All Entries Tagged With: "website"

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.

Use Articles To Promote Your Blog, Website, Or Both?

If you have a blog and a website, which one should you promote with your articles? It’s a good question and one for which there is no easy answer. Rather than answer it outright, I’m going to take a more principled approach.

What you should really promote with your articles is the page where you want your customers to go to make a purchase. If that is your blog then promote your blog. If it is your website then send your traffic to your website. But you should make it easy for your customers to buy something and cut down on the number of clicks that get them to the end goal.

If you are using articles for lead generation purposes then send your readers to your opt-in page or the page where you capture their contact information. If you selling a product and you want to use articles to drive traffic to your sales page, landing page, or order form then send them directly to the place you want them to go to close the sale. If you are a service business and you use your blog as a marketing tool while your website closes sales, you have to decide whether you want article readers to go straight to your sales closing page or your blog for more information. Bottom line: You need to create a marketing funnel and get your article readers into the loop the quickest way possible. Define the funnel first, then start pouring traffic through the top of it.

Article Marketing And Offline Benefits

Did you know there are offline benefits to article marketing? It’s true. If you run an offline business then you can take advantage of article marketing, but you still need a website.

Your offline business will benefit by having a website. Every day, people go online to research information and if they are making a purchase they will start their search for information online before going anywhere else. Article marketing can help you in a number of ways:

• Builds inbound links to your website to help drive up your search rankings
• Drives traffic to your website that you can convert into sales
• Builds trust and credibility in your knowledge of your niche
• Establishes you as an expert in your subject matter

People love doing business with a knowledgeable expert. You can be that expert in your niche. Article marketing can help you get there, even if you run an offline business with a website.

How A Newsletter Can Drive Traffic To Your Website Or Blog And Make You An Expert

Blog Content Provider has spent the last couple of days discussing the benefits of a blog promotion newsletter. Actually, a newsletter can do more than promote your blog. It can promote your entire business.

In addition to pointing your newsletter readers to your daily blog posts, you can also share with them your insights into your niche with articles that enlighten them on the benefits of your business. You can send them to your website with carefully targeted links from your newsletter, designed to increase traffic to specific pages of your website that you want your newsletter readers to pay attention to. Articles can go a long way to make that happen.

Your newsletter articles do not all have to be written by you. They can be written by guest authors, picked up from article directories, even borrowed from blog posts of related websites (as long as you have permission and give proper attribution). One thing is certain, however. Newsletters are not dead. They are a viable way to promote your business, your website, your blog, and your expert articles.