Essay Online

Ok, I have to review a lot of articles that are submitted to my article directories and those that writers send me as samples of their work. Those applying for a job as a writer want to impress me with their ability to optimize the sample article I give them for the key phrase I assign.

In doing so they send me a sample where every sentence begins with the key phrase. Or one sentence ends with the key phrase and the next sentence begins with the same key phrase.

There are a lot of webmasters buying this type of content on the web. They think that the number of times the key phrase is in the article is way more important than the actual content and the article’s readability.

Because these webmasters BELIEVE they know about SEO and article marketing, they request this keyword density as if it is the most important thing.

Then writers that are new to the web and who want to please their customers do as they have been asked to do. After all the customer is paying for it. So give them what they want right?

Wrong. I may be a total pain in the butt, but my clients know that when they request something and I don’t agree with it because I know it won’t help them, I speak up and let them know how they could benefit more by doing it a different way.

Being a yes-man is not what these clients need. They need someone who spends time to learn what does or does not work and who will advise them on the best approach to SEO or article marketing.

Write the article for the reader first and SEO second. you will find that you will naturally include that key phrase where it is appropriate to do so. Read it over after you finish and see if there is a spot or two where you could have added the key phrase without the article being spammy to the reader.

It can be done. Our writers do it all the time for our clients. You can too.

The main function of many WebPages is to deliver information of value. People use search engines to find web pages that deliver information of value to them. This is where articles come in. Articles are used to give information of value to the online surfer. This demand for such articles converts them to an important marketing tool.

A Simple Process

Article marketing is a simple process. First you have to write an article that is of great value to the readers. Then you add a bio at the end of it and a couple of links within the body. Viola! You are ready to go. This dramatically affects the amount of traffic going to your website and even increases your search engine ranking. More people pour into your site from search engines as well.

The article should be anywhere between 250 &ndash 1000 words, though larger articles are permissible as well. Do not be blatantly promotional. Up to three links are generally allowed. Make the information useful. A bio of 75 &ndash 150 words is generally one that works well.

Proofread all your articles carefully. The smallest errors need to be avoided as they damage your reputation online. To create traffic online with article marketing, submit your articles to sites like ghostwriters.com, articlewheel.com and isnare.com. These sites charge a nominal fee. The quantity of articles you write matters here. The more articles are written, the better.

Work Towards a Great Headline

Invest your time towards writing a great headline. A headline is what noticed first when you create traffic online with article is marketing. It is what draws a reader to read your article or overlook it. Naturally you must work on the headline as the most important part of the article. Use credible words. Be specific, believable and beneficial.

Invest Time in a Signature/Bio

The Bio is the second most important part of the article after the headline. The anchor text in the bio should include the phrase that you want to rank highly on in search results. If you want to rank highly on “New York Lawyers”, make sure that it is a part of the bio and features as the anchor text that links back to your website.

Register a Google Alert For Your Article

Within 3-4 days Google will start showing you where your article appears. You will be surprised and even amazed at the results. Google alerts also let you track down article thieves that copy your work.

The Time Consuming Part of Article Submission

The most time consuming part when you create traffic online with article marketing is the initial registration. Once this is done you can easily submit articles to the same directories using the same username and password.

Submitting an article to 50 article directories should generate over 200 backlinks within 3-6 months.

Bookmark the Web Pages with Your Articles

To create traffic online through article marketing, bookmark the web pages with your articles with popular bookmark sites, for example digg.com and del.icio.us, these sites are growing in popularity by the day. Adding social bookmark links to your articles makes it easy for readers to find your content. It’s also enjoyable, simple and efficient. You can use this Social Bookmarking Tool .expertarticles.com/bookmark/ to bookmark your articles with more than 50+ social bookmarking sites. You can also add the “Bookmark It” button on your web site so your visitors will be able to bookmark it with most Popular Bookmarking Services.

I like article marketing and find it an enjoyable and profitable way of promoting my websites. I never plan articles, the ideas just come out of the blue from something I have seen or heard. Once I start writing the words just flow, but before I write an article there are two things that I consider.

1. Why am I writing the article?

2. Would it be of any use to webmasters for their sites or for newsletter publishers?

It does not take rocket science to figure that I and every other article marketer am using articles to benefit our own promotions, but they will be of little benefit to us if we do not produce quality articles that others will actually want to read and use.

Owning my own article directory I have read thousands of articles, many of which I would never use on my other sites or in newsletters and many I have declined for various reasons. Let us consider the rights and wrongs of articles starting at the beginning.

Attention Grabbing

Your title is your headline, there to grab attention and many people never look past the first 2 or 3 words. I could have called this Sheep Do Not Mix With Article Marketing Success but I want people who are interested in article marketing and not sheep to read it. Another type of title that will not grab me is The Top 20 Tips For Passionate Sex. It would be more likely to create interest if it was Passionate Sex My Top 20 Tips.

Writing Standards

Spelling and grammar are important. You are promoting yourself and your business and you need to present yourself as professional to be taken seriously. I write my articles in Word first and use the spell checker. I sometimes fall out with it because I am English and prefer not to use Americanised spelling.

If you have problems with writing but good information the answer is to use a ghostwriter or copywriter. There are plenty of good writers advertising on the Internet and personally I think that one good quality article will do more for your business than 10 poor articles.

Know Your Subject

Good advice for writers is that they should always know and understand what they are writing about or their articles have no credibility. I was gobsmacked last week to read an article about my own country that I knew to be very ill informed and by somebody I suspected had never set foot on our shores. The guy could not even spell Britain right and as his misspelling was in the title he sunk without trace before he even started!

Original Copy

The best and most memorable articles are purely original, thought provoking and offer different viewpoints to a subject. Some writers submit zillions of slightly changed articles about the same subject over and over; yawn. They are boring and eminently unreadable after the first one or two. There are exceptions where writers are providing updates and news about their chosen subjects. I would use those articles for my sites.

Lists of quotes from the bible for instance are not original articles. At least 90% should be your own work and quotes only used as a point of interest not as the whole article. Submitting articles on behalf of others is suspect, how do readers know whether you have filched them or not? Plagiarism, not worth going there, eagle eyes and google will find you out!

Advertorial Blues

An advertorial is an advert written in article form. They carry no unbiased information or advice that would be of any help to anybody interested in that subject. There are plenty of places to advertise for free on the Internet, so trying to fob adverts off as articles is unfair on directory site owners or visitors who want to read articles not adverts.

Link Usage

The reason most of us use Article Marketing for promoting our businesses is to place links to our websites in the author resource boxes usually placed at the foot of articles.

I like to maximise the potential and use the up to 3 links usually allowed. Many article directories allow active links, but some do not. A problem can arise when articles are automatically submitted if the script the site uses strips the html. I prefer to submit manually mostly and then I can activate the links myself or just put my website address if the site doesn’t accept html links.

Links within the articles are unacceptable on most directory sites, but as you get 3 chances in the resource boxes there is no point trying to cheat.

All Keyed Up

You will be asked to provide some keywords for your articles so choose wisely. Study your content and consider what somebody who might be interested in your article is most likely to enter into the search engines. A poor example is if you are writing about search engine optimisation and your title is SEO, Internet Business Bread And Jam, you would not use jam and bread as keywords unless you wanted to attract hungry people. Apart from that your articles credibility takes a nosedive if you do not know what a good keyword is.

Readability

Finally, your article should not be repetitive and should be interesting. Short paragraphs make it easier to read, text talk makes it more difficult. All capitals in the article body or title are a no no, they only stand out in the sense that the reader feels shouted at and nobody wants to feel like that.

I hope that you have found this interesting and useful and that we get lots more quality articles to read.

I submit articles to a lot of article directories and through .isnare.com. A lot of the articles are my own, but most of them are ghostwritten for clients. Isnare and other article directories do an ok job of tracking how many views your article has had at their directory, but that’s where it stops.

Plus, once you submit to any article directory, how do you know where else that article was reprinted? Clients ask me about this all the time.

Sure, you can search for your article title in Google and get a lot of results and sift through them to find which search engine listings are your article and which are just web pages that are related to the same phrase used in your article title, but is that the best method for tracking how well your articles are doing out there?

Submit and forget is the normal approach taken to article marketing. You just keep producing new articles and have “faith” in the system and that your articles are getting widespread distribution. For years, this was the approach I took to article marketing as well.

Since then, we have developed ways to do more with the content that we wrote or paid to have written for us.

For starters, those old articles you own and have already submitted are still good, useful content. You can continue to distribute them to other article directories they have not already been submitted to. You can offer them to be printed on other websites for a link back in your bio. You can break them into parts and reuse them on your blog as part 1, part 2, part 3, and so on.

The content you wrote or paid for still has value beyond the one time they were submitted to directories. How many articles do you have on your hard drive right now that you could be using?

Another method you can use is to place a tracking or serial number into each article. Use something unique as an identifier. Something with numbers and letters. Before you develop your serial numbers, search them in google and if you get a no results page, your serial number is perfect.

You can place the serial number into the actual body of the article or into your author bio. Anyone reading the article will ignore it, but you will be able to search Google for that serial number later and you will start getting results that are your own.

With this method you can track which article topics get the widest distribution, track which websites and blogs reprinted the article after finding it in article directories, and which distribution method got you the most bang for your buck.

Stop guessing and start tracking and you will improve your article marketing results tremendously!

As a writer you may be ready to cash in on the need for web content. There is a lot of money that can be made through content writing if you know what web publishers are looking for in high quality content. If you are a very versatile writer you will find that you can actually make content writing your full time job! The new trend of article marketing has writers very excited because webmasters all over the Internet are hungry for talented writers who can’t pump out the high quality content fast enough.

What to Write

Exactly what you should write will depend on whom you are writing for. If you are a writer that is writing pieces for an article directory you will want to keep things as generic as possible. The more nonspecific you can keep your articles the more likely a webmaster will choose your article to be displayed on his or her website. It’s important not to mention websites or specific products, as this can limit the usefulness of the article to webmasters because they generally do not want to promote anything other than themselves and especially not their competitors. Most web publishers are looking for content, not marketing pages.

If you are writing for a specific web publisher you will want to keep in mind what their business is all about. Think about key phrases or words that are often associated with their product, business, or service and include them in the article. Be sure that the key phrases you come up with or are provided don’t seem unnatural and they don’t disrupt the flow of the article. Key words and phrases are only as helpful as their placement. Remember, we are talking about quality content, which reads well and helps search engines figure out what the website is all about at the same time.

Research Required

Make sure that if you are writing on a topic and you don’t have first hand knowledge that you research! Content provided by websites is only as useful as the author that is writing. If you only provide fluff and no real meat in articles visitors will be less likely to come back to the website again, so you are actually working against the plan to increase traffic with the article. Always look at your article the way that a visitor would and try to provide all of the information you would want if you were that person.

How to Write

Your style of writing is really a matter of opinion. Many web publishers like for their content to be written in a very conversational style. This writing style allows for readers to feel as though the author is talking to them, and it’s just a very comfortable way to get information on the Internet. If you take an official tone many visitors may be turned off even though you are providing all of the information that is needed.

Market Yourself

Don’t forget your resource box! The resource box is the section either at the beginning or end of an article that tells the reader who you are, any websites that you are affiliated with, and may even provide links to the websites. This is a great way to market yourself. While a web publisher may first find your work on an article directory he or she may contact you personally for your services, in which case you usually stand to make a lot more money!

It’s no surprise that your headline is crucial to the success of your article. It’s the first thing your reader will see, and it has to do many things, including getting your reader’s attention, drawing them into your article and encouraging them to read more, and summarizing what the article is about - and you’ve only got about 15 words in which to do it. This article will explain how you can avoid leaving it to chance.

There are some basic considerations when writing your headline. Who is your reader? What are the important features of your product or service? Lastly, why would your reader want to buy your product or service &ndash what benefit will reading your article offer your reader?

For maximum readership, write your headline as if you were creating short, curiosity-arousing teaser copy on an outer envelope. Compel your reader to read further without being so blatant in your headline that it turns them off.

Here are ten ways to produce effective headlines all the while taking into consideration your answers to the earlier three questions: who is your reader, what are the important features of your product or service and what benefit does reading your article provide?

1. State a benefit, something like “Learn how to potty train your dog in 3 easy steps.”

2. Use words that help the reader visualize, such as “Keep your socks dry. Eliminate doggy carpet puddles, and wet socks, in 3 easy steps.”

3. Highlight your offer in your headline. “Learn how to create an award winning aquarium.”

4. Use numbers and statistics.

5. Make it newsworthy using words like: new, introducing, or announcing.

6. Make a promise or guarantee.

7. Make a big promise. This is used a lot &ndash Lose 20 pounds in 20 days.

8. Use a reasons why headline. “10 reasons why you’re losing money in the stock market.”

9. Anticipate and address your prospect’s fears.

10. Pique their curiosity.

There are of course many ways to produce a good, attention getting headline. Psychologists and skilled copywriters will both tell you that people don’t buy for logical reasons. They buy for emotional ones. Fear, greed, curiosity, benevolence, jealousy, lust, insecurity, pride, and frustration are among some of the effective emotions copy writers tap into.

The same holds true for article headlines. If you can provide a headline that appeals to their emotions, not only will you have more people eagerly reading your article, you’ll have more websites, blogs, and newsletters printing and linking to your article.

When writing your headline, it is often useful to write several headlines and choose the most effective or to write your copy first and let your copy dictate the headline. Regardless of how you proceed, experience and reading other eye catching headlines will help you explore the process.

Visit an article directory and take a look at the articles that catch your eye. Browse through the articles with the most readership and examine the differ net headline styles. This exercise will help you create article headlines that generate the same readership numbers. The end result, more traffic and visibility for your website.

Think journaling is old fashioned? Think again. Are you having a hard time getting started on your article writing? Combine writers block with journaling to spark your article writing frenzy.

Journaling is a powerful tool for brainstorming ideas, keeping your writing skills sharp, and for storing ideas and notes for future article pieces. To make the most of your journal, I suggest the following 4 tips to all article writers, beginning through advanced.

1) Get the right tools. I love shopping for notebooks because there’s such a wide variety available today. Looking for a journal with flowers and other fancy designs? Try Barnes and Noble or Borders bookstores. Wal-Mart and office supply stores sell functional albeit less expensive journals. Make sure it feels good in your hands. Too small and you’ll breeze through the pages too quickly. Too bulky and you won’t take it with you for fear someone might snicker.

And, don’t forget your writing utensil. Your pen options are either rollerball or gel. I use a 0.38 Uniball pen. I’ve only been able to find them in OfficeMax. I adore the fine point but they do tend to run out of ink faster than other pens. Use what you like best. If you hate to smear ink, or are clumsy like me and get gel all over you hands, shirt, and pants then stick with a ball point. Or, better yet, get a pencil. I don’t use pencils because I tend to erase too much.

2) Make it a habit. This goes without saying. If you want to be successful at journaling, you have to journal. Pick a time and spot where you can write everyday. Then just do it. Stay away from your computer so you won’t be distracted by everyday business.

3) Fire your inner critic. I used to think that all writing should be critiqued, reviewed, and revised. Once I let go of my inner critic, I began to enjoy journaling. Many times I pen random thoughts that would have been lost otherwise. Journaling should be inspirational, not drudgery. For those of you who are perfectionists, this step will be harder to do. Don’t write on your computer. When you see the autocorrect marks lighting up your screen, you’ll be tempted to make corrections. It’s less tempting to use paper and pen.

4) Use your journal for article fodder. Can’t think of anything to write? Flip through older journal entries. I guarantee it won’t take but a few minutes to find and idea or inspiration to get started. I purposely review journal entries to find new article ideas.

Journaling is an exercise to help you let go of yourself and break through any writer’s block. The important point to remember is that there is no wrong way to journal. Try to journal at least once a day. Don’t think you have anything to journal about? Write down your daily to do list. Sometimes just getting something on paper will get your mind working. You never know until you try. Have fun, enjoy the time, and get writing!

Ok, so you’re passionate about your website, you love talking about your subject and you’re excited to share your knowledge, information, and maybe your products and services with the world. But how do you share your enthusiasm with your readers without coming across like you’re making a pitch? How do you sell your products or services without ’selling’ them.

No one likes a sales pitch and as soon as a reader senses they’re being ’sold’ they’re likely to click away from your article. Yet quite often, in order to motivate your reader to be inspired enough to visit your website, you need to give them a bit of a pitch. Here’s how to motivate a reader to action, without selling them.

The best way to motivate your reader is to provide them with a benefit. One of the reasons tips and how to articles are so popular is that they offer a reader an immediate benefit. Ten tips to make more money today. 3 steps to looking ten years younger. The secret to retiring early. These are all examples of article headlines that promise a benefit. When your article offers content that follows through on your promise, readers are going to be hungry for more information. You’ve kept your end of the bargain in your article, they’ll trust you to provide more benefit on your website.

Tap into your readers’ desires. We all desire to be more attractive, wealthier, smarter, happier, more respected etc…when you tap into these desires in your article you immediately have your reader’s attention. How does the content of your article help solve their problems and attain their desires?

For example, if your product is an accounting software program and your article is about how to balance your checkbook, you could tap into your reader’s desire to be wealthier by keeping track of their money or tap into their desire to be respected or smarter by having their finances at the tips of their fingertips. The headline might look something like this, “Ten Tips to Give You Control Over Your Finances, and more money in your wallet.

When you tap into your reader’s desires and offer them a way to attain them, you’re a virtual hero and your readers will be excited to visit your website and learn more from you.

Don’t give your reader the whole story. Write an article about 3 ways to do something and then in the last sentence of your article tell them this isn’t the whole story. Tell your reader if they want to learn more about your article’s topic, they can visit your website and learn the whole story. Note that if you are publishing your article in an article submission site, they may not allow you to plug your website in the body of your article. If this is the case, you can plug it in your author’s resource box. However, if you’re publishing the article in an e-zine or on another website, this is a great way to draw traffic to your site.

Selling in your article copy is as easy as offering valuable content and solving people’s problems. This approach also makes it easy to write copy. Tips and how to articles are amongst the easiest types of article content to write. Get writing!

Article marketing is essential to the page rank of your website. Although that is true in principle, it is not true in fact. Page rank applies only to individual pages of your website, not to the website in general. Page rank means what it says &ndash a ranking of your pages, not your whole website.

Larry Page invented the concept of Page Rank while at Stanford University and was later helped by Sergey Brin. The two of them eventually founded Google (named as a play on the word googol &ndash a very large number) and trade marked the term PageRank. It applies to the popularity of a web page based upon the number of other web pages that link to it. This applies on the premise that these links are due to the perceived popularity, or relevance, of that site to the search term or keyword being used.

Now, however, PageRank is a synthetic measurement based upon how many links a webmaster can contrive to achieve to any one page on a particular website, and has little to do with the relevance or popularity of that page. It is possible to contrive a high PageRank through a linking strategy that has little to do with the content of the page, or relevance to the keyword in question.

The emphasis that Google and other search engines gives to web pages with a high number of such contrived links, therefore, is open to question. There are indications that PageRank is becoming less important in the overall index listing of a web page. However, article marketing will never in the foreseeable future be overtaken by any other strategy in the search engine listing race.

This is because search engines are highly unlikely to relegate linking strategies to the graveyard simply because of reciprocal liking strategies. It is more likely, and might even be happening now, that links from one web page that are reciprocated with links from another are both negated. The only links that are included in the search engine algorithmic calculations will then be the genuine ones. Those that are provided by directories that do not demand a link back. Those that are provided by webmasters that copy your article to their web page as content.

In other words, it is likely that future Google Page Rank is determined by genuine non-reciprocal links that article marketing is the ideal strategy to generate. All links that the spiders see as being reciprocated will be excluded from the calculation.

One of the biggest misconceptions about getting a book published is that the publishing company will take care of the marketing. Generally speaking, that’s not true. There are basically three different ways to get your book published. You can self-publish your own book. You can use a small independent publisher or if you’re an established author, you can use one of the big publishing houses like Penguin or Random House. Regardless which of these options you use, you will still be left with the responsibility for the marketing.

There are a lot of different things you can do to promote your book and Tactical Execution has made a business out of helping you see real results out there. But this article will give you a few pointers to help you get started. For more detailed information, visit the website. There’s a ton of free information available there and I hope you take advantage of those resources.

One of the best ways to promote your book is to offer workshops and seminars around the country. It’s not that difficult to do that. You can quickly contact the major Adult Education providers and submit a proposal for a workshop dealing with the same topic as your book. Include the release of your new book in your proposal. The people reviewing workshop proposals love having things like that to include in their marketing.

These Adult Education programs are a hidden treasure to say the least. These companies send out small catalogs of courses to huge mailing lists, trying to attract students to their courses. Submitting just one proposal can get you on the schedule and they do all the marketing for you, leaving you with great exposure for very little cost.

Your book should definitely be featured on your website along with a way for people to buy a copy. Assuming that’s in place, article marketing presents another great opportunity to generate website traffic resulting in book sales. In fact, you’ve already done all the writing too. Just take your book and break it up into a hundred small segments; a hundred small articles. Then publish them individually on the web, each with a backlink to your website.

Article marketing is the primary website traffic strategy I use to promote the Tactical Execution website and you can see all my published articles right on the site. In addition, the site provides specific implementation guidance to get your article marketing campaign up and running. Any seasoned internet marketer can tell you that article marketing is one of the most powerful tools available to attract not just human visitors but search engines as well.

The last tip I’ll share in this article is a paid public relations service called PR Leads. This is a tremendous opportunity to get a ton of great exposure and credibility for yourself and your business. For just $100 per month, you can be on a database journalists use to get quotes for stories they’re working on. You simply identify the areas where you’re an expert and wait for the emails to come in. If you’re quick to respond, you can find your own quotes in major news media within a single week. Give it a try.

Marketing your own book is no easy task. But if you know something about marketing and have some good implementation guidance, you can stage a successful campaign from your own home. Visit the Tactical Execution website to get specific step-by-step instructions so you can do it too.