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Incorporate Four C’s to “PR” Your Facebook Page!

By John Casey in Featured

Command, Contest, Cause and Connect

“We’ve got to have a Facebook page!” That’s the exclamation of every small business. And, while many pages go live, they sit almost lifeless, as one of an infinite number of silent trees in a dense forest.

Many small business owners are increasingly recognizing that Facebook is fast becoming their number one public relations tool. But in order to sustain the life-blood for that page, they need to incorporate public relations tactics to generate traffic and build brand awareness. An easy and creative way to do this is to incorporate 4C’s to “PR” your Facebook page: command, contest, cause and connect.

Command

Creating command of an issue or topic is central to establishing a niche authority in your industry. Apple commands the portable music market. Google is the search authority. Nike is the running show king. They all sell other products or services, but have commanded a niche. Let’s say you’re a baker, with shelves full of cookies, cakes, pies, donuts, breads, etc. Pick one of your products. In this instance, let’s take the cake!

Give Up or Keep Going; The Decision That Defines You

By Robert Imbriale in Featured

It was 1995 and I was struggling to get my business off the ground. I was excited, spinning my wheels, yet getting nowhere fast. Money was coming in, but more of it was going out than was coming in.

Before very long, I found myself questioning whether or not to close my business and give up on my lifelong dreams.

When you arrive at a point like this, there are two choices you can make. First, you can choose to throw in the towel and walk away. Many people take this route and in later years begin to regret their decision.

The other option is to keep going and find new ways to get through the rough times. While you may wonder if there’s a third choice of doing nothing, that’s really not making a choice at all and it’s almost the same as giving up because if you do nothing, you’ll soon have nothing.

So there really is only one choice and that’s to keep going.

At some point in every lifetime, there are going to be rough and uncertain times. Later in life, you’ll look back and realize that whatever it was that you decided to do during those times has literally defined who you are in some profound way.

For those people that decide to give up, they often end up feeling deep regret and tend to fade into the fabric of society rarely ever making anything much of their lives.

If you are to become a true leader, you are probably the type to keep pushing through, no matter how tough things get. In our society today, there is a real lack of true leaders. We have a lot of people who talk a big game, but few who do what’s needed to step up and lead.

When things were really tough going for me, I made the decision to stick with it. Although everybody around me at the time was encouraging me to do the “safe” thing and go find a job, I stayed the course, never lost sight of my dream, and soon began to see things changing for the better.

Today, people think I’m lucky or that I had a few good breaks that made all the difference, when the reality could not be farther from the truth.

What I had then, you have now.

What I did then, you can do now.

The only thing that will ever stop you is you.

When you truly understand this very important point, things will change in your life for the better. The biggest obstacle to your success is you. The biggest challenge you’ll ever face in life is getting past your own limiting beliefs.

Every successful person, every leader, gets and uses advice from other people in order to get where they want to go. People who rise to the level of becoming a leader know that limiting beliefs can keep them back and so they get help in order to break through to the next level.

As human beings, we get far too close to our own beliefs and they become so much a part of who we are that we can’t even see them, let alone change them. What’s needed is a person who can see us from a fresh perspective, a person who is not involved in what I like to call our “internal politics.”

Whether it’s the President of a nation, of a company, or even a solo entrepreneur, those who rise to great levels of success all surround themselves with people they rely on to help them see the way forward.

Some call them advisers, others call them mentors, and still others refer to them as coaches. Whatever title you use to refer to these people, it’s important to realize that they are the people behind the leaders.

These people are often trained to see beyond what is, and instead put their attention on what could be. They also have a keen awareness for helping you bring your limiting beliefs to the surface so that you can address them in ways that are productive.

For many people, having a coach is the difference between mediocrity and domination of their careers.

Early on in my career, I was lucky enough to realize how important having outside help was and I sought out people who could help me get past the barriers that I was simply unable to break trough myself.

I’ve had at least one, and at times as many as 6 coaches working with me at any given time.

The results I’ve seen in my own life have been amazing thanks to the people I’ve chosen to work with along the way. With their help, I’ve shaved decades of trial and error away, improved my relationships, and have earned much, much more money in a shorter period of time that I would have had I not had a coach.

Oh, did I mention that I also became a well-known thought-leader in the marketing world and continue to called upon for my guidance and opinions by other industry leaders. None of this would have been possible had I not discovered the power of having a coach every step of the way.

I have been coaching business leaders from around to see beyond the obvious, to see what they are truly capable of, and to get past the beliefs that would have otherwise held them back.

I’m part of a growing legion of professional coaches who work to hasten the rise to success of businesses, enterprises, and individuals. Since 1995, when coaching really started to gain traction, coaching has become recognized as the “must-have” resource for people and organizations looking for rapid growth.

While coaching is not designed to replace traditional psychotherapy, it is a powerful tool that can take you to new levels of success in very short periods of time.

The issues best suited for coaching involve business strategy, personal development, and empowerment.

Leading coaches make little distinction between ‘personal’ and business issues because they realize how tightly related the two can be and instead choose to work on both, often simultaneously.

In my work as a coach, I’ve yet to run into a single person who could not benefit from coaching. The rewards of working with a great coach are immeasurable because once an issue is resolved, it’s resolved for life. That means that the benefits of the work you do with a coach are in place for the rest of your life.

Think of it as an investment with an unlimited ROI because once you learn a lesson from your coach, that lesson is yours for the rest of your life to use as often as you choose.

It is important to pick your coach wisely. Be sure the person, or people, you choose can not just see the vision you hold for your future, but can get on board with it as well. Your coach should have one single agenda: yours.

They should speak your language and see the best in you in every situation. And they should have a proven track record of success working with people who are similar to you or have a track record working with businesses that are similar to yours.

Finally, your coach should have current and past clients who have become raving fans of their work.

While these kinds of coaches are not always easy to find, it’s worth the extra effort to locate them because the results they will bring to your life will have a definite and powerful impact not just on you as a person, but on everybody you interact with as well.

When you find a coach that can meet these criteria, hang onto them! Do all you can to make sure they remain part of your inner circle for as long as they continue to bring measurable value to the table.

When you’re faced with a major decision, don’t make that decision on your own, get advice, get a coach who can help you see things from a new perspective because the decisions you make today will have a profound and lasting impact on your tomorrow.

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Robert Imbriale is known as a “Master Coach” for his extensive work with business owners, and entrepreneurs. He is the author of the book, Motivational Marketing (Wiley, 2007), and is the founder of Ultimate Wealth, Inc. Learn more about Robert’s coaching services, seminars, and see free training videos on his web site at www.RobertImbriale.com

Viral Marketing – Using It To Your Advantage

By Enzo F. Cesario in Featured

In our technologically expanding world, where the Internet is the most available form of media, Viral Marketing is an extremely effective form of advertising. Before the Web explosion, this form of advertising would have been referred to simply as “word of mouth” or getting your message out by having your customer base spread the word.

Why Use Viral Marketing?

There are several studies that state that if someone has a good experience, chances are they will tell a few close friends. However, with a bad experience people will repeat it to anyone who will listen. Since the pace of the Internet is so much faster than that of word of mouth, you will want to be careful with the messages you put out there. The message you put forth can spread, and spread quickly, whether that message is good or bad.

Viral Marketing is exactly what it sounds like – advertising that works like a virus does. It can be as simple as a message that is attached at the bottom of an email. Like a virus, as the email is sent from one person to another, so goes the attached message. It is like an electronic version of that famous television commercial that said “you’ll tell two friends, and they will tell two friends, and so on and so on…”, only with the World Wide Web, one well placed message can have the ability to reach millions with one click of the mouse.

Remember when Hotmail was starting? You could only get an account if a friend sent you an email with the link. Everyone wanted one, and emails spread like wildfire. And BMW had that great campaign with very famous directors, a very new Clive Owen and very short movies – all on the Internet, which was becoming a brand new venue for movies. You may not have enough money in your advertising budget to hire Clive Owen, but there are still things you can do to attempt some viral marketing.

Essential Features

To tap into the potential power of a viral campaign you will need a few essential elements – free products or services that are easily transferred to others using existing communications networks. These products or services should be something that will exploit people’s natural behaviors and emotions. Some examples beyond commercials would be how-to guides, surveys, best-of guides, educational guides, tools, widgets, quizzes and badges.

Sometimes nothing grabs peoples attention faster than the word FREE. Free trials, free email accounts, free anything can put you in a potential customer’s head. Free can get your name out there and introduce people to the goods or services that will generate future revenues for your business.

There are rewards you can offer as well. Rewarding loyal customers with anything from percentage rebates and coupons for future purchases to free gifts for their continued patronage is another outstanding way to make sure that your ‘virus’ continues to spread.

Know Your Customers

Knowing and understanding your customer base will make your viral marketing more successful; tracking and analyzing what motivates them to want to pass along your message. You need to know what makes them tick. What is going to make the working mother of three take the time out of an already incredibly busy day to not only be drawn to your message, but also be interested enough to pass that message along to the other extremely busy moms in her address book?

As an example, say you have an errand-running service. You could offer a day of running errands to the lucky winner of a contest. All you have to do to enter to win the free day of errands is to register by clicking the link to your website. Strategies such as these can be a bit more effective as the people that register tend to have an interest in the services you offer.

If you can zero in on who your customer is, this type of marketing can be quite inexpensive and highly effective. Online surveys and questionnaires can also be quite useful in getting inside your customer’s head. They can and should be your most valuable resource when it comes to figuring out what they want. Careful consideration of your customer’s needs and the commitment to meet those needs is what will ultimately make you successful in business.

Viral Marketing is a useful tool and it’s something to think about along with your other online marketing strategies. However, you still need to create something unusual and useful that people will naturally want to share and tell others about.

With the Internet there are opportunities to reach a much larger number of people much faster than in decades past. However, the basic marketing rules still apply if you want your viral marketing campaigns to be successful. Know your products or services. Know what demographics you are targeting. Get in their head and figure out what they need to feel compelled to not only spend their hard earned money with you, but what will make them want to keep coming back, and more importantly, bringing their friends with them.

About The Author:

Enzo F. Cesario is a Copywriter and co-founder of Brandsplat. Brandcasting uses informative content and state-of-the-art internet distribution and optimization to build links and drive the right kind of traffic to your website. Go to http://www.Brandsplat.com/ or visit our blog at: http://www.brandsplatblog.com/

Article Marketing: A Great Strategy To Promote Your Business

By Enzo F. Cesario in Featured

Promotion is an important part of any business; you need to let potential customers know about you and your product. Article marketing is a strategy that will increase your exposure to the people who will want to buy your product or service. Articles written about your industry will help to establish you, the author, as an expert in your field, and can be published in print media and online.

Customers have a preference for doing business with someone they are familiar with, and article marketing is an ideal way of getting your name out there. The content of your articles needs to be useful and relevant to your target market. Articles that are informative, interesting and provide solutions to your readers are tremendously helpful.

If writing is your thing, then do your own articles. If not, there are several sites online where you can connect with writers, eager for work. Choose someone who uses good grammar and spelling skills, and who can write in an informal and conversational style that is easy to read. Your name will appear as the author on these outsourced articles, promoting you as the expert.

These articles are meant to inform and add value to you and your product; they are not blatant sales letters. Online publishing sites wouldn’t publish sales letters anyway, and print media would avoid them as well. To establish your credibility, you need to give something to your readers, not blast them with sales talk. Don’t ever forget, the reason they are reading your articles is for the information.

Web and ezine writing is very different than writing for other off-line publications. Brief is better. Be concise and write in short paragraphs. Your main purpose is to capture their attention and to get them to visit your website. If your article is long with every piece of information, they won’t see the value in clicking the link to your site.

You should always check for spelling and grammatical errors before submitting your articles to directories. These kinds of errors will reflect badly on your reputation and credibility as a quality information provider. Try to avoid technical language, but provide an explanation of terms if they need to be included.

Put the major benefit to the reader in your title. The title will determine whether or not the reader will click to read the article and possibly click to visit your site. If they aren’t compelled to read the article, they will never get to see your link, or see your website.

Article directories are the sites where you submit articles for online publication. They check your articles to make sure they comply with their guidelines before they publish them. And though we won’t go into it here, print media, like newspapers and magazines, are also always looking for fresh copy, so you can also submit your interesting articles to them for publication.

Make good use of the resource box under the article; this is where you can promote your product and supply contact information. What you include here should encourage readers to click to your website. The best resource box describes your website or yourself in a short sentence and includes at least one link that points back to your website or blog. When the reader clicks on the link to your site, your website visibility will increase.

Remember, a brilliant article with a bad resource box is a waste of time and money. Carefully review the rules for resource box information for each directory you submit to and try to get in as much information about yourself as you can.

If you can, place links to other articles you’ve written in a new article you’re writing. Sometimes, if the advice is helpful, the ezines will let you do this. This cross-referencing will get you more bang for your buck. Before publishing them elsewhere, you should always add your articles to your website or your newsletter. This helps to identify you as the source of the information and is another good way to get your name out there to build relationships with potential customers.

Articles for online publication need to be written with search engines in mind. You need to use the most popular keywords that online users type into their search engine when looking for information about your topic. Use the keywords in your article, but do not saturate it with them. This ruins the readability of the article and will not add to your credibility at all.

Set up a blog to keep in contact with customers and interested contacts. You can upload your articles to your blog to give your readers a continual supply of interesting, informative articles about your area of expertise. Add new content frequently to keep the search engines interested in your articles. Use your blog as another means of promoting your product and yourself as trustworthy and interested in your customers.

Article marketing is probably one of the easiest and most effective ways of driving targeted traffic to your website and boosting your exposure on the Internet. These guidelines will help you get started in article marketing. Use them to promote your product or service and to establish yourself as an expert in your field, then watch your sales increase.

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Enzo F. Cesario is a Copywriter and co-founder of Brandsplat, the only online marketing and advertising company employing Brandcasting, the most effective way to brand your company on the web. Brandcasting uses informative content and state-of-the-art internet distribution and optimization to build links and drive the right kind of traffic to your website. The approach is simple, highly effective and affordable. Learn more at: http://www.Brandsplat.com

Read more articles written by: Enzo F. Cesario

Growing Your Business with Online Marketing

By Enzo F. Cesario in Featured

As a business owner, you know that one of the keys to a successful year is promoting your business. No matter what size your business is, marketing and promotion need to be addressed. Marketing has become a daunting task with the increasing number of online start-up businesses.

And now, along with the traditional offline marketing methods, there are many online marketing tools and methods available.

Online Marketing is also known as Internet Advertising, web marketing, web advertising or e-marketing.

There are many benefits to marketing your business online. Here are a few.

Lowering Your Costs

A recent eMarketer article (http://www.emarketer.com/Article/aspx?R=1007064) sites that “in the wake of the global economic downturn, marketers worldwide are shifting more of their budgets into cheaper, more-measurable categories. In most cases, that means online.”

Your marketing budget is only so big and online marketing can stretch it even farther for you. TV and radio spots are expensive, printing costs for corporate and product brochures are expensive and traditional mailings cost not only in materials and postage, but deplete the environment as well. Why not direct potential customers to your website for information on products and services? Your website is your brochure, a marketing tool available 24 hours a day to prospective customers. Your revenue potential will increase while your costs diminish.

Offline marketing ads for newspapers, TV and radio are for a limited time and you pay for the time slot and space. In online marketing, your ads potentially can stay up longer and over time you end up paying less. Using article marketing, you could either write an article yourself or pay someone else to write it. When that article is distributed online, it stays on the Internet for many years. For a small cost, you’ve placed a marketing proposition that stays around indefinitely, pointing potential customers to your website and your products and services.

Compared to traditional marketing or telemarketing, email marketing costs very little. These targeted messages go directly into the homes and offices of your potential or existing customers.

Reaching a Larger Market and a Targeted Market

The Internet allows people from all over the world to do business with each other.

From another recent eMarketer article, (http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1006988) in 2009, more than 65% of Americans are Internet users. They’re not only checking e-mail and Twittering, they are shopping for products and services.

With traditional media, your ads are restricted to a specific location for a limited time. When you promote your business online, you reach a larger audience than you would ever be able to reach otherwise since your marketing activity is not restricted by location. More potential customers always equal more sales opportunities.

Online marketing allows you to target specific demographics such as age, location, gender and income levels and in many cases allows you to track the behaviors of these groups as they interact with your online marketing.

It can also bring a branding campaign to life in a new way. This unique consumer interaction with your brand can leverage emotional links to your brand. Instead of a brand talking to a customer, your customer can interact with and experience your brand. This is intelligent brand marketing. You can influence people at the perfect time – their time, right when they are looking for information, comparison shopping and possibly buying.

Flexibility and Tangible Tracking

Online marketing can include email, newsletters, blogs, microblogs, podcasts, video and social media sites. All of these outlets have the ability to be flexible. An ad placed in a magazine or newspaper can’t be changed until the next submission. With online marketing you’ll know very quickly if a campaign is working and you can change wording or graphics and adapt product information to match changing market conditions.

The Internet also removes any guesswork from measuring campaign results. Using web analytics, you can measure the number of visitors that a campaign brings to your website, how long they stay and the average number of pages they visit. This important information along with the flexibility, allows you to improve the conversion of your campaign and to increase your return on investment.

Instant Conversion Ability

Online marketing allows you to convert a shopper to a customer instantly. A potential customer reading a traditional newspaper ad does not have the ability to click a mouse and buy your product or service immediately. Offline marketing involves more time and money to convert a shopper into a sale.

Online ads allow direct response. Consumers can click to learn more about a product, sign up for a newsletter or RSS feed, or buy right then and there. This will in turn create a database for you, which, with email marketing, will allow you to reach people who have already expressed an interest in your product or service. And online marketing allows you to sell to anyone, anywhere and at any time. You’re not restricted by time, geography and location considerations.

Internet marketing includes strategies such as search engine optimization (SEO), pay per click marketing (PPC), article marketing, blog marketing, online brandcasting, social media marketing and many more interactive marketing services.

While these strategies may seem daunting at first, with a little research, you can use some of these tools to help you optimize your website and increase web traffic. Or, if you have it in your budget, there are companies that specialize in many SEO services.

There are many benefits to both online and offline marketing. A mix of the two might be just what your business needs to grow.

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Enzo F. Cesario is a Copywriter and co-founder of Brandsplat, the only online marketing and advertising company employing Brandcasting, the most effective way to brand your company on the web. Brandcasting uses informative content and state-of-the-art internet distribution and optimization to build links and drive the right kind of traffic to your website. The approach is simple, highly effective and affordable. Learn more at: http://www.Brandsplat.com/

The 7 Effective Methods Of Getting Targeted Traffic

By Nelson Tan in Featured

I never believe in buying traffic. How do you think visitors come to know me? Did they pay to know me? Most probably they subscribed because of a free download in the first place. You may not remember how but YOU are the traffic. You are targeted because I hit your hot button correctly

There are enough free resources out there on the Net to keep one busy with getting traffic, but here are the only 7 most effective methods: search engine optimization (SEO), link exchange, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, article submissions, blogging, viral marketing and massive giveaway events.

Search engine optimization is the practice of optimizing your pages for the search engines so that your pages are optimized for the search engines to be searched with the most optimized keywords. You get the idea? SEO English is a bit like tongue twister. If you know the exact keywords your business or industry is famous for, you increase the density of those keywords in your page.

Actually, I don’t understand why some folks make SEO sound so complicated. On the other hand, other folks say SE spiders are so smart at discerning quality of content such that SEO is really much ado about nothing. Moreover, SEO English is just so unnatural sometimes and abuse may constitute as keyword spamming, unless you know the secret to writing it ‘fluently’. SEO is absolutely crucial in niche markets where competition in SE listings is not hot.

Exchanging links with like-minded webmasters create a network for increased traffic distribution. Interested visitors are free to visit your site when they see your link on other people’s sites. SEO targeted towards Google is only half the battle. Its PageRank tool measures your page’s link popularity and ranks it higher according to scale. The more links pointing into your site as opposed to pointing out, the merrier.

* PageRank looks at pages, not sites.

Pay-per-click advertising is all about how much you are willing to pay the PPC program for a high listing so that visitors take notice of your link and visit it. You incur the bid price you set for yourself for every visit (click). Considering ROI, this is particularly useful when you are selling a product. Security features are in place so there’s no point being trigger-happy if you don’t like some sites.

Article submissions can give you an amazing amount of traffic, but only if you use the method right. You should make sure the content you’re submitting is easily understandable, and only covers one or two points, leading the people back to your site with your resource box. Most importantly, you need to make sure that your article is interesting, compelling, and of course, informative. Once you’ve submitted these articles to several article directories, you’ll probably see a marked rise in link backs, traffic and more.

Blogging is a free way to make sure that you’re reaching traffic in all regions of your niche. It has come up in stature from its days of being simply a place to ‘share’ with your friends and is now a valid, and often well used promotional structure for a site-or even a basis for the site itself. Using WordPress especially can mean that you’ve got an easy-to-promote, amazingly simple to update site structure that allows you to build and maintain effortlessly. As a traffic generation tool, it is also a good way to create, maintain and direct traffic to your site. The more you blog using popular search terms related to your niche, the more intensive you’re practicing SEO as the archiving system of the WordPress blog script is absolutely well suited for Google indexing. Try to post on alternate days if not everyday.

Viral Marketing is everything and anything to do with propagating your name and URL through giving away free e-books, reports, article and e-zine submission, classified ads etc. But this is only by technological means. With people, we are talking about word-of-mouth.

Massive giveaway events come once in a while but they are really the biggest source of opt-in subscribers for anyone who participate in them. The organizer announces a proposal to carry out such an event, inviting contributors to submit a product of their own or one with resell rights to be given away for free. When the event begins, anyone and everyone can download all these exclusive products as long as they opt in. It’s very easy to get 1,000 subscribers in a week.

Of course, the organizer gets the most numbers, but he also puts in the most work to make sure the web server doesn’t collapse due to traffic overload, the gifts don’t go missing and the event proceeds on schedule.

Awareness and application of the 7 above traffic generation methods slowly but surely builds a good list of followers who are willing to patronize us.

Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com

Article Distribution vs. Guest Blogging: Is There a Difference?

By Karon Thackston in Featured

To many people, the idea of guest blogging is fresh and new and very “Web 2.0.” Personally, I find the discussion to be a rather déjà vu-like experience. In fact, one participant on my blog responded to a post about articles by asking how I would contrast guest blogging with article marketing. He wanted to know how I chose between placing my articles on directories and writing an exclusive blog post. The short answer is: I don’t.

Remembering the Good Old Days of Article Marketing

Circa 1990, the first article directories began to pop up online with the invention of ezines (email magazines). Many publishers of these soon-to-be-popular email newsletters quickly got tired of writing all the content themselves. Others decided to offer compilations of recent articles published by others about a particular topic.

The article directories provided a wonderful new outlet for gathering quality content in exchange for a simple bio at the end with a link back to the author’s site. Articles were written to provide quality information to readers in the hope that they would favor the author with a click.

A few of the many benefits of article marketing were (and still are):

> > Increasing traffic to your website > > Positioning before a highly targeted audience > > Branding yourself as an expert > > SEO > > Online networking and exposure before new groups of people > > Free advertising > > Infinite archiving of your material > > Almost instant propagation throughout the Internet

With changes in link popularity, it soon became common knowledge that using keyword-rich anchor text carried more weight with engines than simple http: links. As is typical with so many Internet-based marketing methods, the article marketing landscape began to be overtaken by spammers.

A Twisted Sense of Article Marketing

A push for quantity quickly took over the article marketing arena and left quality articles in their wake. The invention of article writing software that illegally harvests snippets of text from existing online content and the invention of article blaster software gave speed to those looking to distribute what are now referred to as “junk articles.”

While this may have caused a decrease in the quality of links coming from article directories, the other marketing benefits remain to this day. Quality articles that get picked up from directories and republished on website pages, in ezines and on blogs still enjoy the benefits article marketing has always offered.

Enter Guest Blogging

The advent of blogging and other social media outlets gave new opportunities for professionals to share their expertise with others. Companies as well as individuals found many advantages to publishing blogs including:

• Increasing traffic to your website
• Positioning before a highly targeted audience
• Branding yourself as an expert
• SEO
• Online networking and exposure before new groups of people
• Free advertising
• Infinite archiving of your material
• Almost instant propagation throughout the Internet

(Hmm… sounds familiar. Where have I heard this before?)

When we look back at blogging after two or three more years, will it have followed a path similar to article distribution? Will the evil, greedy powers that be attempt to stamp out the benefits of guest blogging in the near future? It’s very possible. We’re seeing it to some extent already. Trackbacks and ping backs are being manipulated by spammers as we speak.

Search Engine Optimization Issues

The same dark SEO clouds that hang over article marketing can be seen drifting towards blogs. Concerns about duplicate content can be voiced with regard to blog replication as well as articles. Entire blogs are duplicated on scraper sites every single day within seconds of the original posts being made public.

Should you be concerned? I’m not.

Truth is, article marketing is not devoid of search engine benefits as some claim. While the link quality of article directories themselves may have been degraded over time, they only account for one source of links. That’s because the article directories were just a jumping off point. They should never have been viewed as the final destination of articles. The goal has always been to have your article picked up from directories and reprinted on authority sites or blogs. That’s where your linking benefits come in.

Even if I get no SEO benefits from article marketing or guest blogging, I’d still do both on a regular basis. It’s not an either/or choice for me: it’s good marketing. Since long before the Internet was ever thought of, professionals would strive to gain exposure by having their articles published in print magazines. This type of marketing has proven to be successful for decades, online and off, and it’s still a valid marketing method today.

Karon Thackston – Want to make the most of your article marketing campaign? Learn effective techniques to boost link popularity. Get more info today at http://www.searchenginecollege.com/article-marketing-distribution-course.shtml

How To Analyze Website Traffic

By Nelson Tan in Featured

Analyzing your web traffic statistics can be an invaluable tool for a number of different reasons. But before you can make full use of this tool, you need to understand how to interpret the data.

Most web hosting companies will provide you with basic web traffic information that you then have to interpret and make pertinent use of. However, the data you receive from your host company can be overwhelming if you don’t understand how to apply it to your particular business and website. Let’s start by examining the most basic data-the average visitors to your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

These figures are the most accurate measure of your website’s activity. It would appear on the surface that the more traffic you see recorded, the better you can assume your website is doing, but this is an inaccurate perception. You must also look at the behavior of your visitors once they come to your website to accurately gauge the effectiveness of your site.

There is often a great misconception about what is commonly known as “hits” and what is really effective, quality traffic to your site. Hits simply means the number of information requests received by the server. If you think about the fact that a hit can simply equate to the number of graphics per page, you will get an idea of how overblown the concept of hits can be. For example, if your home page has 15 graphics on it, the server records this as 15 hits, when in reality we are talking about a single visitor checking out a single page on your site. As you can see, hits are not useful in analyzing your website traffic.

The more visitors that come to your website, the more accurate your interpretation will become. The greater the traffic is to your website, the more precise your analysis will be of overall trends in visitor behavior. The smaller the number of visitors, the more a few anomalous visitors can distort the analysis.

The aim is to use the web traffic statistics to figure out how well or how poorly your site is working for your visitors. One way to determine this is to find out how long on average your visitors spend on your site. If the time spent is relatively brief, it usually indicates an underlying problem. Then the challenge is to figure out what that problem is.

It could be that your keywords are directing the wrong type of visitors to your website, or that your graphics are confusing or intimidating, causing the visitor to exit rapidly. Use the knowledge of how much time visitors are spending on your site to pinpoint specific problems, and after you fix those problems, continue to use time spent as a gauge of how effective your fix has been.

Additionally, web traffic stats can help you determine effective and ineffective areas of your website. If you have a page that you believe is important, but visitors are exiting it rapidly, that page needs attention. You could, for example, consider improving the link to this page by making the link more noticeable and enticing, or you could improve the look of the page or the ease that your visitors can access the necessary information on that page.

If, on the other hand, you notice that visitors are spending a lot of time on pages that you think are less important, you might consider moving some of your sales copy and marketing focus to that particular page.

As you can see, these statistics will reveal vital information about the effectiveness of individual pages, and visitor habits and motivation. This is essential information to any successful Internet marketing campaign.

Your website undoubtedly has exit pages, such as a final order or contact form. This is a page you can expect your visitor to exit rapidly. However, not every visitor to your site is going to find exactly what he or she is looking for, so statistics may show you a number of different exit pages. This is normal unless you notice an exit trend on a particular page that is not intended as an exit page. In the case that a significant percentage of visitors are exiting your website on a page not designed for that purpose, you must closely examine that particular page to discern what the problem is. Once you pinpoint potential weaknesses on that page, minor modifications in content or graphic may have a significant impact on the keeping visitors moving through your site instead of exiting at the wrong page.

After you have analyzed your visitor statistics, it’s time to turn to your keywords and phrases. Notice if particular keywords are directing a specific type of visitor to your site. The more targeted the visitor-meaning that they find what they are looking for on your site, and even better, fill out your contact form or make a purchase-the more valuable that keyword is.

However, if you find a large number of visitors are being directed-or should I say misdirected-to your site by a particular keyword or phrase, that keyword demands adjustment. Keywords are vital to bringing quality visitors to your site who are ready to do business with you. Close analysis of the keywords your visitors are using to find your site will give you a vital understanding of your visitor’s needs and motivations.

Finally, if you notice that users are finding your website by typing in your company name, break open the champagne! It means you have achieved a significant level of brand recognition, and this is a sure sign of burgeoning success.

Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com

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