SiteProNews

Before Scott Glatstein, a pioneer marketing strategist and Founder of Imperatives LLC started submitting articles online, the only online exposure he had was his own website. A Google search term for his name only returned 8 hits. Two of the 8 hits were for his cousin. None of these hits linked back to Imperative’s website. And they were all unrelated to his current business.

By the end of the second article submission, a Google search for “Scott Glatstein” yielded over 2,000 hits. A Google search for “imperatives” returned the website in the #6 position on page one.

I’d say this is a huge success to get excited about!

But guess what?

When I told Scott about this success, I didn’t get the emotional response I was expecting.

Why?

Because, he understood this concept…

Article Marketing is Not Just About Gaining Link Popularity

You will automatically get links when writing and submitting articles. The increased search engine optimization is a bonus. But links don’t put money in your pocket. So it should not be your top priority.

Article marketing is about getting the right messages to the right audiences and delivering measurable results that absolutely, positively impact your bottom line. Scott understood this and that’s why he didn’t get excited about his article marketing results until:

• He saw his articles on top online publications his audience is reading such as CEO Refresher, CEO Online, and Chief Marketer.com
• His website traffic quadrupled
• He started getting targeted leads from all over the globe (including Australia and the Kingdom of Tonga)
• That’s when Scott jumped up and down with excitement. You should have heard the excitement in his voice when he called to thank me.

Here’s How You Too Can Get the Right Messages to the Right Audiences That Can Affect Your Bottom Line:

1. Identify your audience in the headline, within the article and in your bio box. Not only will this help you identify your audience, but it will also help you get published more. For example, if I didn’t change Jill Lublin’s title from: “Networking: Connecting is the Key to Magical Networking” to “Networking for Women Entrepreneurs: Connecting is the Key to Magical Networking,” her article never would have been published by a publication focusing on women entrepreneurs. Most likely, they would have skipped right over the article, because they would have never known that the article was perfect for their audience without taking the time to read the complete article. Surprisingly most publishers don’t have time to read every article they receive.
2. Tell a story within your article that your audience can easily relate to. This will help you identify your audience and connect with them. At the Yanik Silver Underground Online Seminar that I attended, legendary copywriter, Ted Nicholas spoke about telling stories within your advertisements, and direct mail copy. It helps you spark an emotional response and manipulate your audience to buy your books, products or services. You must do this with your articles as well.

Complete an all encompassed article submission campaign.

Here’s how…

• Scour the Web for the best websites and ezines that your targeted audience is reading, and make sure they accept article submissions. You want to find websites that are highly visited and ezines that are the most read. But more importantly, you want to focus on finding websites and ezine publishers within your specific niche that have strong emotional connections to their audiences.
• Submit your articles to niche directories that only accept articles related to your content. These article directory sites have fewer articles posted than the major article directories, but they have more concentrated content. Readers going to these sites are more targeted than the general directory sites. They have certain problems and they’re looking for solutions that you can provide.
• Submit your articles to article announcement lists and major article directories like Ezinearticles.com, Goarticles.com, Ideamarketers.com and Articledashboard.com. These sites do not bring as many targeted visitors to your website. But they do receive millions of hits per month from publishers looking to republish your articles on their websites, blogs or ezines.

So What Are Your Next Steps Toward Article Marketing Success?

Start following the above strategies and those mentioned in my complete A to Z Article System where I remove all the guesswork, waste and frustration out of getting easy traffic, free publicity and increased sales on a daily basis. And, you will get the right messages to the right audiences that could absolutely, positively affect your bottom line.

Author:  Scott Glatstein is just one of 30+ Case Studies with Real Website Examples revealed in Article Marketing Expert Eric Gruber’s NEW A-Z Article System. Now, you can discover Eric’s top tips, tricks and strategies that top Internet Marketers use to get more traffic and sales. Go to http://www.BroadcastYourArticles.com/atoz and let Your Article Marketing Expert take you by the hand & teach you step-by-step, how to write your way to profits!

If you have a website and you are currently selling a product on the Internet, you need to know that rss can increase traffic to your website dramatically.

Since there are million of websites on the Internet today, and you have a lot of competitors, you need to use every technology available to get higher search engine rankings.

Surfers behavior has evolved other the years, and today, email marketing is not the sole holy gray of your Internet business.

He has no fear of being subject to spam, and therefore, the visitor is happy to add your site to his reader. He thinks that he is in control and he can choose to click and visit your website when he wants.

People are usually in hurry and don’t want to waste their time, and prefer scanning instead of reading.

Furthermore, surfers want up to date information, and with the thousands of websites in any given subject, it is really hard for a busy man (or women) to find what he is searching for.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (or Rich Site Summary). RSS will help you to increase traffic to your website because…

You will get better search engine position.

I use an blog with RSS feed enabled to get my sites in the top ten rankings in Google, MSN and Yahoo.

Tip: use wordpress for even better rankings (specially in Google). I don’t really know why, but Google love wordpress more than other blogging platforms like type pad and bloggers itself!

You need to use a blog for this technique to be even more effective. It is common to get first position in the search engines for low competition keywords just because you switched to a blog, or you added RSS to your website.

Another reason to use RSS to increase website traffic is that surfers are fed up with “useless” e-zines.

Today, every person who spend more than one year surfing the Internet knows that most of the email newsletters are in fact… a big sales pitch.

For this reason, they don’t give you their email easily.

Seth Godin said it best: now it’s the area of “permission marketing”, you need to gain the respect and admiration of your visitor.

When he appreciates your work, and sees that you are a real expert on the subject, he will be the first in line to buy your products or affiliate product recommendation.

When you are involved in any online business, your content becomes really important. I’m sure you already heard the famous “content is king”.

Without good content (and good products), you readers will only be one time readers, and it is the exact opposite as what you want for the success of your online business.

Now, it’s up to you to add wonderful content, and choose great headlines that will appeal to your niche market.

RSS is a technology that you need to add to your arsenal. Whether you add RSS to your site, or you decide to blog, you will increase your traffic almost overnight.

Author:  Franck Silvestre is an affiliate marketing expert and search engine optimization guide. His methods have increased traffic to his site by more than 467%%! Visit http://www.SeoseductionSecrets.com

I’ve heard it said, and even seen it written, that blogging is better than SEO for getting traffic. Are blogging traffic or SEO traffic generation techniques better for you, or does it not really matter?

Actually, a lot depends on you and which you like best: blogs or traditional websites, and also what you want the traffic for. I also wonder why the distinction is being made, since anybody serious about internet marketing and getting plenty of traffic, will use both. There is really no need to choose one or the other. However, when I hear such arguments I get the feeling that it is more academic than which provides the more traffic. Feelings, however can be wrong, so it is worth discussion.

When you think about it, the type of traffic you get from a blog could very well have different needs and interests to those that reached your site after carrying a search on Google or Yahoo using specific keywords. OK, you can get to blogs from search engines also, and through the use of keywords, but if you are looking to buy something you wouldn’t normally log onto a blog, would you?

Let’s say you wanted the best price for a gross of Titleist golf balls, you wouldn’t visit a blog site. Similarly if wanted to discuss their benefits, you would go to a blog or a forum. Sometimes it gets difficult to tell the difference these days, since blogs are becoming increasingly more interactive, but you get my general drift. I hope!

With a blog you can advertise whatever you want to, and the same is true of a website. However, you are more likely to make a direct purchase from a website, and to seek information from a blog. Hence, the traffic you get on a blog are information seekers and those on your website may also be looking for info, but might also be wanting to make a purchase. So right away we can kind of separate blog readers from website visitors.

It’s not a well defined separation, but bloggers tend not to be looking for something different to what a search engine user is looking for. If you have a blog on your website, your blog page will be likely to attract prospects that will tend to be more regular visitors than those that are checking out your website. If the latter don’t respond to your opt-in form, you will be unlikely to see them again, but a visitor to your blog page might return frequently.

However, to return to the question: what is better, blog traffic or SEO traffic, as long as each is free it doesn’t really matter I would have thought. I suppose that it could be argued that the SEO traffic is more focussed because they have used your specific keywords to get to the page they landed on ,and blog traffic could come from ezines and other sources that are perhaps not specific to any product you are selling. Me, I would accept any traffic no matter where it came from, and quite frankly once the traffic gets to your webpage it is up to you to convert it to sales.

The difference between the two is that if you don’t make an immediate impact with the SEO visitors, you could be struggling to keep them returning to your website, but you are likely to have more time with the bloggers, since they tend to keep coming back to the blog. The SEO visitors might register with your opt-in page, but that only allows you to keep in contact with them, and you still have to try to induce them to return to your website.

On the other hand, the blog readers need no such inducement, since they visit your site each time you publish a new posting. That is assuming that your blog is on your own website, and not on the blog server as many (perhaps most) are.

Perhaps I am completely on the wrong track, but I will keep tabs on it and report on my website what my findings are regarding blog traffic and SEO traffic, and whether or not one tends to buy more that the other. It is useful to know, since for a website that is designed to sell products it can determine whether or not it is worth having a blog on your site or keep trying to improve your SEO.

That is a big decision to make, and if it could make the difference between success and failure then it should be determines mathematically and scientifically rather than by conjecture and opinion. It is scientific testing that frequently makes the difference between those that are successful in internet marketing and those that fail.

So, is blogging traffic or SEO traffic generation the best? Who knows? I hope to know shortly though, and I will share it with you on my site when I finish my testing.

Author:  If you want to find out more about traffic generation, or even the result of Pete’s testing, then visit Improved Search Engine Rank where you will discover a way to generate free traffic using SEO that even blogs cannot compete with, but Blog Profits shows you how to use blogs properly.

In less than one minute, most of us can think of at least eight to ten content assets our company keeps hidden away in files, drawers, and other places where we know they won’t be seen by customers. But in an online atmosphere that demands fresh, quality content to achieve high search engine positioning, why not let the search engines (and hopefully users) see what you’ve kept tucked away?

I just took the last minute to brainstorm what kind of content asset a typical company leaves off their website. How about your best PowerPoint, brochures, white papers, case studies, template proposals, technical briefs, service descriptions and offerings, sell sheets, or process manuals?

All of these assets are great places to leverage existing content for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes, and what’s more, they’re all easily converted into PDF form.

Still, many within the search sphere have questioned the practicality and utility of using PDF content on websites for SEO. Why not convert them to HTML? In the past, this would have been the only way to make them visible to search engines. But now, all the major search engines have evolved to the point where their spiders have the ability to crawl and index and PDF content, thus making PDFs a valuable content platform from an SEO standpoint.

As I mentioned earlier, many in the industry would have demanded this PDF content in HTML form. But, of course not many of them have the time, desire, budget, or skill to perform such conversions. Others would claim their marketing materials are visually based or inherently tied to other brand elements, like print advertising.

So how do you decide if posting PDF content on your website is a good idea for you? It all depends on the type of PDF content you’re holding onto, and whether it is has the potential to be effectively optimized for the right reasons. But how do you optimize a PDF?

1. Ensure that your PDFs are text based. If they aren’t text, the search engines won’t be able index much of anything from them, and chances are they won’t have much of an effect on your search engine ranking.
2. Optimize your copy. The words in a PDF are no different than other web content, so this is your proverbial “bread and butter” as far as SEO is concerned. Make sure the text is keyword focused and relevant.
3. Like any other web page, you’ll want your PDFs to contain links. Along these same lines, it is critical that the anchor text within these links be optimized like it would a link on any other web page. Search engines are aware of these links, and they are also another great way to define navigation pathways that connect readers to other content you’re offering. From a business perspective, PDFs are often sent via email, and links inside the PDF itself can direct these interested readers back to your website, where they’ll more than likely browse for related materials.
4. Remember to position your PDFs where they’ll be found by search engines if you want them to find and index this content. This means placing links to your PDFs in the upper echelons of your site’s architecture, not burying them on pages no one ever looks at.
5. Optimize the size of PDF file itself for search. If the file size is too large, readers will be sitting there while it downloads at a turtle’s pace. Moreover, search engines may not even bother to index the content if its unaccesible. Spare visitors and search engines alike the hassle of downloads and respect their time by using the full version of Acrobat to correctly size the file. You can do this by selecting “Advanced” under “Document Properties,” then go to “PDF Optimizer” and select “right-size” to format the document in a search engine friendly manner. Also, in the interests of your users, you’ll want to enable the “Optimize for Fast Web View” option in the Preferences>General Settings panel. This will allow the PDF to load one page at a time rather than all at once, which cuts download time.
6. Be aware of what version of Acrobat you’re using, as search engines have been known to lag behind Adobe’s newer versions of Acrobat. While the major search engines all spider and index PDF content, it is safer to use Acrobat 7.0 or lower to be sure that the search engines don’t pass over your PDF content because they can’t read it. Some of your users may not have the newest versions of Acrobat either, so it’s safer to save them in a format you know will be accessible to search engines and users alike.
7. Don’t forget to complete the document properties! Many times when we’re creating PDFs, we forget this critical step. In fact, most of the PDFs out there don’t have the document properties optimized or specified. The most important aspect of the document, like SEO on any other webpage, is the Title. In addition to being the text that’s presented as a search result, the PDF’s title is identical to an HTML tag. Simply go to “File” and then “Document Properties” to access the title properties, and from there you can also add other document properties related to meta data, including Subject, Keywords, Author, etc. What’s more, if you neglect to complete the title property, search engines grab a title from your PDF’s content, which may not necessarily be the best description of your document or the title you want. So always fill in the document properties in order to optimize your PDF like you would any other webpage. Start your PDF with a few targeted sentences describing the content and it’s more than likely that searches for the keywords you’ve chosen will include your PDF as a result.
8. Specify the reading order of your document, as search engines search the text of your PDF and then select a blurb to display as the description of your document. If your reading order isn’t specified, it’s possible that the search engines could select something pretty random. So don’t give them that chance. If you do, users probably won’t click on your PDF anyway. A good rule of thumb to remember is the same as traditional SEO: Search engines will index and subsequently associate the first thing they see with the content of your document. So how does one go about outlining the reading order? Using the full version of Acrobat, you’ll have to start at “Advanced,” move to “Accessibility” and then “Add Tags to Document.” From there go to “Touch Up Reading Order” and you’ll see the path a search engine would follow through your document. In addition, within the “Add Tags to Document” section, you’ll have the chance to tag images, headings, etc.

In conclusion, it’s clear that many companies have a wealth of content assets that they can easily convert to PDF format. Still, if these PDFs aren’t optimized, they won’t be nearly as effective in creating additional online visibility and boosting search engine ranking, which is one of the main reasons you’d do this in the first place. So remember, SEO applies to PDFs too, not just webpage’s, and moreover, as search engines continue their evolution and grow ever more sophisticated (click here to see how), PDFs are becoming even more valuable due to their ability to act as a virtual gold mine for content. When all is said and done, posting optimized PDFs lets your content work harder for you by boosting organic search engine rank and increasing your company’s online visibility and opportunities for interaction. Connect through content.

Author:  Nick Yorchak is an SEO expert and Search Engine Marketing Specialist at Fusionbox, a full-service Denver Internet marketing, web design, and web development company. He can be reached at his Fusionbox email nyorchak@fusionbox.com or at (303)952-7490