Devour The Web

It is a well known fact that writing, distributing and posting articles to various location on the web is an extremely effective way to generate targeted traffic and establish yourself as an experienced marketer in your field. Unique articles that help solve the reader’s problems, assists the reader in advancing their marketing acumen, or otherwise generally inform tend to stay posted on many web sites throughout the Internet and usually generate targeted traffic for the writer.

In order to further maximize the benefits of writing and posting unique articles, it makes good business sense to optimize the articles so the search engines list the URL’s associated with those articles on search engine results pages (SERP’s). Ideally, you’d like to see your article URL on the 1st page of the SERP’s so you can capitalize on the free and targeted traffic from these listings.

So, what type of strategy can be utilized to optimize your articles for the search engines?

There’s quite a few different ways but here are some tactics that you may want to use:

Article optimization tactic 1: Choose keywords that complement your USP and name your article page accordingly.

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The backbone of business success is communication.

And networking is one of the most powerful sales training strategies that can open up an avalanche of leads for you.

Networking is when two or more different businesses stay in contact on a regular basis to build and improve each other’s business.

There are many ways to network your business online.

Participate in online business related discussion boards , e-mail discussion groups, newsgroups and chat rooms.

You can communicate with other business people via e-mail, video conferencing and by using instant messaging programs.

Join online business associations and clubs.

You’ll gain many benefits from networking online.

You’ll learn business information that you didn’t know before.

You can get advice on how to solve a current business problem. It can lead to new business projects.

Negotiate joint ventures and cross promotion deals.

Learn important skills that you didn’t have before.

Get constructive criticism that can improve your business.

Brainstorm with others to come up with new business and marketing ideas.

Before you go out and communicate with other business professionals there are a few things you should know ahead of time.

A great way to get the word out about your business in a hurry is something so simple and effective yet few marketers online take advantage of it.

What if you can advertise for free and potentially get thousands of people to see your message? What if this same concept is viral and can potentially spread all over the internet?

What if you can have potentially hundreds of websites linking to you, and in the process, boost your search engine ranking? What if this same concept also builds trust and credibility and brands you online as an expert, which could quite possibly increase your sales?

What could this concept possibly be?

It’s staring you right in the face and you didn’t even know it! It’s called Article Writing.

Publishers are always looking for content for their ezine. You can give them that content by writing an article about something you know about or by sharing your experiences and if they like your article they will then publish it.

Then at the end of your article, include a small bio or resource box about yourself with a link to what you are promoting. This is where you will get your free advertising.

In my e-mail one day, I received the following message: “Hello, I am a subscriber to your ezine and received the attached e-mail. Please advise if this is actually from your website. Thank you.”

The attachment was from my mailing list program. It was informing my dear subscriber that since her mail kept bouncing, “I`m not going to try again; this message has been in the queue too long.”

1. The Problem

Why was my newsletter bouncing? My mailing list program reports receiving this message: “…The information presently available to AOL indicates this server is transmitting unsolicited e-mail to AOL. Based on AOL`s Unsolicited Bulk E-mail policy at http://www.aol.com/info/bulkemail.html AOL cannot accept further e-mail transactions from this server. Please have your ISP/ASP or server admin call AOL at 1-888-212-5537, or visit http://postmaster.info.aol.com for more information.”

Basically, I was being accused of sending unsolicited commercial e-mail. This was a double opt-in subscriber. I don`t do spam!

America Online, Inc. (AOL) had blocked my subscriber from receiving the e-zine she requested. About fifteen percent of my subscribers use an AOL e-mail address. Not only am I adversely affected, but my AOL subscribers are not getting their e-mails.

Click fraud is an unfortunate byproduct of the pay per click advertising business. Many people with an online business spend large amounts of money on pay per click advertising only to discover that many of the people clicking on their ads weren’t really interested in their products or services.

Bogus “visitors” to a pay per click ad represent click fraud. This is a serious scam that threatens the viability of the pay per click advertising business which has become enormously profitable for all of the major search engine operators, namely Google, Yahoo/Overture, and MSN.

Click fraud has different forms, but the end result is generally the same. Advertisers are billed for fruitless traffic generated by someone who repeatedly clicks on an advertiser’s ad without any intention of ever buying anything.

The search engine advertising market is currently about $3.8 billion per year and estimates vary widely on how much click fraud is actually going on. Clearly, the search engine operators would like to downplay the extent of this problem. Some industry experts claim that a little click fraud exists but that it is overblown by advertiser paranoia, while others estimate that ten to twenty percent of all clicks are false (made by someone with no legitimate interest in the ad itself).

Contrary to the claims of high-priced SEO firms, optimizing your web site for search engines is not brain surgery. But you must first accept the fact that “spiders” - the search engine programs that read web pages - run away from non-HTML code. This is why the first thing any SEO expert does - before researching keywords or rewriting your copy - is look at your web site code.

If your web pages are full of Javascript, graphical navigation buttons, Flash animation, and other glitzy stuff, your odds of ranking high in the search engines sink like a stone. The spiders may never even find your site, let alone start adding your pages to their search results.

You say you just can’t give up those cool Javascript menus or that glitzy Flash intro? Then be prepared to get shunned by the search engines. Spiders are good at only two things: reading basic HTML and finding text. If your sites throw obstacles in their path, resign yourself to obscurity - and poverty!

Every business is engaged in selling something, whether a product, service, information, or something else. And sales usually begin with sales leads. As an offline example, new insurance and car sales people are frequently asked to compile lists of their friends, families, acquaintances, and so on. This list is used then as a lead builder - something to get the ball rolling towards that first big sale. The online world is no different. Every for-profit web site needs a steady flow of internet marketing leads. A big part of any online marketer*s job is to generate the leads that will ultimately be responsible for another sale. In particular, in the highly competitive online marketing arena, someone selling products and services to other marketers will need a steady flow of fresh internet marketing leads to fuel their sales.

Selling to internet marketers is a tough market segment to compete in. New products and services are released at an amazing rate. These new products and services are sometimes driven by new technology, other times by changes in market conditions or search engines, and still others are variations of existing products. Some of these products are themselves designed to help capture internet marketing leads!

Everybody Loves A Freebie!

It’s true! Who doesn’t like to get free stuff, no matter how cheap, lame or otherwise undesirable? You know it, I know it and you can be darn sure the marketing departments at the big boys out there know it and thrive on it.

So why aren’t YOU getting in on this?

Giving away promotional freebies is a great way to get people to buy from you, to sign up for newsletters, to get a heap of free advertising and to generally boost the profile of your business both in the online and offline world.

Thankfully, in the online world these kinds of promotions need not cost a fortune either which again begs the question:

Why aren’t you doing this already!

Here’s a few reasons why giving away free stuff is such a wonderful thing for your business.

Freebie & Coupon Sites

There are thousands of websites, forums, blogs, newsletters and other online communities who report on nothing but all the freebies currently out there on the internet. If you are giving away something free then these guys will find out about it and will more than likely list what you are giving away on their own sites. That’s free advertising for your business and it’ll be seen by THOUSANDS of potential new customers! It’ll also do no harm to your link popularity and hence search engine rankings…

Reciprocal linking is an effective, free way to get more visitors to your website.

Exchanging links with other webmasters can help you in two ways.

Firstly, by getting your link displayed on other websites you are increasing the number of paths leading back to your your own site. This in turn will increase the number of visitors.

Secondly, exchanging links will increase the chances of getting your web page ranked more highly in the results returned by search engines.

The reason for this is that for most search engines, the number of links pointing to a site plays a huge part in determining where that site ranks. Why? Well, wouldn’t you be more likely to visit a place that had been recommended to you by a friend? The same reasoning applies to search engine positioning.

A link from site A to site B is like a vote for site B. The more votes that site B gets, the higher it is regarded by search engines.

However, quantity is not everything! A link carries more weight if it is from a high quality site - in the same way that a recommendation from a trusted friend would be taken more seriously than a recommendation from a casual acquaintance.

Do you want to join the well known gurus like Terry Dean, Willie Crawford, Jimmy D. Brown, Micheal Green, Jim Daniels, etc in bringing highly targeted visitors to your website weekly without spending a dime in adverts?

If yes, then write articles and send to article directories, article banks, article announcement lists and ezine editors on a constant basis.

Terry Dean uses it consistently to bring highly targeted traffic to his websites. At one time he said that he could stop advertising and writing TODAY and still will generate well over 50% of his traffic for years to come…all because of free articles.

Micheal Green confessed that he is making thousands of dollars in sales, for each article that he writes. He also said that EVERY leading marketer that he knows includes “article writing” in their TOP THREE most-used promotional strategies.

Willie Crawford said anytime he writes, his articles are published on many other websites, so each article becomes a mini-system which continues to bring in new site visitors and subscribers for YEARS.

Jim Daniels even calls writing article his “web traffic magnet” because it brought him 8,000 visitors per month in just his second month of existence. Now it contributes in bringing him over 100,000 visitors a month… without fail.