Internet Marketing Hints And Tips » blogs

Distributing Articles Through Blogs

Gary Knox — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 11:39:27 +0000

These days, it is hard to find anyone, of any age, who does not blog. Even people with a business have taken to blogging, from small ones to large corporations. The popularity and simplicity of blogging makes it popular with everyone.

Using blogs to help with your sales is easy and recommended. It is simple to create your own blog on which to post your articles. You can find a webhosting company that includes a blog in its webhosting package, or you can choose a popular blog site like Blogger at www.blogger.com .

The most important thing is to make your blog viral. Do this by creating an RSS feed and allowing readers to copy your blog to their own.

All you need to do is set up your blog and start posting your articles into categories of your own choosing. Using pinging features will allow blog directories to be kept updated whenever you add a new post to your blog. You can also sign up at pingomatic.com to have your blog pinged with many different services all at once. This will help bring traffic to your blog.

Another way to make blogs helpful in your article marketing is to seek out blogs that relate to your field of interest. Upon finding a subject that relates to your article, add a comment and a link to the article asking other readers of the blog to visit your blog and read the article.

Posting the actual article on someone else’s blog is rude and not accepted. A simple link to an article that directly relates to the topic in question is perfectly acceptable.

Giving Others Free Reprint Rights

Gary Knox — Fri, 27 May 2011 11:44:22 +0000

The purpose of writing and distributing articles is threefold: to increase website traffic, to establish your credentails as an expert, and ultimately to sell more products or services. Just writing and submitting articles won’t do this, however. You must make it possible for your articles to become viral.

An article that you write is distributed to the various article sites on the Internet only one time. From there, ezine publishers, blog writers, and website owners who have an interest in information in your area will find the article and publish it on their websites, blogs, and in their ezines. This starts the viral domino effect.

From those websites, blogs, and ezines, other people will pick it up and publish it in their ezines and on their websites. That one article just snowballs. The sky is the limit.

Ten years from now, you could be wandering the Internet and stumble across an article that you wrote and distributed just today. It shouldn’t come as a surprise if that website owner only recently published your article on their site. If you search for that same article, at that time ten years from now, you may be astounded as to many times that one article appears!

The article will all but disappear, however, unless you give it the ability to become viral. You do this by including a notice at the very bottom of the article giving others permission to reprint the article, free of charge, as long as the article remains unchanged, and your resource box is included in the reprint.

It’s that easy. One small sentence at the bottom of your articles can change the entire path of your article simply by allowing it to be reprinted. This will in turn change your business for the better. Without that notice, others won’t know if they can use your article, even if it is posted at an article site. If there is a doubt, most people will pass up reprinting the article to protect themselves from accusations of copyright infringement.

To make sure your article becomes viral, make that one sentence permission a normal part of all your article.

How To Become A Super Affiliate

Gary Knox — Fri, 20 May 2011 11:30:53 +0000

Affiliate marketing can be a great way to make money. Finding a niche market with products and services you trust and believe in is the first step to success. There are tremendous affiliate programs which offer you an abundance of tools and materials to promote and market their products. However, what you do with those tools and materials is entirely up to you. You can be just another affiliate or a super affiliate.

What Is A Super Affiliate?

Technically speaking a super affiliate is someone who generates a significant amount of profits for the products or services they represent. A super affiliate can make a healthy living from their affiliate business alone while a standard every day affiliate may need to supplement their affiliate income with, gasp…a 9-5 job!

Benefits To Being A Super Affiliate

The most significant benefit to being a super affiliate is the income. Many super affiliates make six figures simply promoting the products and services of others.

Additionally, if you’re one of the main contributors to a company’s affiliate program they’re going to pay attention to you and your needs. You may receive a higher percentage of sales you may receive first shot with new marketing materials and programs and you’ll get the support you need when you need it.

Here Are A Few Steps To Become A Super Affiliate:

Step One – Commit to publishing content every single day. Content has proven time and again to be the best sales tool available to affiliate marketers. Nothing, not even strategically placed ad copy works as well as providing quality content that pre-sells any product that you’re promoting on your website.

Possible content includes:

* Autoresponders.
* E-newsletters.
* Blogs posts
* Social networking via forums, social networking sites, and chat rooms
* Articles
* Press releases

Step Two – Track and test. Make sure you know where your prospects are coming from, what motivates them to click through and what information they read and respond to – then give them what they need. Tracking and testing is the only way to hone your affiliate program into a smooth running, money making machine.

Step Three – Use the provided marketing materials and be willing to take it a step further. Many affiliate programs do a great job of providing their affiliate with ready to marketing materials including:

1. Banner ads
2. Buttons
3. Email copy
4. Articles
5. Free promotional reports

Use the materials your affiliate manager has provided. It’s been tested and developed for results. That being said, be sure to create your own content too. Even as an affiliate you are your own company and your website needs to reflect your personality and brand. Building a community around your website and providing valuable content is a sure way to create a following that trusts you and your credibility – which will result in click throughs and affiliate sales.

Step Four – Pre-sell. The good news is that your job as an affiliate is to pre-sell products and services. Pre-selling means your content, whether it is a review, article, tutorial, course, or blog post, speaks honestly about the products and services you promote. Pre-selling is about providing value to your website visitors and prospects, making them comfortable with you and your authority to generate interest and a click through to the company website, where the selling happens.

Step Five – Follow up. Just like your affiliate manager follows up with you to see how you’re doing and what you need, follow up with your prospects. A great way to do this unobtrusively is to create a lead list by providing a newsletter visitors can subscribe, a free report, or any number of products in exchange for an email address and the permission to contact them with valuable information and special promotions.

Being a Super Affiliate is the only way to go if you want to build a successful affiliate marketing business. Find products and services you trust and believe in and then create a strategy to share information to your target audience. Test and track your efforts, focus on providing value to your prospects and leave the selling to the companies you represent. Helping others live better lives, without having to provide the products or services personally, is a great way to make a living.

Still More Places to Distribute Your Articles

Gary Knox — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 12:47:07 +0000

Keeping your articles working for you is easy if you use all the available channels. Posting articles to the article directories or repositories, publishing them ezines from your compiled list, creating an article blog of your own and using other people’s blogs to gain interest in your articles, using available members only sites to post and posting articles to industry specific forums are all viable options.

You haven’t exhausted the available places out there yet. You write articles to get people to your website, yet many people forget to post their own articles there. Your website needs information. Why not provide that with information you have already written?

Compiling all the articles you have written into a free ebook is another avenue. All you need do is create a PDF file. This allows you to announce the ebook in directories set up for just that purpose. Allowing others to give the ebook away is also a good strategy.

Create an email course and use your articles as the lessons. This course should be offered free of charge. Put a sign up box on your website, set up an autoresponder to send the material at scheduled times and you are set to go. This has too advantages; it gets your material out there and it helps build a mailing list for you.

Set up a zipped file on your website of all your articles. Allow anyone who asks to download this file and use it as they want as long as the articles are not changed and your author information is included. Let others know of this file through your email signature.

Keep your eyes open and look for many other creative ways to distribute your articles. The places are out there and waiting for you to find and use them.

Content For Every Kind Of Publisher

Gary Knox — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 13:31:20 +0000

This is the first in a series of articles dealing with this subject. So without further ado lets get started.

Content comes in lots of different forms. Just as a print publisher can choose to create a tabloid, a broadsheet or a weekly magazine so an online publisher can select the format that suits them best.

What’s the difference between them?

More than the look. The choice of format the publisher makes can define the sort of audience they get, the style they write in, and most importantly, what their users expect when they reach the site.

There are commonly four types of content. These being a blog, an online magazine, product reviews and finally teleseminars and audo. Lets deal with the first of those now.

Writing A Blog

Blogs are by far the easiest way to create a website. You do not have to think of a domain name. You do not have to look for a host to hold the site. And you certainly don’t have to play around with HTML coding or anything more complicated than the sort of buttons you can find on a word processor.

There are a number of features that make blogs special for publishers.

First, they are easy. Once you have chosen a template, the design is all done for you. All you have to do is write the words and paste them up. Even adding images is a breeze.

Second, they are regular. Blogs are supposed to be online diaries, and while in practice they have little in common with the sort of diaries that people keep as kids, users do expect them to be written often — usually every day.

That can mean that users return regularly without you having to remind them or spend more money on advertising. But it can also mean a lot of work. Writing one article a week just is not going to cut it.

But what characterises a blog is that it is personal. Users will expect to see accounts of the writer’s personal experience. They will want to know what the writer thinks and they’ll expect to see opinion as well as news. Although few publishers use blogs to write about what they did all day, they often use them to write about what they think about a particular topic.

While blogs can be factual rather than personal — that is, they can take a position rather than reflect a personality — blogs then are almost always linked to the identity of the publisher.

For some publishers that can be a step too far. They might want to write about a topic but they’d rather do it from the shadows, without people knowing that this is their personal opinion. For these kinds of publishers, an online magazine might well be a better option.

15 Must Have Tools for Social Marketers

Gary Knox — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 14:36:04 +0000

Here is another geust Post from James Adams, enjoy.

As social media continues to dominate the consumer landscape, social marketing is becoming more important. By going to where potential customers are, businesses of all sizes are capitalizing on the phenomenon. If you’re like most people, you’re looking for ways to get started in social media marketing, or you are looking for ways to make your social marketing more efficient and effective. The following are fifteen must have tools for social marketers.

HootSuite: allows multiple users to access a single Twitter account and it allows single users to manage multiple Twitter accounts. HootSuite is for more than just Twitter too: it also interfaces with WordPress blogs and FaceBook to help you keep a handle on all your social media activities.
UserVoice: helps your business track feedback so you can address concerns and solve problems. Customers can vote on the best solutions and collaborate together with you to support your products and services. You can even set up private forums that you can use to solicit participation in beta releases.
Flock: full-featured social media enabled web browser integrates with multiple services and keeps you connected as you go about your daily routine. Market with Twitter, chat, and broadcast your news all from one powerful browser.
Hubspot: lets you track the effectiveness of your keywords and those of your competitors. This service will help potential customers find you. It will show you how to convert visitors into sales.
Ping.fm: a web-based application that lets update all your social media connections at once, from a single interface.
MailChimp: an amazing tool that can breathe new life into your email campaigns and integrate them with social media. Powerful analysis tools are also available. MailChimp is free up to a certain number of subscribers and emails.
SocialTALK: manage the flow of your social media projects. SocialTALK enables companies to manage their presence across platforms as you create and schedule posts and monitor and analyze traffic.
Basecamp: the leading web-based project management and collaboration tool can provide vital support for your social media marketing campaigns.
TweetDeck: designed to get your tweets and twitters organized so they can make sense. Once you get a handle on all the information provided by TweetDeck, you should be able to more easily target your social media marketing.
Spokeo: an online service that collects information about users from social media networks and more.
IceRocket: search for blog posts by categories and give you valuable keyword insight. This powerful tool allows you to perform combined searches, track blogs, and build RSS feeds.
Infengy: a commercial tool that stores billions of conversations from literally millions of online sources that can give you analysis and alerts to trending topics and keywords that can help shape your social media marketing. Use “Deep Social Analysis” to get the most power out of your marketing effort.
Technorati: a leading blog directory that will help connect you with blogs in your industry and in your market.
Radian6: useful tool to find people who are looking for your product and service and helps you connect with them to convert sales. Radian6 is a comprehensive monitoring tool that is essential to your marketing effort.
Sentiment Metrics: gives you more information about the keywords you’re looking for in social media. You can track what the sentiment is behind mentions of your name, products, and competitors to keep your social media marketing on track.

With this many tools out there to help you manage social media for marketing purposes, surely there’s something on this list that will help you. Go ahead, give them all a try, and explore the different solutions that can help you.

This guest article is from James Adams, a writer who works with Cartridge Save where he reviews products such as the HP 300 ink cartridge and others.

What Does Blog Marketing Entail?

Gary Knox — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 12:17:57 +0000

Blog marketing is something that many of us do every day. Depending on just how serious you are about marketing your blog, you may find that some aspects of blog marketing are just something that you are not interested in doing. For instance, if you have a blog that you have as a hobby an update infrequently, you are not going to be too concerned with how many readers you have or how many sales you make from your blog. But, if your blog were more than just a hobby, and is how you intend to make an income from, you would certainly need to know all of these things and probably a good deal more.

Blog marketing is a technique that many employ. Whilst not everyone that has a blog markets it the same way, they all typically have the same goal. Which is more traffic, sales, and readers. When you have all of these things you are considered successful in marketing your blog. But you need to understand that just because you have all of these things it does not mean that you are done marketing. In reality blog marketing is an unremitting task. There will always be something more that needs to be done, and you will never actually be done.

Marketing your blog consists of several things all employed together to achieve the same end result. Such as getting links to your blog or leaving comments on other peoples blogs. Applying SEO which is search engine optimisation is another thing that is important in the world of blog marketing. You should employ SEO on your blog just as you would a website. Doing so will get you higher ranking in the search engine results and will result in a blog that anyone can find that is searching fot the products or information that you have.

Make certain that your blog has the RSS feeds. Having these feeds will permit others to be able to link to you blog. When someone uses the RSS feeds from your blog, they are able to get the posts that you make. You can also use RSS feeds from someone else’s blog on your blog, and return the favour provided that their blog posts are relevant to your blog.

Blog marketing entails many things as you are able to see, whether you are blogging for a hobby, or an income is going to make a vast difference in the techniques that you choose to employ, as well as the outcome. Make certain that you are employing the best techniques that will get you the results that you want and that you are seeking. If you are not sure what that is, just wait a while before you actually start marketing your blog so that you will not be wasting any time. Wasting time on something that you are not sure about is almost as bad as wasting your hard earned money on it.

The Exciting New Frontier Of Professional Blogging

Gary Knox — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 12:03:30 +0000

Professional blogging is a relatively new idea with a lot of potential for entrepreneurs who have the insight, drive, and a basic understanding of today’s innovative web technology. The ranks of so-called pro bloggers are still quite small, and there are a few people who make a living entirely from their blogs. However, every day there are increasingly more people who have managed to turn their blogs into cash cows that supplement their income. The number of pro bloggers is growing by leaps and bounds, but it is hard to say whether this trend will continue.

Numerous bloggers dream of entering the sphere of professional blogging. There are very few people who happily devote an hour or more each day to their blog without at least from time to time wishing that they could earn some kind of financial reward for all of their work. Several models exist for making money with a blog, the most popular being to sell advertising space through Google’s AdSense program or directly to a company that wishes to reach the demographic that your blog appeals to. However, there are very few people indeed who can make a comfortable living just by selling space on their blog sidebars.

Several people who read blogs are bloggers themselves, in part because of the fact that the people who use blogging technology on a daily basis are most likely to be interested in what other writers are doing with the medium. This fact begins to explain why the people who succeed in the world of professional blogging are mostly people who have devoted themselves almost entirely to learning about, talking about, and writing about blogging. More than any other topic, pro bloggers turn their attention to the phenomenon of blogging itself. A lot of pro bloggers make the topic of blogging the stunningly self-reflexive ongoing focus of their blogs.

Of course, professional blogging is destined to become much more complicated in the future than it is today. In the current moment, pro bloggers who attract the largest audiences and make the most money are mostly concerned with investigating the blogging movement and with offering advice to amateur bloggers. However, as the kinds of people who regularly read blogs changes, and the demographics of bloggers expand and diversify as blogging software becomes more user friendly, it is very likely indeed that the world of pro blogging will begin to reflect these changes. Indeed, it is very difficult to predict exactly what kinds of blogs will be reaping the greatest financial rewards five or ten years down the road. The world of pro blogging is one of constant change and flux, which is part of what makes it so exciting.

Great Ideas For Blogs Are No Longer Enough

Gary Knox — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 12:52:50 +0000

Because there are so many blogs and websites about blogs on the internet, it can be tough to differentiate your blogging website from all of the others. Whether you are embarking on a new website aimed at bloggers or whether you are looking to make your existing blogging site more distinctive, the key to constructing and maintaining a site that will capture the interest and attention of the blogging community is determining your niche. If you are able to fill a unique need in a way that no other website does, you will be able to establish a lasting readership among web surfers. Once you have discovered a niche, you will still have a lot to do, but finding your position in the blogosphere is certainly the place to begin.

Every great blogging website starts with a great idea, and you cannot build a successful site that will last without one. There are numerous great sites aimed at today’s bloggers, and competition for the attention of this growing demographic is fierce. To make your blogging website stand out from the pack, you will need to offer something that no other site is currently providing, or you will need to do the same thing that an already popular site does but in a more impressive or valuable way.

One method of discovering an ideal model for your blogging website is to view the sites that have successfully captured a blogging audience already to ascertain if you can appropriate some of their strategies to assist realising your vision. Naturally, you will also need to add a unique flair to your project in order to stand apart from your competition. Many people agree that the websites that do the best in today’s market are the sites that have the most personality. The fiercely individual surfers who are bloggers are a demographic that responds particularly strongly to personality, so consider how you are able to give your site a unique and attractive feeling by lending your own voice and sensibility to your site’s design and content.

Once you have a great idea for your site, have pinpointed a particular niche that you are well equipped to fill, and have infused the site with personality, the next step is figuring out how to get the word out to bloggers. In the long run, a great idea just is not enough to propel your blogging website to success. You will need to draft a smart and realistic marketing plan in order to attract readers to your site. Once you hook a blogger, your great content will keep them coming back, but it is vital to get that first glance or your site will not have a chance to shine.

Successful Blog Marketing Tips

Gary Knox — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 12:58:33 +0000

So you have a blog and want to market it and make it a successful blog. How do you do this? How do you go about getting your blog out there to be seen and known by others? How do you draw readers and keep them coming back for more? There are many ways to get your blog out there and known by others. This can be known as challenging for some and just quite easy for others. If you have ever had a successful blog before then you know what it takes. You are not going to get anywhere by just setting up a blog and hoping that people will find it and read it. You are not going to gain any links, nor a higher search engine ranking by just having a blog. This is all part of blog marketing. Anyone can do it, even you.

Successful blog marketing tip number one. When you first create a blog, of course it is unheard of. No one knows anything about the blog unless you give them the link and show it to them. However, for a new blog that has never been seen, there are many ways to get it out there and known. You just need to know how. The first thing that you can do is to allow RSS feeds be taken from your blog. Allow other websites and blogs to publish your same exact blog. When you do this, they are giving you a link back to your blog, and also telling their readers all about your blog. You will get more traffic than ever with this tool. RSS feeds are wonderful for promoting and getting your blog out there.

Blog marketing tip number two. Update your blog frequently. We can not put enough emphasis on this tip. If you tell your readers that you are going to update your blog daily, then do it. If you tell them that you will be writing in your blog weekly, don’t let them down. Your readers are what makes your blog successful. You may not realize this in the beginning, and you will have few readers in the beginning as well, but you will eventually build a readership base and have people checking out your blog regularly. Maybe you do not plan on telling your readers how often you will update your blog. That is ok too. However, think about this, if you were reading a blog on a weekly basis, and you expected to see the blog that you like to read updated at least once a week, you would be very disappointed to find out that it was not. Sure, things happen that might prevent you from updating, and that is expected, and excused, but week after week can hurt you and cause you to lose readers.

Tip number three. While you are working on your readership base, and trying to gain readers, you are going to find that commenting on blogs that are relevant to yours will surely help. Find a blog that is on the same topic to yours, or close to it and leave comments. You can also make a track back with your blog postings to comment on your own blog. Doing so will probably more than likely give someone else the urge to track back to your blog. Which will be good for it as well. Commenting on blogs that get many comments will make yours be seen by those interested in that market. You will gain traffic and readers that way, and it is easy as well as free.

The fourth blog marketing tip. Learn and apply SEO to your blogs. SEO is search engine optimisation. You are going to find that if you want your blog to go anywhere, you need SEO, and you need to know how to use it to the advantage of your blog. Just like a website, a blog will be better off optimised.