30 Days "Take Action" Program - Day 13

Article Marketing - Now You're the Expert

Normally when one thinks of search engine rankings, you think of search engine optimization (SEO) work. The tweaking, mauling, fiddling, and juggling of something called algorithms to get a higher ranking with the search engines. Well, first of all, SEO – bottom line – is highly over rated and has been made way too complicated.

What really happens is this: people go to search for something – be it cheese, shoes or home business opportunities – and they type certain search words into the browser. It’s the WORDS people use to search that really affect your rankings.

Key Effectiveness Index is the ranking of words used by people when they search for product A. They get site A through D etc. as a result because the words they used to search are prominently used on those sites – either in the meta tags at the top of the page (something you can not see) – or they are used in your copy (most often the top 25 words as that is what the engines typically crawl).

Okay you’re thinking – so what? How does that relate to me and article marketing?

This is so easy you’ll be delighted, because anyone can do this effectively. Article marketing means YOU provide something you’ve written – on marketing, home business opportunities, training, etc. – to other Web sites, blogs, and eZines for FREE. Yup – FREE! Why?

FreeWays vs PayWays

Because in return you get to include a short bio and links back to your site in the “resource box” that appears at the end of your article. By the way – your article will fit into a niche that you get to pick. So if you want to write about team building or blogging, then your site link should lead back to a site that most directly relates to your topic.

What a perfect opportunity for you to write something about FOL, or lead generation – you get the idea. This establishes YOU as the expert and guess what? Gives you several very nice benefits such as: lead generation, increased site traffic, and improved search engine ranking.

This method of marketing is so popular you can even find software packages and web sites to help you syndicate your articles easily to hundreds and even thousands of other sites. Imagine the number of people you could introduce to FOL!

Here’s a very powerful example of what we’re talking about. Marketer John Doe submits an article to iSnare (a web based article distribution service). It’s free to submit to them, but John chooses to spend $2.00. His article was sent to over 150 other distribution lists, which in turn sent his article to even more lists.

Within a couple of weeks, John’s article (he searched for it on Google) returned about 650 results. 650 other sites that posted his article and created links back to his site. THAT’S A LOT OF LINKS. Think of the team building you could do with those results!

Keep in mind your article needs to be well written, focused, easy-to-understand and helpful to your readers. DO NOT blatantly promote your product or service or it won’t get run. Put a link to your site in the resource box and try to stay away from other links in your article – largely because they often get taken out by the editors. BE SUBTLE – it will get you a lot further than a two by four.

Places to get started with your article marketing are: iSnare and The Phantom Writers and ArticleMarketer. Google search for article distribution services and you’ll get hundreds of other places to place that expert article on FOL and it’s benefits for at home business netrepreneurs.

Yes, you can choose to spend some money to do this, but if you are going to, do your research carefully, you’ll find the most cost effective way to do this (and in some cases free ways to accomplish your goals!)