Archive for articles
Start a Blog – Part 1
Posted by: | CommentsI recently published an article on numerous Internet sites that I called the Seven Step Online Marketing Strategies Plan. In that article I detailed seven steps that should be included in when you are developing your own online marketing strategies. The first step is to start a blog. Why a blog? There are a lot of different reasons, but the biggest reason is that a blog usually provides more fresh and up to date information than a typical website. For many people, establishing their current website was a big deal that involved a lot of money and time and often required the services of a website development company. Once the website was set up, it was pretty much left alone and quickly became out dated.
With the arrival of some amazing blog software, all that has changed. It is now much less expensive to develop an Internet presence, and blogs can be set up to look like virtually any website you could imagine. The difference is that a blog is much easier to set up and maintain than the traditional website. Also, because the blogs are easier to work with, they tend to get updated more and are often ranked higher than sites that have not been updated. One of the first things I often do with my own online marketing clients is to change their existing websites into a blog environment.
There are many options for starting a blog on the Internet. There are some excellent free options like Blogger.com and WordPress.com. These are easy to use and most people should be able to go to either one of those options and have a blog up and running in less than hour. For most businesses, however, I recommend using WordPress.org in a self hosted environment. The WordPress software is free, but hosting a site and getting a domain name will cost around $60/year. I will be writing about getting a WordPress blog set up and hosted in future articles.
Until next time….
Steve
Article Marketing as an Online Marketing Strategy
Posted by: | CommentsOne of the Online Marketing Strategies I recommend is article marketing. Article marketing is writing unique 300 – 400 word articles about topics that apply to your blogging niche and then having them published on multiple sites on the Internet. This process is a very clean way of not only developing links for your blog, but also encouraging people to visit your site. In each article that you write you can usually include two links back to your site. If your article gets published on 100 sites, you get 200 links. It is not unusual for an article to get published hundreds of websites. Why? There are a lot of sites that need content and they don’t have the time, ability, or desire to write their own content so they publish articles that have been written by other people. I have articles that have been published on over 1000 websites.
How to Use Article Marketing
You need to start by writing an article (400 – 500 words) about something on topic for your blog. DO NOT post this article on your blog, it needs to be uniquely written to have the most impact. Then you need to give the article a title that doesn’t currently show up on the search engines. I wrote an article today called “Now is the Time to Develop an Internet Presence”. My initial title was “Developing an Internet Presence”, but when I did a Google search there were quite a few results for that title. The unique title I chose will allow me to see how well the article is doing in the future with the search engines.
Once the article is written you need to get it published. Fortunately there are some good options for this. One option is called Ezine Articles www.ezinearticles.com. They offer a free publishing service and they are good to work with and get a lot of articles published. The option that I use is Article Marketer. I use them because they seem to get my articles out to the widest number of publishers. They offer a free service, but I use the paid service. It has been worth it to me to have them publishing my articles.
The most important thing from an Online Marketing Strategies perspective is the Authors Box. In the box that allows HTML you can add two keyword phrases with link. Here is what my Author Box displays:
Stephen Lawes helps people to get started blogging and develop Online Marketing Strategies. His blog site is http://stephenlawes.net.
That gives me two links back to my site every time the article is published. I will try and write at least one article for article marketing purposes every week for the next eight weeks to give the Online Marketing Strategies site a good start. I hope to be able to generate more than a thousand links and get some page rank in the first three months of this blog being public.
Until next time….
Steve
