If you scour the web looking for low-cost or no-cost ways to promote any product or service online, you surely will see the suggestion of article marketing. Well-written original articles have proven to be one of the most powerful forms of advertising on the internet for the small business owner.

Article marketing can take several forms. One of the most obvious is writing articles to post on your own website or blog. This is a great idea. Search engines love unique content and are always trolling for something new. Adding keyword-rich unique articles to your website or blog on a regular and consistent basis will keep the search engine bots coming back frequently to update their indexing of your website.

The next most commonly used article marketing strategy is for a marketer, like you, to write an article and submit it to an article directory. Since the idea is to have original, fresh content, you should not submit the same article to different directories. Each article should be unique. You can use the same theme, but the words and ideas need to be different.

Article directories are where webmasters or ezine editors go to find new content to publish on their sites, blogs, or distribute to their readership in the form of ezines. They are also visited by people researching online for information. When you submit an article to an article directory, attached to it is what is known as an author’s “resource box” or “bio”. This is a piece of text that you write to promote your personal website or a particular product. This is where you include a link to your website, your blog, or other articles you have written so that interested parties can click through to learn more about your products.

Once you get the hang of writing articles, you may want to consider submitting some of your articles to sites that actually pay you for well-written articles, like Associated Content, or Constant Content. These sites have high editorial standards, and many writers find they can earn additional money by submitting articles to these sites.  It may not be much, just $2.00 to $8.00 per article, but you can also earn lifetime residual income from the amount of views a particular article receives, so it can add up over time.  Obviously, you will want to promote your articles on the pay-per-view sites as much as you can.

Having your articles posted at article directories has a twofold benefit. The first benefit is that it gives you a one-way link from your author’s resource box back to your website. This improves your website’s ranking in the search engine placement. This is what Google calls “PR” (short for Page Rank).  A link back is like a “vote” for your website. The more votes you get, the more important your website will appear to the search engines. The more backlinks you build linking to your website or blog, the higher position your website or blog will appear in search results.

The second benefit is that real people read these articles.  If people choose to read your article, it is logical those people may be interested in your subject matter and, therefore, are potentially customers for the items you are offering on your website. This makes them “qualified traffic”, i.e. people who are more likely to be converted into actual customers.

Free advertising, in every form, is worth the effort. Getting links and real live visitors from article directories is just the start of the benefits of article marketing, though. The real power of article marketing is in its viral effects. Have you heard the phrase, “Do the work once, get paid forever?” That’s the idea behind viral marketing.

To benefit the most from the viral effect, articles need to appeal to human readers and have:o Interesting content
o Good grammar, spelling and punctuation
o Material that will not get dated too quickly
o Desirable keywords

An article with all of the above will potentially spread throughout the Internet for literally years to come, at no additional cost. It is for that reason that spending time on article marketing is one of the best uses of your time for any online marketer.

Here at Success Point Consulting, we love to help small business owners get started with Article Marketing.  We will write a package of 10 articles on topics and keywords you select for only $85. You are then free to do whatever you wish with the articles.  You can use them as blog posts, submit to article directories or ezine publishers, or use them however you see fit.  For  more information, contact Trina@SuccessPointConsulting.com.

Here’s to your success,

Trina

P.S.  Remember to check out our new ebook: Money in the Bank: A Step by Step Guide to Establishing Business Credit.

This is the part of the process where a good software program, like the full version of WordTracker or Market Samurai, really comes in handy.  But if you only have one or two websites and you only do this process occasionally (which you should update your research every 6 months or so because phrases go in and out of popularity), then you can get good results by using the free Google keyword tool.

So surf over to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. This is Google’s free keyword tool and it is the model on which all other tools are based.  Google is currently Beta testing a new interface, which I don’t use because they limit your results to the top 100 keywords. As you’ll see, in really competitive niches, I will often look at 300 or more keywords and phrases, so the new interface makes it a pain.  So for now, if I’m going to use Google, I immediately click on the link at the upper right hand side of the page that says “Previous Interface.”  

Once I’m there, here’s the basic process that I have found works for me and my clients:

         1)  Select the second choice “website content” in the first section. 

         2)  Type in your website address in the search box and hit “get keyword ideas.”    This will create a list of what keywords Google is currently associating   with your site.  It’s not unusual to see some phrases that really don’t apply.

         3) For each “section” go to the bottom and hit the “add all” link.  This will create a  list of selected keywords in the right hand bar.

         4)  Compare this generated list with the list you created on your own.  Add any missing phrases to your list by scrolling down to the bottom and hitting the “Add Your Own Keywords.”

CAUTION:  DO NOT EDIT the list at this time.  Even if some of the phrases are just wacky, don’t remove them yet because they’ll just get added back in.

         5)  Once you’ve completed this list, hit the “Get more related keywords” box.   This will automatically move those keywords into the “get keyword ideas” box at the top of the page.  Type in the Captcha and hit “get keyword ideas.”

         6)  Go to the bottom of each section and add any new keyword ideas to your selected keyword list.  Again, don’t edit, just add. 

         7)  Repeat this process until very few new keywords come up – often takes 3 to 5 repeats.  You should now have a list of 200 to 300 or more potential keywords.

         Once you are satisfied that you’ve gotten more keyword ideas than you could possibly use hit the “get more related keyword ideas” one last time.  This time, though, go through the list in the top box and delete any obviously non-relevant words or phrases.  

         9)  Once you’ve edited your list, click on “Filter my results.”  Select the box that says “don’t show new ideas, give me data on my selected keywords” and then hit “Get Keyword Ideas.”

         10) NOW is when you really start to edit and refine.   Click on “Global Search Volume” heading.  This will sort the results according to volume.  Everyone is different, and your actual numbers will depend on your target audience, but I typically will remove every word or phrase that has more than 150,000 searches per month.  Those words and phrases are just going to be too competitive and it’s going to be almost impossible to get ranked for them, at least in the short-term. I then usually scroll down to the bottom and look at the phrases that say “Not Enough Data.”  I will remove all of these, too.  (Now, you are removing them from your list on the right hand side, not from the results box.  If it’s too confusing, you can go ahead and repeat steps 5, 8-9 to get rid of the phrases in the main results box.)

        11)  Find the box at the top of the results that says “Match Type.”  Change the selection to “Phrase.”  You’ll see the number of searches change.

        12)  Then you can start to evaluate the keywords and phrases you have left.  Look at the Advertiser Competition column.  Solid green means the phrase is very competitive, that alot of other sites are targeting those same words.  The gold is in the phrases that are NOT solid green, so start with those.

        13)  Now is when it gets fun.  Open up a new tab in your browser and open up a Google search box.  Type the phrase:  allintitle: followed by the search term you are interested in within quotes e.g.  allintitle: “divorce rules Ohio”.

        14) When the search results come up, look at the top right hand side of the page.   There will be “Results 1 of XXXXXX sites.”  This is the number of competing sites for that particular keyword or phrase.

         15)  Do this with every potential keyword phrase.  As you pull up the results, look at the sites that come up.  If Google is pulling up well-established competitive sites, it’s going to be hard to compete.  However, if the Google results are Wikipedia, and Ezinearticles.com, and directory listings, then, even though there may be more than 50,000 competing websites, they could be “soft” competitors and there is opportunity for you to dominate the phrase with an aggressive SEO campaign.

        16)  Create a spreadsheet that shows you the phrase, number of global searches, and number of competing websites.  You may also want to make a note of the top 3 or top 5 search results.  Look at the data.  Though there is no hard and fast rule, it is a common theory that the “sweet spot” for SEO is a search term or phrase that gets at least 2,400 global searches per month and has less than 50,000 competing sites. With dedicated SEO promotion, a site can often appear on the first page of Google results of a sweet spot term in less than 30 days.  If you’ve got one or two keywords that fall into that category, congratulations, you are on your way to online success.  Keep this data and compare the results in 6 months.

Congratulations, you’ve just learned the basics on how to conduct keyword research.  Next week, we’ll look at what to do once you have your target keywords selected.

Here’s to your success,

 Trina