Archive for May 2nd, 2007
When creating articles or for distribution to gain exposure and backlinks, those articles must appear objective or many content distributors like eZine Articles and Articles Factory won’t accept them. Further, readers don’t like being blatantly sold.
One way to write an objective article is to make it purely informational. For example, an article written for a company that sells batteries titled ‘How to Replace a Golf Cart Battery’. With this type of article, you hope that someone who needs to replace a battery will read the how-to information and then follow the link at the end of the article to purchase the battery from the article author. But this type of article doesn’t necessarily sell the reader on purchasing a golf cart battery.
For an article to be objective AND promote a product, it must offer a variety of different viewpoints or resources. For example, here are a few recent articles I wrote to promote companies and how I worked in some objective viewpoints.
For a company that offered a 100gig iPod hard drive storage upgrade:
- Title: 3 Ways to Store More Songs on Your iPod
- Points presented: Hard drive upgrade, reducing bitrate, eliminating clutter
For a company that sold white noise machines:
- Title: Unique Baby Shower Gifts- Shopping Outside the Baby Isle
- Points Presented: white noise machine, food processor, hand painted portrait
For a company that offers high-quality replacement windows
- Title: 3 Home Investments that Significantly Reduce Energy Costs
- Points Presented: replacement windows, solar panels, replacement siding
But how can you do that without undermining your agenda? Sometimes an objective article does drive traffic to other resources and that’s ok. If readers honestly preferred the other options you were presenting, then most likely they wouldn’t have purchased your products or services first.
As you can see, the agenda of the company I’m promoting is always the first of a list of three. When writing it this way, you have the opportunity to compare the second and third options to the first.
For example, with the replacement windows article, I could mention that solar panels have a much higher up front cost than replacement windows but does in fact save more energy over the long run and that replacement siding can really add to the look of your home, but doesn’t have as high of a return on investment as replacement windows but does offer more aesthetic value than solar panels. Comparing and contrasting this way also gives you an opportunity to work in more keywords.
As you can see, comparisons of each are objective. Throughout the article, the pros and cons of each are mentioned, but because of that, replacement windows are sold throughout the entire piece.
Objectivity is a good thing for conversions as well. If you only talk about the great things about your product, consumers will naturally want to go check out the competition. When you compare and contrast different options, you can actually create more of a well-balanced persuasive argument than if you were to only talk about the plusses. This makes readers feel less wary about making a purchase since they already know the downsides. At the same time, you’ll have a great article that can be distributed to hundreds of online content providers and really beef up your backlinks.
May 02 2007 | Marketing | 2 Comments »
If you have a blog, you need to have Technorati ping it.
Technorati Profile
May 02 2007 | Marketing | No Comments »
If you’re selling products or services to businesses, there are likely numerous decision makers involved in the buying process and each one has to be sold on the idea (or at least not completely against it) for the purchase to happen.
What normally happens is that one person is responsible for handle a specific problem. That problem could be anything from getting more traffic to the website to picking out new office furniture. That person then goes off to research the various options and then present the findings to the rest of the decision making group.
Once the person responsible for the task is sold on your business, they then shift from the role of the skeptical comparison shopper to the role of the advocate that defends their choice.
Does your website make it easy for the decision maker to present features, benefits, and critical information to the decision making group?
I was once tasked to architect a website for an office furniture company. Knowing that there would likely be many decision makers involved in any purchase, I designed a wish list type feature where the inside advocate could save items in a place that displayed images, product info, prices, and any other type of information that decision makers might need in order to approve the sale.
The list was printer friendly and linkable, so that the list could be emailed or passed around to decision-makers at a meeting. Designing the website this way made it easy for the inside advocate to look organized and professional in front of their peers and superiors.
You want to make it as easy as possible for the inside advocate to sell your products and services to management and executives. Some other ways to do this are:
- Create PDF’s that are downloadable and printer-friendly and that list features and benefits in a logical and visually appealing way.
- Create an industry-specific calculator that allows the researcher to plug in specific numbers in order to calculate cost savings or potential profit
- Offer a printer-friendly comparison list chart of your company vs. your competitors or competing technologies
Happy selling!
May 02 2007 | Marketing | No Comments »
Blogging is a huge buzz word in the internet marketing world these days. But many webmasters have heard that blogging is a powerful tool, but don’t know how to use it. This super simple system will show you how to use blogging to attract and utilize search engine traffic.
Step 1: Find keywords.
First of all, you need to find a good keyword for each blog post. Go for a keyword that is not too competitive. (do a search for allintitle: [your keyword here] to determine how competitive a keyword is. Try to find a keyword that Google returns fewer than another for the allintitle query. Like golf, less is better.
Step 2: Write your post.
Write a post optimized for the keyword you chose. Basically you just want to make sure that the keyword is in the post title and in the body of the post several times.
Step 3: Build links to your post
Now you need to build inbound links to your blog post to get it ranked well for the keyword you write/optimized it for. You can use link exchanges, articles, etc. to build links. If you chose a low competition keyword phrase, you shouldn’t need many links to get a good ranking.
Step 4: Repeat.
Write/optimize/promote a new post on a regular basis twice a week, for example.
Step 5: Utilize the traffic.
Be sure that you setup your blog to use the traffic that your optimized posts will draw. Try adding a DHTML popup to your blog to get newsletter subscribers.
May 02 2007 | Internet Marketing | No Comments »
