With the World Wide Web already flooded with websites and new websites popping up every day it’s becoming increasingly difficult to stand out in the crowd. Anyone who is involved with an online business knows the importance of providing rich, original content and building credibility in the web world. Content or SEO copy writing is not new; it has existed since the birth of the internet, but with the continual changes in technology, content writing has had to evolve to stay current to the many changes.
Research has proven that the content of your website contributes greatly to the usability and effectiveness of a site. The overall visitors experience is affected more by the words your write than anything else you publish; flash animation, groovy pictures and the coolest fonts don’t hold a candle to a well written article, blog post or product description. Achieving credibility in your field, which comes as a by product of publishing well written original content, is one of the most important factors to increasing your conversion rates.
Behind every successful website there is unique, accurate, interesting, and reader-friendly content. A few great articles can build your web site’s credit immediately. Since your entire internet marketing campaign is directed towards your specific audience, the language and style of the content should be in accordance with your targeted reader.
For example, if you are writing sales copy then you should have an excellent feel for what your reader’s “hot buttons” are regarding and write to their wants and needs. A successful site grabs the attention of the visitors within 5 to 10 seconds.
The content should be written keeping in mind the SEO requirements as well as your target audience. In other words, you write first for the humans, you write second for the robots. Both are necessary. But your readers come first. No use writing a paragraph of perfect keyword density copy of no one can stay awake long enough to read it.
To please the robots, or Google spiders, each page should revolve around a single topic containing the main keywords. Your main keywords are the words or phrases that your perfect customer would be typing into a search engine to find your web page. The content should be written as an inverse pyramid, with an introduction that provides the summary of the page. Remember to use of objective language, it further builds your credibility. You can provide secondary and background information on separate pages which can be accessible from an internal link.
A quick tip: readers dislike to download several pages to cover one topic so put the printable versions on a single page.
Building your credibility in a skeptical world can be a tough task. Users want facts and solid reasons to buy what you’re selling, even if all you’re selling is a product review or a convincing argument. However, people in general tend to believe what they read, that’s a plus, but you have to make sure what you’re saying is credible.
A few more credibility building tips:
• Always stand behind the product, service or even the opinion you’re selling. Here’s how:
• Offer complete money back guarantees. Leave the customer no reason not to buy now.
• Provide testimonials from other customers who have purchased your product or service. You will never find a more persuasive sales technique than from a person who believes in your product and has previously purchased from you.
• Give away free samples of your product or offer an initial free service to demonstrate your quality.
• Your article is the answer. Readers read to gain insight or find solutions. Give them that. Be concise, intelligent and provide information that helps your borrowers fix their problems.
Ok, ok, right, I know… good stuff… where’s the part about explosive marketing results?
Well, it’s time to put all that great content to work for you. How do you get more traffic with all this great content you’ve put together?
Article Marketing is the key.
Christopher Knight, the founder of Ezinearticles.com believes there are two different strategies for marketing your content. I subscribe to his belief.
1. Intentional and consistent distribution of quality original articles every month to a small list of highly relevant publishers. About 15% of the market does this.
2. Stab, stick and blast. In other words, they take a stab at writing articles without a plan, they stick it anywhere they think they should and when this doesn’t pay off in traffic attraction dividends, they blast it to everyone (relevant and not so relevant sites).
A good Article Marketing plan really depends on what the end-outcomes are… and how many qualified leads or qualified visitors you wish to attract.
If your are serious about achieving results through marketing your articles and distributing original content, you first need to write the content yourself or hire a professional copy writer that will grant your exclusive ownership rights to the material.
Keep your articles between 300 and 700 words and distribute them to two different types of sites:
• The first tier is high traffic distribution portals like www.ezinearticles.com
• The second are smaller, very relevant niche publishers. The traffic these sites receive do not come close to the first type of site but the traffic they do attract will always be extremely relevant to the reader you are trying to attract.
If your business is local, article marketing can help you tremendously. “Geo-targeted” article marketing is a new field that is predicted to explode in popularity in the coming years. The trick is in the title. Always take time to brainstorm the title of your articles. They should relevant and leave the reader wanting more after just a few seconds of reading. The solution is simple: To attract a local audience, include your locality in the title.
It should go without saying (so I’ll say it anyway) that the content should be thoughtful and written to your local audience. More than at any other time make sure your articles are smart and focused and leave a clear impression with your reader that you are in tune with the local niche market.
A few more points:
• Article (or educational) Marketing is not about writing a book. Your goal is to write a tightly focused article that demonstrates your expertise and leaves your reader wanting more. Always include an “author’s box” at the end of the article telling your reader how they can learn more. Once they click through to your site, call you, email or otherwise take the desired response, you can give them more.
• Unlike traditional print publication, once the article is published, it gone. Thrown out and likely never to be read again. Submitting articles to quality online distribution sites allows your article to take on a life of its own. Online articles can be syndicated indefinitely and spread virally to hundreds of other sites. And… each time it’s published, you are generating more links back to your website. It doesn’t get much better than that.
• Spend as much time on the article headline as you do writing the article. The article headline will determine 90% of how much traffic and viral distribution your article will receive. Optimize the copy with relevant keywords. In other words, use words in the headline that you know your target reader will be searching.
• Help with your Author’s Box: Include 2 to 3 working links that include your company’s name. Be sure to include at least two active URL’s in your resource box and make sure they include the full http://your-company-name.com/ format versus just using an anchor text link – this will maximize your ability to get active links back from publishers who reprint your content.
• More articles submitted to less sites. 50 articles distributed to 3 sites or ezine publishers will produce far greater results than 3 articles sent to 50 sites.
• Be consistent. Take your article marketing strategy as seriously as you do your other marketing methods if not more so. Like most SEO tactics, your results will not manifest overnight. Continually marketing your articles on a monthly basis will increase the return on your time investment much more than submitting ten articles at one time and then not doing anything again for another six months.
• Become familiar with the publishers you are submitting your articles. Do they have the audience your want to attract? What content do they publish? What are their editorial guidelines? When during the week or month do they publish articles?
