All About Publication

I know you’ve heard many times that to be successful at Internet Marketing you have to have a list. You can build your list in many ways but the quickest and most effective way is by writing articles.

Many ezine publishers and website owners are constantly looking for new and up to date information for their publications and web pages. Article writing is the perfect way to provide that information and build an opt-in list.

A lot of new and some experienced Internet Marketers get confused about the obvious use of the opt-in list. The main objective is not just to build a list of names and email addresses. Its purpose is to help you build your business by providing you with a valuable list of names and email addresses that are of good quality.

Millions of people search the internet daily for numerous reasons. The majority of them are usually looking for information on one or a variety of subjects that they just want to know more about.

Here are a few things that you should consider when writing articles to build your business:

1. Find out what type of information people are looking for and provide it for them. This can be done easily by asking the members who are currently on you list what they want.

If you don’t currently have a list you can always visit different forums to find out what people are asking for.

2. Keep in contact with the members on your opt-in list and get to know them. Obviously, if they are subscribing to your list, and staying around, they are interested in what you have to say and you have something in common.

You can ask them to recommend you to their friends, family or co-workers who have the same interests that you have and they can help you build your business.

3. Be careful not to frustrate the members on your list by constantly providing too much information by email too frequently. Though they may like to get email, try not to send too many emails too often.

You can provide the best quality information there is but if you over do it some of your members will opt-out and leave you because of information overload.

When you write articles and submit them to article directories in most cases it is free. It is one of the easiest ways to drive traffic to your website, get free advertising and build your opt-in list all at the same time.

Make your articles key-word rich about your website topic and strive to keep the word count between 400 and 600 words long.

There are times that they will be longer but make sure you check the article directories rules as different article directories have different rules about article length.

Always include a resource box at the bottom of your article with a little bit of information about yourself and include a link to your website.

You will soon build credibility and draw more targeted traffic to your website as your articles are read by others and they begin to click on the link to your website and opt-in to your list.

You will also start to get noticed by search engines and get established as other website owners begin to publish your articles in their ezines, to their list and on their websites.

So, to build your opt-in list quickly and drive traffic to your website, write good quality articles and submit them to the article directories often.

If you are spending several hours a week writing articles you want to be sure you get the most “bang for your buck”.   Here’s how.

1. Effective titles

Great content is a given essential but without a great title an article loses most of its effectiveness right away.  Titles should be crafted according to your goals:

-         If you want people to click on your article and read it, then the title needs to promise something useful, interesting or perhaps controversial.

-         If you want your article to be picked up and redistributed by aggregating websites or community sites in your niche, then look at the kind of titles they are looking for

-         If you want your article to rank well in search engines, the title has to consist (mostly) of a search term that you can realistically promote onto first page results.

One title that have worked for me was “US economic decline is looking terminal” which now ranks no 1 for “US economic decline” and is a controversial enough statement for people to take a look.

Another was a pretty routine piece about the effectiveness of PPC advertising which got syndicated on loads of sites not because it was that great a read but because the title referred to PPC.  Same with one I wrote about dieting.

2.  Tags

People can be a bit lazy about thinking through the tags they put at the bottom of articles, or even putting any on.  But if you want people, search engines and re-publishers to find your material then it is vital you do so.

Also if your goal is ultimately SEO for your website then you want to tailor your tags accordingly; if you want to rank well as a dental hygiene website then having links from articles tagged “dental” and “hygiene” presumably helps.

I’m no tag guru but I am starting to take care over what I put in the tag box to help achieve several of my goals but particularly getting articles republished.  If you look at aggregator sites you are aiming for then they often give a big clue as to particular tags they are fishing for.  I write a lot about finance and noticed for example that tagging my articles “economy” (among other things) got them republished in appropriate places.

3. Develop an article promotion routine

If you are publishing articles to promote a particular website then don’t forget that the more you promote the articles the better it will be for your target site.  In fact you should treat each article like an SEO project in its own right and this is best done by developing a  routine.

I have a spreadsheet on which I list my articles and I try and give all of them the same treatment, in my case involving things like:

Blogging about them
Submitting them to google
Tweeting about them
Republishing to Facebook
Social bookmarks
Going back to old articles and adding links to the new ones
Making the article my forum signature or posting about it on a forum
4.  Designate some articles as “flagships”

If you publish a lot of articles you might want to designate some flagship articles that you think are really good or significant in some other way (they promote a service of yours) and promote these more than the rest.

Some ways to give extra attention to flagship articles is to issue press releases, advertising them or write a few quickie articles (not duplicate content) that link to the key one.

An example of how to use this strategy is if your niche or industry is, how shall we say, a bit boring.  If you are forced to put out dull technical content because that’s what people are searching for or need in your area, you are not going to pull in much casual traffic and build momentum.

The trick is to occasionally put out an article with wider appeal and give it a big promotional push and this should help your other material.  If your niche is office products for example and you normally write about the qualities of staplers and post-its, you could put out an article about “Top 10 things people steal from the office”.

5.  Take advantage of RSS

RSS, formatting technology that puts content into feeds for easy distribution around the web, is a boon for article marketers if they take advantage.  Websites that re-publish articles often do so by subscribing to RSS feeds which deliver articles, posts, images etc from selected sources and regularly updates them automatically.

The good thing from an article marketers point of view is that the feed data, besides the title and text (or a summary) of the article, also includes metadata and authorship information.

In terms of how you go about this, you can either create an RSS feed yourself if you are HTML proficient or, more likely, take a shortcut like I do.  I publish all articles of a certain type in one account on an article publication site and create feeds using their facility (Articlesbase has the excellent Personal RSS Builder).  Once created there are literally hundreds of places to submit your feed to if you search on google.