List Building Toolkit

To get the maximum benefit from any web marketing effort, you need to pay attention to both the advertising side AND natural search engine traffic. Web advertising is much easier as there are many advertising firms that can create compelling copy for the advertising. An often ignored area, or at least undervalued, is building up natural search engine traffic. The reason is its harder to build up for each desired keyword and takes a lot of effort. Once done properly, you have built in traffic without spending a dime on marketing costs, and this traffic is permanent. Using an article directory can be an important part of this endeavor and should be utilized for maximum impact.

Using an article directory allows users to post content related to their website, and include links in this content back to their site. The search engines love article directories and consider some of them an authority source. Ignoring this source of possible links is not a good idea. While it can seem difficult to write so much content to be submitted to article directories over time, in the longer run it really will pay off.

To get the maximum benefit from using an article directory, you need to be able to spin your content. What the heck is spinning anyway? Its really very simple. It uses a computer program to help dynamically substitute sentences for one another on a random basis, while keeping the read and flow of the work the same. So you might write “The dog is brown”. If you wanted to take this and spin the content, you could easily say “The dogs fur is white” or “The dogs fur is yellow in color”. They all say basically the same thing, just in a slightly different way – all of them talk about the dogs fur color. Doing this with your articles can actually create huge amounts of “new” content from a single article you write. Of course you have to write out the alternative text that gets submitted, but then a computer program does the rest. This will give you maximum impact and protect you from getting penalized by the search engines for duplicate content submitted to article directories.

Altering the content around a main article allows someone to submit the content to many different article directorires and not have to worry that the same exact content is being submitted.

Sure a few of the same article is fine, but you dont want 200 copies of the exact article submitted all over the web.

No matter how good your copy is, and no matter how smart and creative you are, without traffic, you are dead.  The fancy graphics don't matter, the best products don't matter either if you are not getting anyone to see the website.  Traffic is always the end game for anyone trying to publish ads or sell anything on the web.  It seems like its a mystery to most, as most products sold on the web focuses on content, PPC (which is not bad, but also very hard to get right), or management products to help with productivity.Very few really work on the nuts and bolts of where you get traffic from.

The number one source of free traffic will come from natural search engine ranking, and the consistency is hard to beat.  Why?  Once you build your site up on a few keywords that get decent search volume, this traffic will be consistent.PPC and other methods are also fine, but are also subject to other risks ($$$ cost) that really have to be managed.  Basically you need links and content - this is the key to getting higher rankings on Google.

One way to get links is through  submitting niche articles related to your site to an article directory.Once your site topic is decided, you will want to write at least 20 articles that are 300-500 words in length.  Before you write the articles, make sure you have signed up for an adsense and adwords account even if you are not going to use them.  Google has some terrific free tools for researching keywords and how often they are searched.  You don’t need to spend days researching keywords BUT you really need to pick 3 or 4 keywords to focus on for your articles that get decent traffic in the search engines and are related to your topic.  Another tool you can use that is free is PPC Web Spy (just google it) – it allows you to see what keywords people are bidding on for their PPC ads on Google – again, they have probably done extensive work since they are paying for the ad clicks – no reason you cannot just benefit from their work and use some of those keywords.

Once this is done, make sure you write at least 5 articles per keyword grouping (2 for each article) with links to your site using those keyworeds.  Do not try to tackle too many keywords at once - you need about 200-300 links realistically for each keyword to move up - depending on how popular they are it may take more.  This is where any article directory comes in handy.You then sumbit your article which is then redistributed for you by the directory to others looking for content or to learn about a subject.This really does make getting links easier and faster in the long run - it just takes a bit of time to start working.  In addition, you may want a tool to help rewrite your articles so that many different versions are distributed to thousands of sites.  This is a key to quicker ranking on the engines as the same thing distributed over and over just does not do the trick.

In addition to articles, you will want to submit your site on all the major social networks like Facebook, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Digg, etc.The more of that the better.  You will want to create an account on all of them - very time consuming but needs to only be done one time.You can do a search on Google or other engines for a list of the major ones.Once this is done, you can also use tools to automate posting to all of your accounts at once which saves a huge amount of time.

Almost anything you want to do on the web can be found for free, but there are tons of stuff that will save you huge amounts of time for a small fee.  I usually opt for the time saving tools - in the long run its really worth it as there are only so many hours in the day.  Its always a trade off of time and ease of use vs paying for it.  Some stuff I do with free tools, some stuff I pay a monthly fee to use because it saves me so much time I could not achieve any goals without them.

Assuming you write articles and then submit to social networks, you should start to see some results in about a month.  Longer term, even once you get ranking, you need a plan to continually feed articles to directories – not as often as the beginning, but you really want to do at least 1 per month per keyword to keep fresh links coming into the search engines.  Over time, the content you distributed that Google finds links to disappears as sites go offline, content is deleted and replaced etc.  Once you get a stable of articles written, often you can just do a complete rewrite of an older article and then submit that again - its often faster than rewriting a new article.

Submitting articles to article directories is one key strategy in article marketing which is part of internet marketing strategies that can determine the success and failure of a website.

Here are some advantages of submitting articles to article directories and how it can help improve your business online.

1. Free Marketing:
Most article directories allow you to include links in the article content that you can direct to your blog. If you write articles with content related to your products, you can to market your offer indirectly and include a link back to your services. This result in a Free marketing media for your offers.

2. Boost your business credibility:
Most article directories allow you to have an author bio box at the bottom of every articles you submitted. You can use your author bio box to promote your business or personal brand to build a brand image for yourself. In the author box, dont forget to market your product page by including a link back to your product offer for more information on the related articles you have submitted.

Moerover, when you have submitted enough “good” articles read by unlimited visitors to the article directories from all over the world, you will soon be seen as an expert in your industry who has a wide knowledge in the field. Being listed as “authors” in article directories helps promote yourself as an expert in your field too!

3. Attract traffic to your website:
With the links that you are allowed to include in your article content and your author bio box, you have created an opportunity for readers to click on the links to visit to your website. When crafted in an interesting way, these links can bring readers to your website especially when your articles are being chosen by website owners to post in their own website and reposted all over the internet.

4. Huge exposure to millions of Article Directory visitors:
Your articles may be viewed by the millions of readers who browse article directories every year.

5. RSS Syndication:

If your articles were good enough and being reposted by website owners to post in their websites, this automatically create a viral effect for your content. Your article can then be reprinted virally all over online with links to your product offer as well as your personal advertisement in your author bio box.

Most article directories as well as blogs now comes with RSS (Really Simple Syndication)  technology which produces RSS feeds for all blog contents. These articles can then be distributed easily through RSS feeds and distributed even further receiving more views and clicks that can help you can get website traffic to your blog.

6. Generate sales and leads without having a site:
Even if you do not own a website, you can also gain advantage from your effort in article marketing, since the article directories as well as website owners who reprint your article in their websites can be represented as your website. Since your articles come with an author bio box as explained above, you can include your contact information such as postal address, contact phone humber or email address instead of links to your website to allow prospects to contact you.

As a suggestion, it always advisable to create a simple web presence online even if you do not know how to build a website. You may create a free blogger or wordpress blogs, or even facebook and twitter page that you can link to from the bio box.

7. Reach New Markets:
With a wide readership of article directories all over the world. and the chances of your articles spreading on the internet, submitting articles to Article Directories can help you reach new clients that you have never dreamed possible. Your articles and your product offer can be exposed to millions of potential clients internationally.

8. Get continuous traffic to your website – for years
Articles submitted to article directories usually stay in the directories forever, meaning that your articles can continue to attract traffic to your website for many years to come. Your articles may be chosen anytime and reprinted many years later too.

9. Articles Spread Automatically by Scripts

Recently, there has been some new scripts that pulls articles automatically from article directories. These scripts will further help spread your articles to websites all over the internet providing you with backlinks and traffic to your websites.  One of the latest release of such script is Automated Blog script a wordpress plugins that pulls article from articles directories

For more information on article marketing, free tools, softwares and Ebook on Internet Marketing, download at Internet Marketing for Small Business website www.BOBmarketing.com

You have set up your online business website. Everything you need for a well functioning website is there: links, signg up page, product description, everything. But why don’t you have a single sale made since? Simple! You have no traffic coming in to your site. Worse, nobody even knows that your website exists.

Any online visitors will not do. You need targeted traffic to your website. Meaning, you need to invite people who would actually want to buy whatever it is you’re offering. To achieve increased in visitor traffic, you need to advertise your website. And remember that there are more differences in online business and offline business advertisement than there are similarities.

The most popular method to advertise a website is to write articles for article marketing campaign.

For the right person, article marketing can be totally free. If you know how to write articles, you can find free article directories on the Web where you can submit your articles for publishing. This way your campaign will cost you zero.

Article marketing is useful in establishing your authority over your niche. When you gain an authority status, it’s much easier for you to sell your product since people have more trust in you. Authority websites also gain higher search engine ranking – another free way to search engine optimize your website.

By writing articles, you know you get targeted traffic to your website. Only people with particular interest to your niche will read your piece so that you know if you carry them to your business website, they will find what you’re offering interesting. You are sure your efforts will not go to waste.

However, you must remember one important point when you write article and start your article marketing strategy. Remember to cater to your readers’ needs and not to yours. That is to say know what your readers would like to read about your niche. To do this, you must join forums or chat rooms where your target audiences post questions for you to answer. Once you know your readers by heart, you can write a piece purposely dedicated to them.

Realize the power of article marketing for your online business, and before you know it, the profit starts pouring in. If you keep in mind to put service first above profit in your article marketing campaign, your success is near.