What's Your Article Marketing Strategy?

Copyright © Laura Shapiro, Your Home Business Guide

What's Your Article Marketing Strategy?

Did you know the right Article Marketing Strategy can bring you leads, commissions and “relative fame” (which is mostly referred to “branding”) on the internet? And did you know that article marketing can be done for free?

There are some aspects of article marketing that still elude a lot of people (I know I was confused about it in the beginning) so I thought I would share some of the very simple-to-implement tips that I’ve learned - hopefully it will help you in your article marketing strategy.

Just to start at the very, very beginning,. . .article marketing basically means that you write articles to promote products/services and then you get commissions and/or generate leads off of the sales that are generated from these articles.

There is a “right way” to article marketing and it all starts with picking out the right keyword (one with enough demand and not too much competition).

But don’t worry. . .the right way is not complicated. In fact, the right way is the simple way. Don’t make this harder than it is – you do not need to over-analyze this to be able to come up first in the search engines. Here are the 3 easy steps to follow:

1. Decide what you want to market (if you haven’t done so already).

2. Find the people who are looking for what you’re selling.

To do this, use a free keyword tool and plug in the word or words that represent your product (kites,gymnastics equipment, herbal remedies, etc).

You can use https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

to get a general idea of the words people are typing in, how many people are typing in those words and how many people are providing information on those words (your competitors).

What you are looking for is a word with high demand (Global Monthly Search Volume Column) and not so high competition (Advertiser Competition Column).

3. Which brings us to point number 3 in your article marketing strategy. Evaluate the competition of the term you are going to be marketing. Pick a term that is not too competitive. The best way to get a feel of how much competition you will have is to type your keyword (make sure you type it with the parenthesis around it – so “herbal remedies” for example) into this free site:

http://www.seologs.com/keyword-difficulty.html

You want to be writing about something that has a difficulty ranking of 50% or less. The lower the number, the better, as long as it is still a term that is being searched for so always check out the demand for your term first.

You can also try typing in your term (again, with parenthesis around it) directly into google to see how many results for that term come up. You want the number to be less than 5,000.

4. Ok, now you have a optimal keyword or phrase! All you need to do is write the article! Again, keep it simple. . .Make sure that your keyword is in the title and that you include it several times within the article.

A general rule is to include the keyword or phrase 3-5% of the time. You do NOT want to overuse your keyword or you will be penalized by the search engines. They view it as sort of cheating. Write naturally while keeping your keyword phrase in mind. You want your article to be over 450 words long and but no longer than 900 words. The optimal range is between 550 and 800.

5. After you’ve done your article, you want to make sure you are submitting it to the right sites - not everyone knows what they are. Here are just a few that the search engines love - :

Ezine Articles, Goarticles.com, and Searchwarp. Believe it or not (I didn’t know this!), the search engines (google specifically) loves some classified ad sites and UsFreeAds has been favored for a couple of years now.

Other biggies are Wordpress.com, Squidoo.com and the somewhat newer HubPages . These sites are FREE...and anyone can get started here with NO cash!

If you post an ad, message or article on any of the above sites and if you do it the right way, you will be appearing on the first page of Google when someone types in the search terms you write about.

This is just the basic outline for a good, solid article marketing strategy. I'll be following this up with many more detailed article-writing tips that I've learned from other sources like this incredible Article Marketing Strategy System. Feel free to rush ahead and take a look at that if you're impatient to wait for my next post!!

Laura Shapiro is a Home-Based Business Owner and Consultant (who started after 40!) in addition to being a full time Mom. Is a Home Business your Dream? It doesn't have to be - let me help you make it a reality.

Home Business Help: Learning Time Management

Copyright © Laura Shapiro, Your Home Business Guide

Feeling overwhelmed? Too much to do and never enough time to do it? You are not alone – in today’s fast paced world, I challenge you to find someone who manages to do it all. And as home business owners, many of us are “in the office” every day (and night).

Learning time management is crucial to our business and our well-being. Realizing that we will never be able to do it all and then having a plan to tackle what we can do helps cut out time-wasting activities and eliminates the stress and sense of overwhelm. There are many courses and lots of information about time management on the internet.

I recently got a very detailed overview of “Eat That Frog,” by Brian Tracy since I’ve heard that it has really made a difference in so many people’s lives. I haven’t read it yet but I wanted to share just a few simple concepts that already make a difference in my life and that this book also promotes.

Brian starts off by emphasizing what we already know but sometimes don’t want to admit. . .that there never is, or will be, enough time to do the things we have to do. In this modern world things come at us fast and furiously. He lays it out simply… “get over the notion that you somehow can get it all done… you can’t.”
The book’s title is a reflection of this quote by Mark Twain. . .

“If you eat a frog first thing in the morning, the rest of your day will be wonderful.” -Mark Twain

Putting this into the perspective of learning time management, our frog is the hardest thing that we have to do –the one that we always tend to put off. So, as advised by Mark Twain, get it done first so that you don’t have to worry about it.
This advice will help you overcome procrastination and become much more productive. Always worrying about that thing that you keep putting off is a huge emotional drain. Getting it out of the way sets you free.

Which brings us to the second quote featured in the book, again from Mark Twain. . .
“If you have to eat a frog, don’t look at it for too long.” -Mark Twain

These concepts seem very simple but sometimes analogies like these help to bring the point home. I’ve always considered myself pretty good when it comes to learning time management, prioritizing, multi-tasking, etc. But I do catch myself sometimes putting off the hard things (my frogs) for later and do the easier, quicker (and often less effective or totally unecessary) things right away.

Brian has 21 points throughout the book to challenge you and help you with learning time management – I’ve basically just listed them here and added brief comments to any that don’t make sense on their own:

1. Set the table – figure out what you want to accomplish. This could be the most time consuming but makes the rest of the steps easier.

2. Plan every day in advance – make a to-do list.

3. Apply the 80/20 rule to everything. This principle says that 20% of your activities will account for 80% of your results, even when all your activities take the same amount of time to do. The activities that give you the most return on your investment are your frogs.

4. Consider the consequences.

5. Practice the ABCDE method continually – this is all about prioritizing.

6. Focus on key result areas.

7. Obey the Law of Forced Efficiency - "There is never enough time to do everything, but there is always enough time to do the most important thing."

8. Prepare thoroughly before you begin.

9. Do you homework.

10. Leverage your key special talents.

11. Identify your key restraints.

12. Take it one oil barrel at a time.

13. Put the pressure on yourself.

14. Maximize your personal powers.

15. Motivate yourself into action.

16. Practice creative procrastination.

17. Do the most difficult task first.

18. Slice and dice the task.

19. Create large chunks of time.

20. Develop a sense of urgency.

21. Single-handle every task.


If anyone else out there is learning time management and comes across this "Eat That Frog" book, let me know what you think of it!

Laura Shapiro is a Home-Based Business Owner and Consultant in addition to being a full time Mom. Is a Home Business your Dream? It doesn't have to be - let me help you make it a reality. . .

Home Business Help: Home Business Lead Generation

Copyright © Laura Shapiro, Your Home Business Guide

Home Business Lead Generation is what makes the Work-At-Homer's world go 'round. How much time are you spending on coming up with new leads?

The answer for most people is "More time than I would like to be spending!". After all, the whole point of going into your business for yourself is being able to actually work on developing your business. But many find themselves spending up to 100% of their time on lead generation, with disappointing results and no time to do much else.

If this sounds all too familiar, you would probably benefit from a brand new Web 3.0 Automated Home Business Lead Generation System which was developed by Paul Birdsall, one of the industry's top success stories.

I've had the privilege to try the new system during it's pre-launch phase and it is truly amazing. It will revolutionize online marketing when it launches on July 6, 2009.

In a nutshell, the software is designed (and proven) to automatically extract qualified leads and traffic from websites and systematically do all the selling. It’s true automated lead generation at its best. Every person that comes in and every person that comes in after them will have access to 10,000 unique, targeted subscribers every month.

This system will not be seen anywhere else - Paul has exclusive rights and won’t ever be selling it.

If you want to learn more about how you can benefit from automated home business lead generation, visit:

http://www.FreshLeadsForLife.com

Laura Shapiro is a Home-Based Business Owner and Consultant in addition to being a full time Mom. Is a Home Business your Dream? It doesn't have to be - let me help you make it a reality. . .