Sense amongst Madness - Wit amongst Folly

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Contents

* Article Marketing Overview
* Create Traffic and Sales through Content
* Content is STILL King
* Article Syndication
* Building Web Credibility
* Content Soft Sell
* Tips for hiring Freelance Writers
* Writing for the Web
* Recommended Article Submission Software
* Full Article Marketing Course
* and more …

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How do you actually convince someone to pull out their credit card and actually busy something from your website?

Anyone who knows the answer to that question, or even part of the answer is worth a million bucks. Unfortunately there ins’t any one answer and ‘the answer,’ such as it is, comes slowly and hard. And further, it is different for different types of sites.
Strategies for Education sites are going to be different from strategies for sites that sell machinery.

My personal strategy for promoting sites is the “learning library” approach where lots of free information is provided for browsers with a soft sell approach. This type of promotional strategy works well for education related sites, dating sites, some web and Internet related sites, for example SEO content sites, but not web design sites. Maybe more…

The learning library strategy means creating an online library of material that is related to your product or service. See my other posts on Anatomy of a Content Site, Broad Conent and Content Sites Sell

What are SEO Articles?
SEO Articles are web content that has a specified number of keywords. For example, an article, that may be part of a Learning Library or Knowlege Center on a website, may contain 17 repetitions of a particular keyword. For a 1000 word article, that is 1.7% keywords density.
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Local search has got to be one of the best bargains out there! Here are some local search results I noticed this morning.

Submitting to Google local search is free and ranking is easy.

A recent study by comScore found:

63 percent of U.S. Internet users (or approximately 109 million people) performed a local search online in July, a 43-percent increase versus July of 2005.

Not only is local search increasing fast, the people that perform local searches are highly attractive to web merchants:

During the second quarter of 2006, 47 percent of local searchers visited a local merchant as a result of their search behavior, while 41 percent made contact offline. More than one-third (37 percent) made contact online as a result of conducting a local area search.

During the second quarter of 2006, 47 percent of local searchers visited a local merchant as a result of their search behavior, while 41 percent made contact offline. More than one-third (37 percent) made contact online as a result of conducting a local area search.

Why local search?
Local Search has been growing for a while and the reasons behind it make sense. If I am looking for a local merchant, or service, a website gives me a much richer experience than a yellow pages ad.

In addition, the only option a yellow pages ad gives me is to call, which I may not be prepared to do because I want to browse and check out other merchants first.

Combined with a marketing campaign targeting location keywords, you can get twice the real estate on the front page!

Content sites are a great way to soft sell your way to high conversion. I keep producing content for my own sites and client sites and watching the traffice increase slowly but steadily.

Something I have been noticing recently is sites jump in and out of the rankings for no apparent reason. Reading one of my favorities blogs recently BlueHatSEO, I found an article which goes into all the gory details of how Google handles fresh content.
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Today’s post is several items that don’t generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to
small business owners:

Organic and PPC

Media Post’s Search Insider recently did a great article on the advantages and dis-advantages of Organic Search vs. Pay Per Click

http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=54507

Thanks to cingular wireless, we can enjoy all internet services while sitting in our porch and placing our wireless router with the phone. This has been largely made possible by the efficient service of midphase. There are antivirus firewall software arrangements too because of the chat software in our systems, increasing risk of viral threats. Reliable names should be purchased like microsoft office software and only the genuine copy.

I had several conversations with webmasters and clients recently about how much traffic is required for a website to be profitable.

Several webmasters, who have around 200 unique visitors per day, complained that they were making nothing from their sites. The commonly held view of traffic and profitability is that you need thousands or tens of thousands of visitors to make money online.

Here is a short list of some of the factors that go into making a website profitable.
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Ok so you have a website now and an SEO guy has just told you it will cost $2000 – $5000 to get your site on the first page of Google. And it doesn’t stop there! Even after you have paid that much, it will take a year or more.

Those are unfortunately the facts of life. Probably you can get some traffic from MSN and Yahoo in 4 – 6 months, but generally the traffic from Yahoo and MSN doesn’t convert as well.

So, what can small business owners do in the meantime, without a big budget, that will increase their visibility?
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Clients and browsers frequently ask me for information on promoting their website, what they can do, and how the search engines work. So here is a quick primer on what the search engines do, what they want for small business owners with a brand new website.
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I am a big fan of Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg at FutureNow, and highly recommend their newsletter.

Here are a couple of articles that explain, point by point, how to write more contact us, and about us pages.

Writing more effective Contact Us pages
Writing more effective About Us pages