn thousands of dollars.
If you lose focus of what publishers and readers want, then all you can hope for is a few links from your articles, from a few websites that very few people visit or read.
Who Is Most Likely To Buy What You Are Selling?
Just because you sell cars does not mean that anyone who has a drivers’ license is in your target market. Let us put this statement in perspective.
- If you sell $2000 cars, most of the people in your target market are the poor – including those in poverty and students.
- If you sell $10,000 cars, your market is mostly families in middle-class America. Occasionally, you will find the college kid coming to your store to buy a car for college, and sometimes you will see a bunch of tire kickers who can only pray to get financed.
- If you sell brand new cars, your target market will again differ by what kinds of vehicles you sell. A Cadillac-buyer is different from the SUV-buyer and the economy-car buyer.
There is not a car dealership anywhere in the world that tries to target its advertising to everybody with a pulse and a drivers’ license. It just does not happen. Either the dealership talks about its available cars and the benefits of owning a specific car, or the dealership points out that they can finance anyone.
Once you understand who is most likely to buy what you are selling, then figuring out what to write about has been made much easier.
Help Your Readers Solve A Problem
Before you start writing your article, you should try to get into the heads of the people most likely to buy what are selling. Those people as a general rule have common problems for which they seek solutions.
One way to get a handle on what those problems might be is to review the email correspondence and phone calls you have taken from your clients. If you read that email all at the same time, certain questions will be asked over and again. In fact, you might even have a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page on your website that you can reference at this point in the brainstorming session.
Your email and phone correspondence and the FAQ page on your website can lead you to a better understanding of the kinds of questions your customers are always needing to be answered for them.
Once you have achieved the understanding of what problems your customers seek to have solved for them, then you have to come to the magic formula for writing articles that find wide publication and a large readership.
In your article, present your readers with the questions that people have, and then present answers to the questions and show people how to solve their problems.
In doing so, publishers who have heard the same questions you have heard will be strongly inclined to publish your articles. And when publishers agree to publish your articles, you will be able to reach the publishers’ readers and a huge network of already targeted people who are very likely to buy what you are selling.
Understanding The Mechanics Of Article Marketing
When you write your articles, it is important to remember a few key points while writing the articles. Those key points are:
- The title serves to get your article opened, so it needs to be good.
- The body of the article answers questions and sells readers on your credibility in the marketplace.
- The article should be easy to read, and it should easily carry the reader to your About The Author information at the end of the article.
- Once at your Resource Box (About the Author information), the role of the Resource Box is not to sell your products or services, but to get the reader to visit your website, where the real selling will take place.
Using the formula that I have outlined here, you are sure to find success with your article marketing endeavors.
Sure, I know some people might be thinking that the only reason for article marketing is building links, so all this extra effort would be unnecessary. But let me tell you something that I learn from time-to-time…
Did you know that if you write an article that gets published in a large newsletter that you can in fact earn $10,000 plus in sales from that single article? This is a lesson that I have learned more times than I can count. And to be honest, it is a lesson I like to learn.
Consider this… You can spend a few dollars and very little time to create an article that will generate a few back links, hopefully helping you to rank in the search engines for your target keywords. Or, you can spend a few more dollars and a little more time and create an article that could generate back links for the search engines AND find a wider audience for your article in newsletters – newsletters that could potentially deliver thousands of visitors to your website and generate thousands of dollars in sales in the next couple weeks. Which strategy makes more sense to you?
If you are wondering if I practice what I preach, then read this article again and then see my resource box below. I provide article distribution services to my customers, and my customers frequently ask me what they should write about in their articles and how to best construct those articles to reach a wider audience, and more specifically, their target audience. If I have answered these questions to your satisfaction, then visit my website and let me help you to promote your articles too.
About The Author
Bill Platt has been writing about article marketing and SEO for a number of years. If you have written an article that you feel is good enough to get publication in a major newsletter or website, then you owe it to yourself to use Bill’s article distribution service at http://www.thephantomwriters.com/ If you are interested in learning about coop article marketing, then visit Bill’s newest website: http://www.sponsorarticles.com/
