Article marketing is by far the most misunderstood form of online marketing there is. It is many different things to many different people. There are those who have hurriedly tried out promotional articles without fully understanding what they were doing.

Inevitably, it has not met their expectations and if you ask them today they will tell you that it just doesn’t work. They know this because they have tried it out and have the results to prove it. These types of people are similar to a person who does not understand jet aircrafts, yet tries to fly one. The most probable result is that they will tell you the thing doesn’t fly.

Then there are those who have had only a little success from their article marketing. Some of them have jumped to the conclusion that unless a person has thousands of promotional articles completed; this marketing technique will just not work. There are also those people who have been listening to those who have tried to promote their online businesses and failed. These folks do not feel the need to try out anything for themselves. They already think that it does not work.

Sadly, all these people miss out on the great opportunity to easily make their online businesses a great success by using promotional articles correctly. It is useful at this juncture to carefully examine the reasons why promotional articles fail to work for some people.

Failure To Understand Your Objectives

Articles can serve a number of different objectives for an online marketer. Sometimes articles can be used with the objective of gaining links from highly page ranked Google sites only. The more sites that have a high PR with links pointing to your site, the higher of a ranking your site will get. In fact, the quickest way for a brand new site to get indexed by Google search engines, is to get a link from a high ranking site that covers an area that is closely related to their topic.

The most obvious objective for a promotional article would be to get immediate direct traffic from it, by posting it to various high traffic article directories. Another possible marketing objective of an article would be to create a favorable image, by enlisting the owner of the site as an expert in the subject matter being covered by the site.

Another fairly common objective would be to create as many one way links as possible pointing to the site being promoted. For this purpose the kind of article created is called a link bait article.

Failure To Understand The Correct Article Marketing Techniques

To achieve the various objectives, different techniques and skills have to be applied. The problem with most people, who try out article marketing and fail, is that they are not aware of the tough requirements to make promotional articles work. They are also completely ignorant of the various skills levels needed.

For instance, it is virtually impossible for any article marketing campaign to be fully successful without SEO (search engine optimization) skills. SEO skills will enable the article writer to use the most effective keywords for the anchored text when linking. This will make a huge difference in the final results a webmaster receives when they are looking to build up the number of links pointing to their site.

In the event that one creates a link baiting article, it is not enough to post at high traffic article directories only. Such an article needs to be promoted as much as possible, which means using social network sites. Some of these sites get millions of visitors at a time and this is the kind of publicity needed.

Another key skill that is important in making article marketing successful is headline writing skills. Without a good headline it doesn’t matter how good the article is. The most probable result is that most people will never get to see it, let alone read it. For example, link baiting starts with an excellent headline that draws attention to the article. Your article titles are what will determine the volume of direct traffic that you will end up getting from articles posted at leading article directories.

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One of the truly amazing aspects of email is the fact that you can segment an audience based on data, and believe me you can collect huge amounts of data from any email list you have with very little effort. Segmentation and data analysis makes it possible for you to speak to your list as individuals.

 Your audience will love this and will almost always reward you with loyalty and a very high response rate. You really can’t go wrong when you address the individuals and their particular unique problems after you have segmented the market accordingly.

Incidentally, when you do this, you personalize the relationship further, which will without doubt translate into huge profits for you later on. Actually the truth is that you cannot go wrong when you do things that contribute to a long term relationship rather than to a short-term-make-maximum-profits-at-all-costs approach.

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Affiliate Marketing is a derivative of Internet marketing where the advertisement publisher gets paid for every customer or sales provided by him. Affiliate marketing is the basic for all other Internet marketing strategies. 

In this type of marketing, affiliate management companies, in-house affiliate managers and third party vendors are effectively utilized to use E-mail Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, RRS Capturing and Display Advertising for the success of the product. The web traffic can be traced with the help of a third party or own affiliate programs.

A lot of work is involved in this process. At first marketing by this method involved lots of spamming, false advertising, trademark infringement, etc. But, after the invention of complex algorithms and advance security this has been regularized to make it safer for doing business and shopping online. This even led to the better scrutinizing of the terms and conditions by the merchants. Affiliate marketing became more profiting with the opening of more opportunities but at the same time it also increased the competition in marketing.

Due to this pressure, in house affiliate programs for merchants became a thing of the past and were replaced by out-sourced programs. The companies that offered this service have expert affiliate and network program managers who have various affiliate program management techniques.  These affiliate networks have publishers associated with them who help them with the advertising part.

Since its invention, the affiliate network has been adopted by various businesses like travel, education, telecom, mobile, gaming, personal finance, retail, and subscription sites, the most common being adult and gambling sectors. In UK alone, affiliate marketing produced £ 2.16 billion.

The compensation methods used are Cost per sale (CPS), Cost per action (CPA), Cost per mile (CPM) and Cost per click (CPC). The first two are the more famous methods today. This is because in CPM and CPC, the visitor which turns up on a particular website might not be the targeted audience and a click would be enough to generate commission.

CPS and CPA have a compulsion that the visitor not only clicks on the link but also buys something or signs up for some service after it which proves that he is among the targeted audience. Only in the above case the affiliate gets paid. So the affiliate should try to send as much targeted traffic as possible to the advertiser in order to increase his/her returns and for this reason affiliate marketing is also known as performance marketing because it totally depends on the performance of the affiliate.

The affiliate team can be differentiated from a sales team from the nature of their jobs. The job of the affiliate team is to drag targeted traffic to a point and from that point it’s the job of the sales team to influence the visitor to buy the product or the service.

This is a very effective kind of method because the money is being paid only when results have been achieved. The publisher incurs all the cost except that of initial setup and development of the program, which is incurred by the merchant. Many businesses give credit to this method of marketing for their success.

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There is plenty that has been written about search engine optimization. Most of it leaves out this very important secret, without which no SEO campaign has any hope of being successful.

Folks are concentrating so much on using keywords and keyword phrases that they have forgotten something much more important and without which keywords can be virtually useless.

Lets illustrate this with a common scenario that we all go through fairly frequently. You enter a keyword phrase at your favorite search engine and the first page of the results comes through. What do you do next? Do you go to the first site listed or do you scroll down the listed sites. Most people do the latter, but what would they be looking for? The answer is simple, the headline or article title that looks the most relevant to what they are looking for.

Now let us assume that the site that comes up right at the top, at number one has a boring uninspiring headline and the site that is number 10 at the very bottom of the first page has a hot enticing title. What will happen? But of course No 10 will end up getting all the traffic while number one will be starved of hits. That is how important headlines are. So without a good headline all the good SEO work that you put in will not yield the expected results, even if you do end up right at the top of results for popular keyword searches.

Why SEO Will Hardly Work Without Powerful Headlines

In fact, SEO will hardly work without excellent headlines and titles to your articles. One of the key aspects about SEO is the accumulation of back links pointing to your site. Search engines favor this happening in a natural way rather than you having to purchase links. For this to happen, your article on the web page will need to get very high traffic so that when a fraction of these visitors link to your article, you will quickly end up with thousands or even tens of thousands of links pointing to your site.

To attract this traffic, a key component of your content will be the headline. Many stories have been told about headlines making the difference between a few hundred copies of a supermarket tabloid sold and a couple of millions. Online headlines are even more critical because many times it is all that somebody sees before they make a decision on whether or not to click on a link that will lead to you and your article.

Why Good Headlines Without Keywords Still Work

Many times webmasters have been greatly hindered in their work of creating suitable article titles by the need to use exact keyword phrases. The result has been awkward headlines that hardly inspire readership. Yet those who have realized that it is possible to leave out a keyword phrase from your headline or to modify it slightly and still succeed in SEO have greatly benefited.

The truth is that while it is true that your keyword phrase as early as possible in a headline will help a great deal in terms of SEO, it is in fact not the only consideration that leading search engines take into account when deciding how your site will be ranked in search engine results. More important are the number of relevant back links pointing to your site. This means that an excellent headline that will attract readership and ultimately back links to a site is much more important than a poor headline with the exact keyword phrase slotted in at the beginning of the headline.

What Is A Good Headline?

A good article title or headline has to be relevant to start with. Never forget that headlines are supposed to flag down your target readership and not everybody. This is perhaps the most common mistake people make when creating headlines. And this is where the webmaster thinks to create a headline that has as general an appeal as possible. Actually a headline that seeks to attract everybody quite often ends up attracting nobody.

Excellent Headlines Are the Fuel That Will Drive Your SEO Campaign

Always remember that without good targeted headlines your SEO effort will most probably come to nothing. It is therefore a good investment to spend your time studying the art of creating good headlines for your SEO content.

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A key element that makes all the difference for online promotional articles and press releases is how they are distributed. The web has plenty of very well written articles that have hardly been seen and press releases that have remained buried and well hidden. It is all because those articles or product news releases have not enjoyed much “distribution” in cyber space.

What Effective Online Article Distribution Means

When the word “distribution” is mentioned, to many people it simply means going round and delivering or dishing out something all over the place. However, this word has a slightly different meaning when we talk about distributing press releases or articles online. This is because random distribution of anything online is called SPAM. Any serious marketer worth their salt just doesn’t do it.

So to distribute anything via email you will need to strictly adhere to the rules of permission marketing, which means that everybody who ends up receiving your email needs to have opted to receive it. Posting articles or any writing has to be carefully done keeping in mind the relevance of what you want to say to the site where you are making your posting.

When it comes to a promotional article or press release it is important that it gets as much exposure as possible. This is done so that as many sites as possible end up re-posting it or linking to it after a brief comment or discussion on their sites about it. In other words, accumulating links is the most efficient way of distributing anything online. Actually “links” and “distribution” are very closely associated terms when it comes to distributing press releases or articles online.

Social Networking Sites Will Revolutionize Your Distribution

The World Wide Web has become such a huge place where finding things can sometimes prove to be very difficult. This is one of the reasons why social networking sites have grown so rapidly in recent times. Sites like Digg and My Space, to give just two prominent examples receive phenomenal traffic. These are ideal places where one can draw plenty of attention to an article or press release that needs wide distribution to get as large an audience as possible. All one needs to do is to find a way of bringing up the discussion about the article that you would like to draw other people’s attention to.

One key rule that you must always keep in mind is to endeavor to first address the selfish motives and aspirations of others, rather than your own. That’s how you get the attention of people anywhere and it is a very important rule to also remember on the web. Too many folks make the mistake of posting their articles in social networking sites, while seeking attention without understanding or focusing on the needs of their audience first.

It All Starts With the Headline

The headline is terribly important in any online undertaking. Few people realize it, but a headline is much more critical on the web than it ever was offline. It really doesn’t matter how well written your article or press release is. Without an exceptional headline, it will never get the distribution that you are looking for. What this means is that you will need to spend a lot of time with your article title, actually much more time than what you will even spend writing the original article or press release. And you can always be sure that it will be well worth your time more so when you see the kind of attention that you will be able to attract from the high volumes of traffic going through the social networking site where you choose to publicize your article.

You can use popular social networking sites to attract a lot of attention to your articles and press releases so as to gain respectable distribution. However it is important that you take the time to carefully study these sites and to learn exactly what works and what does not work. Always remember that we humans are selfish and we respond much quicker to our own selfish needs and desires. The truth is that once you have mastered the use of these wildly popular sites in the distribution of your stuff, it will have a phenomenal impact on your content and the distribution of it online.

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Some exciting new features were discussed at the eMetrics Summit in Washington D.C. by Brett Crosby today. This is something that is going to be unveiled in the up and coming weeks. You will be able to use Google Analytics to track site search activity. You can find out what people search for on your site and also find out where those searches lead the user. A limited beta test will be performed on the Google Analytics Event Tracking capability. A limited beta test will also be performed on their new Outbound Link Tracking feature. This feature will report on links visitors clicked on at your site that directed them to another site.

Urchin Software was also announced as a software product that runs on your own servers from Google limited beta. It sounds like these are tools that can be used to better serve your website to optimize its greatest potential.

To read more…

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I cannot stress enough how important relevance of keyword to content is. The importance of this value reflects on the search engines need to classify websites according to their content. If your keywords don’t match your content, your website will be ignored by the search engine.

Some will say that 2% to 8% is the ideal density of keywords for SEO purposes. Others claim that optimum density for Google is specifically 2% and that anything higher will result in your site being penalized. For Yahoo and MSN, they specify a 5% keyword density. But is it really?

In my experience as an SEO writer, most internet marketers require keyword seeding density at 10% or higher. Now, if Google, which happens to be the most popular search engine in the internet, does indeed penalize websites with keywords seeded at more than 2%, don’t you think that it’s senseless for my clients to ask for more than 2% seeding?

Since Google, Yahoo and MSN began incorporating relevance of keywords to the actual content into their web crawlers, keyword density, which was the main focus of web masters at that time, became a secondary consideration. Unfortunately, some web masters and internet marketers still stress keyword importance over content relevance. For example, the words “book”, “car” and “shopping” are most commonly used in internet searches. If you had those words in your site, you have a guaranteed hit. This system would work before. You could use sex as a keyword, but your website actually contains information about rutabaga farming.

This system of keyword importance and density lead to misleading search results. Because of the decrease in serviceability of search engines due to the abusers of the system, search engine operators decided to add the value of keyword relevance to actual content to better their service to internet surfers. So if you are talking about rutabaga farming and scatter the word sex all throughout your article just to attract more traffic, the search engine will get confused because, your keyword does not have any relevance to your content at all. When this happens, the search engine can ignore you, penalize you or blacklist your website from its search index.

If you take the time to read newsletters or articles about keywords today, you will mostly find similar emphasis on keyword relevance. When you write an article seeded with keywords that are relevant to your product or idea, you are doing several things at once. Your first accomplishment is in having a greater chance of higher search engine result rankings. Because the search engine understands what your website is all about, it would not hesitate to churn it out as a search result from a user query relevant to your keywords. Second, by having relevant keywords on your site, you get more chances of attracting the right kind of traffic. Having more relevant website hits gives you more chances of selling your product because your product is exactly the reason why the users are directed to your site.

Because of the relevance of your article, your ratio of relevant to irrelevant surfer traffic increases. Third, as a result of highly relevant keywords and content, the users will find your website very useful and will most likely decide to mark your site down for another visit just to find out if they can get something useful out of it again. Lastly, even though you will experience a significantly reduced traffic count, you don’t really lose anything since most searchers tend to get annoyed when they are re-directed to a website that doesn’t contain anything related to their search. You increase and enhance the usefulness and reputation of your site without having to resort to dirty, misleading tactics for traffic generation.

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It is possible to generate the best written articles using the ideal keyword phrases and still fail miserably in your article marketing campaign. The reason for that are weak, inappropriate headlines that many use in their articles.
The result is that an article that features right at the top of search engine results for a popular keyword phrase will still end up receiving only a tiny fraction of the traffic it was supposed to enjoy. On the other hand, an article that ends up on the second or even third page of the same search engine results can end up receiving a very huge percentage of the traffic, easily beating articles that are ranked well. This would happen simply because they have much better headlines.

The Main Objective of a Headline

One of the most common mistakes content providers make when creating headlines for their articles is they want to appeal to as wide of a general audience as possible. The only result of targeting an audience that is too general would be losing everybody. You see, the basic rule about headlines is that they are supposed to flag a specific audience. The idea is draw attention to the narrow niche that would be interested in the subject. The narrower the niche targeted by a headline, the more successful that headline will tend to be. The end result will be that most of the people who get to read the content will find it useful. The odds that they will end up making a purchase at the site will also be much higher.

Even products that seem to have a very wide and general audience are best marketed by dealing with a single specific niche of the market at a time.

Spend More Time Deciding On Your Article Titles

Many people are surprised over the fact that the pros will tend to spend a lot more time agonizing and deciding on their headlines that they do putting together the actual content. With a poor uninspiring headline, it will matter little how good your article is, the truth is that few people will actually get to read it.

The task of creating good headlines online is made much more difficult by the need to use carefully selected keyword phrases. This calls for a lot of creativity. That is why an online writer should create a number of different headlines and then examine them carefully before finally deciding on which particular headline to use.

Track Your Traffic and Test Your Headlines

Being able to track your traffic online is of extreme importance. It is a good idea to test your headlines as much as possible before you fully roll out your articles online. Your tests will clearly show you the most popular and successful headlines enabling you to make an informed decision on which particular headlines to use.

This is one effort that is well worth putting in because the difference in hits and revenue between a bad headline and a good one is in the region of several million dollars.

The Magic Focus for Most Great Headlines

It is human interest to always think selfishly. This is why by focusing on the reader’s point of view when listing the benefits of the article in your headlines will make a huge difference in the way people react to your piece and ultimately the number of click through that your promotional article will end up with.

Avoid Making Your Visitors Angry

Always remember that people are in a hurry. They will not take kindly to you wasting their time. Many webmasters get their visitors angry by generating benefit-laden headlines that always end up being a huge disappointment because the actual content comes nowhere near delivering the promises of the headline.

You don’t want to do this because the worst thing that can happen to a site is genitive word of mouth publicity generated by your prospects that have visited your site and have been bitterly disappointed. You can easily test the power of headlines by going back to your site and changing the headlines while keeping track of the visitors.

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The truth is that viral marketing techniques are invaluable in helping email marketers overcome the challenges of safe and acceptable email advertising and can help you get very quick results. It is therefore well worth the effort for somebody to go out of their way to carefully study the principals and techniques of online viral marketing.

The biggest obstacle faced by any online entrepreneur using safe email advertising methods these days, has to be the slow speed with which email lists typically grow. For example it can take a very long time for an opt-in list to grow to a mere 100 names. Yet one needs thousands of names on their lists pronto to be able to successfully market their products or services using email.

 Many Rapid-Building Email List Techniques Don’t Work

But the first thing I must caution you against is getting carried away by so-called miracle-working programs that promise heaven on earth and email list building at the speed of light. There are actually thousands of claims we all come across fairly frequently online promising swift, overnight growth of our opt-in email lists. Most of the time they just don’t work as well as they claim. This has frustrated many would-be online email marketers who will naturally get very discouraged when something that they had pegged all their hopes on and maybe even paid a few dollars to get, fails to work.

 The reason why many of these so-called miracle email list building programs fail to have any impact is because they are hardly able to attract any significant traffic. The truth of the matter is that without some very high traffic, it is highly unlikely that your list will ever grow.

 This is the reason why using viral marketing techniques to build an email opt-in list makes so much sense and usually ends up being so effective.

 Start by Building High Traffic

The first thing you need to do is to create a viral marketing campaign designed to generate very high traffic to your web site or the web page where you intend to promote your email list.

 There are various ways of doing this. You could post a sensational article in high traffic social sites like Digg.com which receives millions of hits every week. The more popular votes your article receives from other visitors to the site, the higher the traffic that you will end up getting. If your article happens to get high enough traffic, people will talk about it and link to it. This is the viral effect that could easily get you hundreds of thousands of hits.

 Using Viral Techniques to Directly Build Your Email List

This is not the only way to launch a viral campaign. You could for instance offer a valuable report for free on the condition that the recipient leaves you with their email address and the email address of several friends who may be interested in the same report. So if for example the initial 50 people introduce 5 friends each, that will give you 250 free new prospects. If the 250 do the same it will yield a further 1,250. The result is that within a very short time, you will have a huge opt-in email list.

 It looks easy, but there are a few key factors that you have to take good care of. Firstly, every effort should be made to ensure that the special report being offered for free is something of great value and highly desirable to a very high number of your targeted audience. This will be a major factor and detail to take care of that will determine how fast your opt-in email list will grow.

 Offer Services and Products In Exchange For Referrals

One of the fastest conventional ways to build an opt-in email list for safe email marketing is by purchasing names for your mailing list. Why not then find a way to offer valuable services or products in exchange for referrals that you can put into your email list?

This is one of the most effective methods of building an email list rapidly. And remember that with a targeted email list, you will be able to recover your investment many times over within a very short time of regular email messages or ezines being sent out.

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It has been reported by the Wall Street Journal that Discovery Communications is to acquire the well known website ‘How Stuff Works’ for $250 million. Discovery Communications currently owns the cable channels ‘Animal Planet’ and ‘The Discovery Channel.’ This is just another example of established media companies that are looking to expand their global reach to many more markets via the World Wide Web.

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