Article Marketing Strategy is one of the best ways to get quality highly targeted traffic. Not only will you benefit from being listed in the most viewed categories you can also make it to the most published article category too. But more on that later. Lets get right to it. I will list out 8 secrets that done correctly will help you dominate the article directories and get lots of traffic.

1. Top Copy - Of course you need to have something relevant and intriguing to say. Write from the heart but do not ramble. Get to the point fast and offer value. Sometimes you want to offer information you would normally charge for.

2. Organize Your Article - The way you layout your article is actually very important. You want to make your article readable by the skimmers. Most people have short attention spans even when they want to learn something. Make your article stick out. Use bullet points and start new lines for important sections, words, or sentences.

3. Wondering Eyes - Now everyone has wondering eyes. So take advantage of this trait. Use Bold, italic, and if allowed small pictures or emotion icons. Highlight words through out your article that tell their own story. Your skimmers will see these words and get the picture. Your main goal is to get the reader all the way through the article to your resource box and clicking your links to find out more.

4. Keywords Are Key - Do a little keyword research. Write your article using the keywords you find and sprinkle them through out your article. Place the keyword in the title, body, and resource box. Definitely use the keyword as an anchor text in your resource box.

5. Internal Back linking - The large article directories have hundreds of thousands and some millions of article in their database. This creates a whole lot of back link opportunity for you. Your goal is to get into the categories that will deliver the most Article Marketing Strategy to your article then your website. Most of the large article directories have categories such as most viewed article and most published. These tends to be difficult to get into but the pay off is sweet. More on that later.

6. Generate Article Traffic - In order to get into those special categories you need people to come view your article. This is where your back linking skills come into play. But I would first start by telling all of your friends that you have a great article that they should go and view. You can republish your article whereever you would like to get some back links generated for your article. You want to pick places where you can generate views of your article. One great place is social networking sites. Especially ones that allow you to have a blog.

7. Faster Approval - Online you will here a lot of people say take action. But taking action sometimes takes time. Well we all know time is money. So to help get that money you will want to take advantage of the faster approval methods these article directories give you. Most of these options cost money. If you can afford it, do it. its worth it. The faster you are approved the faster you can get working on your traffic and the faster you get paid.

Bonus: Promotion - I touched a little on this in tip 6 but I want to be more specific. I mentioned use social networking sites to republish your approved article but what social networking sites you ask. Here’s a few. Start with Ning.com. If you haven’t heard of ning.com get familiar. This site allows individuals like you and I to create our own social networking site. Ning is a great resource to place your republished articles. Not only will you get a back link to your original article you will be grabbing the attention of the members of the ning site you just joined. It’s a win win. Check out the warrior forum (do a Google search) and search for lists of do follow bookmarking sites and social networking sites. These lists will work wonders for you.

Original article from Ezine Articles - Article Traffic

Squidoo Lens about Article Marketing Strategy

D & D Media Group Internet Marketing article marketing, article traffic

Ezine Articles has added a great new tool that helps you place appropriate keywords into your articles. Just when you thought the site couldn’t get any better.

It’s nice to know they continue to add great funtionality to the site.

Check out their blog post about it here

D & D Media Group Internet Marketing articles, ezine articles, keyword tool, new keyword field helper

SEO Question: Hello, How do sites such as: ____ and _____ work with flat fees Where everyone else charges us up the wazoo.
Do you offer such a program for my business. - Thanks, Paul

Short answer: “Laws control the lesser man. Right conduct controls the greater one.” - Mark Twain

Some People Provide Value, Others Steal Money

Long answer: Believe it or not, at one point in time I was an SEO client who bought a trashy scammy service. The site I was trying to market was terrible, they offered no link building solutions for it, and instead suggested I create copies of pages on the site with hidden links pointing back and forth to try to rank well for some obscure 5 word phrases that nobody searches for.

Now those people could have told me that my site was a poor website and I can improve it by doing x, y, and z. But they didn’t care about the actual outcome of the work. They just wanted $149 and they got it. That was over six years ago, and they are still scamming people today.

Many Big Organizations Sell Scammy No-Value SEO Services

Most SEO buyers are allured by the prospect of free traffic and that free price-point sets their anchoring for the price. Further their first introduction to SEO comes from non-SEO. Many web hosts, domain registrars, clueless web designers (who talk up web standards but do no actual SEO research), and sleazy telemarketers offer low priced flat rate packages that have no value. Some of the domain registrars and web hosts run on such thin margins that they would be bankrupt without selling stuff like the scammy bolt on no value SEO packages. To highlight such scams I created dollarseo.com to show how they did not work.

Which Creates a Market For Lemons Effect

John Andrews also highlighted this issue in the past, in a post about a market for lemons, comparing the market for SEO services to the used car market:

As non-selling good cars were removed from the market, masquerading “lemons” dominated, setting the tone for the used car market, and further blocking actually good used cars from appearing. In the end, the used car market becomes a market for lemons, not a used car market.

It seems SEO has the same problem. As “boiler-room” SEO firms cold-call companies and pitch ridiculously low prices for SEO contracts, based on old and incorrect SEO information readily accessible to consumers, high quality SEO firms start looking “too expensive”. Consumer research into SEO does not reveal better information, since that knowledge comprises a significant portion of the value SEO consulting, and is thus not freely published. The entire market for SEO services starts to become a market not for actual search engine optimization, but more a market for “snake oil SEO” than true SEO.

Consider the Baseline

To further put the economics of SEO in context, any great SEO should be able to profit from marketing their own websites about their own interests. If I was still interested in baseball cards (like I was in high school) I have no doubt that I could make 6 figures a year promoting a website about baseball cards. That interest faded. But any interests I have I can attempt to monetize. That sets the barrier kinda high for client services. Why would I market someone’s thin affiliate site selling Viagra cheaply when if I poured the same effort into my own sites which I love I would make far more profits?

Competent SEOs Have Many Options

Because of snake oil SEO salesmen (and people who want to buy something cheap) the SEO market is very hard to extract money from in service based businesses unless…

1. you run your own publishing business (monetized through affiliate ads, contextual ads, lead generation, direct ad sales, creating & selling your own products + services) and optimize your own websites (which we do)

2. you sell information and/or tools that others can use to apply to learning SEO (which we do)

3. you sell other niche services (like keyword research or link building) that help clients, but are only a piece of the overall strategy (we do not do too much of this, but sometimes do)

4. you have very few select high end client relationships (which we do)

5. you hire a bunch of salesmen to sell worthless trash to the bottom 80% of the consumer market. (which we do NOT do)

This site is about 90% of my labor and about 30% of our profit. But we still run it for a variety of reasons…

• it is one of my favorite hobbies

• income diversity

• running this site (and interacting with hundreds of smart SEOs) helps give us more feedback on international markets and inform some of marketing strategies

• there are a lot of ways to make money online that are somewhat dirty, but this site is pure as snow and helps thousands of families put food on their tables.

Some Markets Are Competitive & Expensive

Anyone who is selling flat rate SEO services is selling a service priced without exploring the market and learning how competitive it is. Ranking well for credit cards might be worth millions of dollars. But it might also cost that much to rank. Ranking for Salem, Oregon bus rental is far easier and can be done using less than 1% of the capital investment.

Worse yet (for the consumer of a flat rate SEO service), SEO is a winner take most market. Most people click on the first page of the search results, with most those clicks happening on the top few listings. So lets say one of the flat rate companies was surprisingly not a scam and actually gave a crap about your business. This is doubtful in most cases, but lets just consider it. Well if they under-price the flat rate and rank you on page 2 or 3 you still are not going to get very much traffic, and (in spite of them trying their best on limited resources) you still probably lost money because page 3 of the search results = fail.

Is Google Flat Rate?

And here is another way of looking at it. Google AdWords doesn’t sell their keywords for a flat rate. The words live in an auction that rises and falls with consumer demand. At the same time, advertisers who are paying Google over $10,000,000,000 a year are starting to put some of that budget into organic SEO. With the average SEO employee earning roughly $80,000 a year it is hard to believe that an outsourced discount flat rate package can compete.

Flat Rate Dream Homes Located in _____ for Only $5,000

I am not sure who came up with this analogy. I think it was Danny Sullivan (he is always great with those), but how many contractors do flat rate home building? Probably 0 legitimate ones. Everything is important from the foundation, to the number of rooms, to the materials used, and any special requests need to be considered.

Knowing if the house is on the side of the mountain, if it needs rocks cleared away, if it is in a swamp and could sink is important. Likewise legitimate SEO consulting aims to know the direction of the market, understand the brand, evaluate domain name selection, survey the market, and assess strengths and weaknesses.

Only AFTER all that work has been done to establish a foundation then you have to establish a well researched market strategy and keyword strategy. Then you need to do push marketing and other forms of marketing to build links. You might need to build 100 or 100,000 to compete. No matter how perfect your site is optimized, you generally are not going to rank for competitive keywords until AFTER some link building has been done. On-page optimization has a glass ceiling.

Rarely, if ever, do flat rate SEO service providers build quality links. And if the do buy them, then it is generally to some prescribed generic schedule rather than a specific plan catered to your market and your website. And while the provider is stuck working within that flat rate someone else is subscribing to sites like this one, learning SEO, and aggressively reinvesting their profits to further build a competitive advantage.

It is very hard for an outsourced discount service to compete with a self-interested business owner.

In the markets worth being in, pre-defined flat rate SEO rarely gets it done.

Original Post by www.seobook.com

D & D Media Group S.E.O increasing traffic, keyword research, search engine, seo