Are You Writing Articles to Boost Your Business & Explode Your Sales?

For many years search engine marketing has been the most popular advertising strategy on the Internet. But, as you know, strong competition makes it extremely difficult to get high rankings in search engines. So, what is the solution to get placements in the top 20 listings in search engines?

To get the top ten rankings which receive the lion's share in attracting traffic to websites has almost been impossible for most businesses because of the insane competition. That's why online business owners and marketers are striving hard to find solutions to this problem.

Finally, they have found one affective strategy to get top rankings in search engines. They are now writing informative articles on any subject they know well. Then, they send their articles to hundreds, even thousands of online and offline publications, including newspapers, magazines, newsletters, e-zines, journals, online portals, websites and weblogs.

Utilizing this marketing strategy helps marketers expose their offers to multi-millions of target audience in related categories worldwide, attracting tens of thousands of potential customers to their websites, helping their target audience receive information, learn many things in their favorite categories, or learn the most powerful advertising
methods to grow their businesses fast.

So, articles provide the authors with opportunities to expose their offers to millions of target audience, having many of them visit their websites. You know, more traffic generates more sales. Their readers get information on the subjects they have interest in, getting answers to the questions they have in their minds, learning many methods to boost their businesses.

In fact, both authors and their audience benefit from articles in many ways. This makes articles valuable tools serving millions of people online and offline.

Because great number of people benefit from articles, search engines evaluate articles as valuable tools, too, giving them high credits when evaluating websites. This way, articles play a great role in getting higher search engine rankings.

But, most probably you are a busy person, don't have enough time to send your articles to hundreds of distribution points including magazines, newsletters, e-zines, journals, weblogs, websites. Besides, you don't know how to submit articles to those publications, you have no idea about their rules.

How could you possibly benefit from article marketing when you are unable to send your articles to any publication. To reach herds of people, millions of target audience you have to send your articles to thousands of popular publications, high traffic websites, and you are simply unable to do it!

Don't worry. There are many nice people out there to distribute your articles to hundreds of best places and popular publications for you to reach millions of target audience in a specific category. Most of these wonderful people would even do it without any cost on your part.

These are the links to the websites of free article publisher and distributors:

1. Ezine Articles.com  
2. <a href="http://www.zapcontent.com">ZapContent.com</a>
3. ArticleRich.com
4. iSnaire.com
5. Marketing for Success
6. The News  
7. New Free Articles

Your original articles sharing useful information with the readers will enhance your credibility and reliability which are essential values to keep your existing customers in your business, while attracting many more potential customers to your website. Keep writing.

Are You Making These Article Marketing Mistakes?

As an article directory owner and editor I am exposed to a huge number of articles every single day of the week.

I sometimes receive complaints from authors who are angered by the fact that their article has not been published, which leads me to believe that there are still a lot of people out there who do not understand article marketing, nor the role that directories play.

For those who are not finding success with articles, or for those considering starting out, here are a few ground rules that will save you a lot of work in the long run and will likely get your article marketing career off to a much more auspicious start.

Read the article directory's specific terms of service and guidelines. This may seem like a boring, tedious and long winded waste of your valuable time but in the long term it will save you hours of frustration and wasted effort. All directories set their own rules and some are stricter than others. Most directories labor under a huge number of submissions and the work of sifting through them is often the job of one individual. This means that if your opening paragraph or introductory statement is poorly written or contains mistakes, that is as far as the editor will go before hitting the delete key. The luxury of time to edit an author's mistakes or to decline an article as opposed to deleting it, is one that most editors do not have.

Mass submissions are usually viewed as spam. Let's face it, none of us are capable of writing over 200 articles in a day - I would say that even producing more than ten would be a pretty amazing feat of productivity. It should come as no surprise to those submitting large numbers of articles in a 24 hour period to find that they are all deleted. Article directory software usually allows for quick erasure of such submissions, so if you don't want your work to fall victim to mass deletion, don't mass submit. All that is needed is a little common sense. If you are using a submission service, set the option to stagger your submissions over a longer period of time.

Proof read your articles. If you don't know what this means, look it up! If your writing is riddled with spelling errors, poor structure, punctuation horrors and grammatical butchery, don't be surprised if none of them get published. I could write thousands of words on the most common mistakes seen in people's writing. These usually involve spelling and grammar. Spell check your articles, even if you think you're perfect, you will often be surprised at the mistakes you make. If you tend to misspell a word regularly, you will never correct it unless you make yourself aware of it.

If you are of the opinion that these things don't matter (after all, people will know what you mean!) then think again. If you want to write and, more importantly, see your work published and picked up by other website owners and bloggers, you need to demonstrate an ability to write well.

As an example, all the "SEO experts" who talk about search engine optimisation (sic) but don't even understand that being able to spell their claimed occupation correctly would lend a little more credibility to their claims. Just for the record, most words ending in "ize" use a "z" and not an "s". This is a very common mistake, but it would be corrected by the use of a spell checker, as would so many others.

If you want to write with authority, you have to be able to exhibit basic literacy. Yes, this is important and should be borne in mind by those who eulogize about "the Queen's English", thus making themselves look even more foolish than those they chastise. (a good example of a word that does actually end in “ise”) Regardless of who is on the throne, it is always "the King's English".

None of us are perfect and this is not a lecture on grammar and spelling, no matter how needed it might be.

If you are tempted to use PLR articles, even if you rewrite them in an attempt to make them unique, remember that you will be competing with all the other shortcut seekers who are doing the same thing. It's another shortcut to the delete key for a lot of directories.

When it comes to the resource box, it is quite amazing how many authors defeat their entire purpose by making a mess of this vital section. If the article directory in question allows one, two or three live Hyperlinks, make good use of them. Think about your anchor text very carefully. In other words don't say......to find out more click here and Hyperlink the words "click here". The resource box is where you need to give readers a compelling reason to visit your site(s) but it is also the one place you can make the most of good keywords as the anchor text in your links.

Use the resource box wisely and take full advantage of everything the directory is offering you by way of promotional tools. Adding your URL without making it a live link is a pointless waste of time if the directory allows you to use Hyperlinks in your resource box. Conversely, adding more than the quota of permitted links will probably result in deletion of your work.

Another thing to watch is linking directly to affiliate programs. Read the directory's policies on this point or again, you may well find yourself on the cutting room floor. Many directories will stipulate that you may only link to affiliate programs indirectly by referring readers to your own site or domain. Some do not allow straight redirect links either.

Relevancy is also an issue here too. In other words, submitting a PLR piece about gardening and linking to your MLM program is not very helpful or wise, just one more recipe for deletion.

I should finish by saying that yes, you can churn out badly written articles to your heart's content, just don't be surprised at the results.

Customer Service with Autoresponders

Ideally, when you perform customer service, it is
done on a one-on-one basis with each of your
customers. That works quite well in the offline world
– but on the Internet, that simply will not do. Your
customers are literally all over the world, and there is
no way that you can really deal with each one of
them personally. That is where an autoresponder
comes in.

Customer service with autoresponders is quite
simple. When an order is place, an autoresponder
can send out the receipt for the sale, the information
for accessing the product, and a ‘thank you’ email.
This happens whether you are logged in to your
computer or on vacation in an exotic location! But
customer service doesn’t always end right there, and
if you are away from your computer, you may be
letting your customers down!

For instance, an elderly gentleman sees your
product advertised and places an order. Everything
goes through just fine, and he receives the receipt,
the download information, and your ‘thank you’ email.
Your product is an ebook, compiled into a PDF file.
This particular gentleman doesn’t understand what
a PDF file is, and he has no idea what you mean by
‘right click to download.’ He needs additional
customer service for the product that he has
purchased, and there is nobody available to help
him – nobody but an autoresponder.

Set up an additional autoresponder that will send out
a list of frequently asked questions or problems that
deal with customer service or how to access the
product. Also set up a support autoresponder. If he
sends a message to support, he should get an
instant message back letting him know that his
message has been received, and how soon it will be
addressed. This will give him some measure of
comfort, and in most cases, he will wait that
specified period of time for assistance.

However, if he doesn’t know how to download the
product, and he sends a message to support, and
nothing happens, he will most likely become very
dissatisfied in a very short period of time. The
difference between a patient customer and an irate
customer is one simple autoresponder message
that can and should be set up in under five minutes.

Really think your ordering process through, and
consider the potential problems that may occur for
your customers. Get an autoresponder set up to
address those problems, and you will find that your
customers are more satisfied with your products,
and extremely satisfied with your customer service –
all because your autoresponders handle their
problems right away!