Flawed Strategies

In 2005, a few of the Internet Marketing gurus took notice of the success people were having with article marketing, and they passed this news to the Internet Marketing newbies of the world. But, there was something missing from the advice given.

In a lot of cases, the people preaching the power of article marketing had never used the technique themselves. Even today, few of my article distribution competitors utilize reprint articles to promote their own businesses. Most of my competitors rely upon affiliate marketing to promote their websites.

Unfortunately, the Internet Marketing newbies of the world were given a lot of bad advice. It was said that:

The only suggestion that bore any resemblance to the truth was the first item about “building links for link popularity”, but the error in this statement was to assume that there was no other purpose for article marketing.

The Bigger Picture

I have been using article marketing to promote my own websites since 1999, and I have offered article-marketing services professionally since 2000 and under my current domain since 2001. I had been using article marketing and providing services for at least five years, before the gurus started leading the uninitiated Internet Marketers astray in 2005.

As one of the pioneers in this industry, I have always attributed three benefits to article marketing, in this order:

1. Publication in a newsletter ensures that thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of readers, can read ones’ article when it is published. (Frequently, publication day for my articles will generate phone calls from many potential customers and multiple sales, sometimes thousands in sales.)

2. Publication on a website increases the likelihood that your article will be found and read on websites that have targeted and loyal visitors.

3. Building links for link popularity and improved search rankings.

I have never denied the ability to use articles to build ones’ link popularity and to increase ones’ ranking in the search engines. In fact, my website ranks in the top 20 results in Google for hundreds of keywords.

But in my experience, using articles to increase search rankings is something that is ranked at #3 in my list, because it is a long-term play. Your ability to rank in Google for specific keywords is influenced significantly by what your competitors have done before you. I have used this example many times before, but if you want to rank for the keyword “travel” against such websites as: Expedia, Yahoo, Orbitz, The Travel Channel, CNN, Travelocity, Lonely Planet, USA Today, the New York Times, and the U.S. Government; then you better bring a huge budget to the contest.

Once the newbie in Internet Marketing is aware of the challenges of the search rankings game, then the newbie is better prepared to target and get realistic results from an article marketing campaign.

What Newsletter Publishers Require From Their Writers

While it may be true that a few article directory managers do not review articles before publication, it is not true of all article directories. Directories such as www.EzineArticles.com, www.IdeaMarketers.com, www.Website-Articles.net, www.InvisibleMBA.com, www.ArticleStars.com, www.ArticleDashboard.com, and www.Isnare.com have editors who personally review each and every article posted to their directories, to ensure that the articles meet the directory’s editorial guidelines.

And, newsletter publishers personally read and approve every single article they publish. Why? In order for a publisher to be able to sell high-dollar advertising, the newsletter must attract and retain loyal readers. In order to get and keep readers, the newsletter must “absolutely” publish content that its readers appreciate receiving and want to read.

Herein lies “the secret to success” in article marketing. Not only do newsletter publishers read articles, seeking to find the content that will ensure the loyalty of their readers, the website publishers who have served loyal audiences for several years also strive to provide their readers only the best content available.

Article Spinner Software Stops Short Of Serving The Reader

No matter how well the Content Spinner software sellers may write their sales copy, one would be a fool to trust computers to write the kind of articles that people want to read.

Remember, the newsletter publisher and the successful webmaster are solely focused on finding content that will keep their readers loyal to them. Also remember that the “link building game for link popularity” is a long-term play that could take years to see fruition.

Given this knowledge, why would someone who is truly seeking success online be willing to trust that the article spinners are able to develop articles that would pass the “human eye test” or even the “smell test”?

What The Article Marketing Professionals Have To Say

I know that I have always suggested that one should take into account what someone is selling, before taking his or her word at face value. Since I sell ghostwriting services, it is absolutely in your best interests to take my words with much skepticism. BUT… I am not the only professional Internet Marketer with this viewpoint. Following are quotes by people whose names you may recognize.

Christopher Knight of Ezine Articles was asked, “How much must I change or rewrite my article so that your content filters won’t reject it or suspend my account?” Chris responded, “The answer is all of it. Seriously, don’t rewrite your own articles. Just create new ones. It’s not that hard.” Chris added that derivative content adds no value to his website. (blog.ezinearticles.com/2008/07/content-filtering.html)

Chris McElroy from www.ArticleContentProvider.com says, “Computer-generated articles can never replace hand-written original content. Just getting articles into article directories does not help your link popularity, so submitting garbage will get you nothing in return. Only when your articles are reprinted in newsletters, ezines, websites, and blogs that are related to your topic do you get any value from article marketing. Those who think otherwise don’t understand the first thing about article marketing or SEO.”

Allen Taylor, who contributes to the article marketing blog at articlecontentprovider.com/article-marketing-blog/ was asked to review someone’s article spinner software. I am sure the guy who requested the review is kicking himself in the butt right now; since Allen proceeded to show his readers exactly how worthless the software is in the real world.

Allen concluded his review with the following words: “I would not recommend rewriting your articles. Just write fresh articles that don’t threaten to have problems like the ones noted above. Really, it doesn’t take long to write a 500-word article that can be used for article marketing or other online marketing purposes. If you’re going to do something, why not do it right?” (articlecontentprovider.com/article-marketing-blog/?p=177)

Willie Crawford (TIMIC.ORG/) is not an article-marketing professional. Instead, he is a professional marketer, who uses article marketing to promote the many websites that make up his online empire. Willie is a seven-figure earner, and yet, he continues writing new articles whenever he has the time to do so.

Willie said: “I’ve looked a numerous ‘article spinners’ and seen that the output from them was generally so incoherent that it would have been an insult to my readers.”

“I respect my readers and realize that writing is communicating one human to another. That’s why all of the articles that I publish are unique and not software generated variations of my work.”

Communicating One Human To Another

Those people who have found the greatest success utilizing article marketing as a promotional tool are those who understand that article marketing is best-used as a tool to communicate “one human to another.”

At the beginning of this article, I suggested, “Success and failure is determined by the writers’ motivation, and more importantly, by the writers’ commitment to the reader.”

Successful newsletter publishers are those who have made a commitment to keep their readers interested and reading every issue. Successful webmasters and bloggers are those who have made a commitment to keeping their readers satisfied and coming back to their websites frequently. All are looking for article content that will attract readers to their publications and ensure reader loyalty.

The successful article marketer is the person who understands his or her audience and gives his or her audience exactly what they want.

The article must convince the newsletter publisher that his or her subscribers will value the message in the article enough to read the next issue. The article must convince the Webmaster and Bloggers that the article will keep a reader on his or her website for a while longer. And finally, the reader must be thankful for having been given the opportunity to read the article.

In the end, the decision is yours. Are you simply happy complaining about what could have, should have been with the articles you have written. Or, do you want to invest what will be required to make sure your article marketing campaigns are successful?

Editor’s Note: Article published here.

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Bill Platt has been helping online marketers with article ghostwriting and article distribution services since 2001, through his website: thephantomwriters.com/ Read more of Bill’s thoughts on article marketing at his blog: article-blog.thephantomwriters.com/

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But before I can show you how to reduce your advertising expenses and increase your traffic, it is important for you to learn about proper keyword research.

When playing the search engine rankings game, it is important to know what people are “actually typing into the search engines” in an attempt to find your business…

Food For Thought

Think about this, if you were going to take a vacation to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and you needed to find accommodations in Ft. Lauderdale FL, what would your first search keywords be?

Would your first search be the generic search phrase, “travel”?

If you answered, “Certainly not”, then you and I are not much different…

Why would anyone type in the generic keyword “travel”, when they know specifically what they want, before doing the search?

They wouldn’t, would they?

Some people will abbreviate the “Fort” in Fort Lauderdale; others will not abbreviate. The same applies to the state information – some will abbreviate; others will not. Some web searchers will eliminate the state information, because they assume that Google will know “which” Fort Lauderdale they mean. (In the case of Fort Lauderdale, that is reasonable to believe. But search for something like “Paris”, and you might discover that 23 U.S. states have a town or city named, Paris, along with the country of France.)

People will search for a range of spellings for the locality, and then they would add niche-specific keywords to their search, utilizing words like:

Expand Your Thinking

Chances are that even if you sat down to generate a list of keyword phrases that people might use to find your business in the search engines, you will get stuck in the “keyword rut” that bogs down so many other webmasters… The “keyword rut” that I speak of is the one where we get a certain set of words and types of words stuck in our heads, and that prevents us from exploring the wider range of what might be available.

Even the best keyword research tools fail to show us the full-range of related keywords – keyword research tools tend to only show us the keyword phrases of a “similar root word”. For example, if you type in the word “hotel”, you can get vastly different results from the Google Keyword Research Tool (adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) and the WordTracker Keyword Tool (freekeywords.wordtracker.com/).

Just to prove my point, I ran the keyword “hotel” through both keyword search tools. Google’s Keyword Research Tool performed better than the WordTracker tool, but WordTracker does provide better estimates of search-volumes outside of the Google universe.

While not all-inclusive, I wanted to show you a list of suggested keywords that I was expecting to find using both tools. Behind each Keyword, I indicate in parenthesis which tools provided those suggestions to me…

As you will note from this example, if you let the keyword research tools do all of your thinking for you, then you would have missed over half of the keyword phrases that are actually relevant to your business…

That my friend spells m-i-s-s-e-d o-p-p-o-r-t-u-n-i-t-i-e-s!

How To Do Better Keyword Research

A trip to the library or your favorite bookstore could be the best thing you will ever do for your business research / keyword research…

Use book titles to narrow your search, but check the “back of the book” for the Index, before you make your selection…

Many of the best books in the non-fiction niche have an index at the end of the book, with page-after-page of topic related keywords, with page numbers.

If you have selected the most relevant book from the shelf, and it has a good Index at the end of it, you will have one of the best resources you will ever need to do keyword research in your niche.

Value The Long-Tail Keywords

Many people make the mistake of only chasing the high-volume keyword phrases that signal strong interest in a topic…

However, the high-volume keywords have some inherent shortcomings:

The still-generic search for “Fort Lauderdale travel” will require $1.72 per click, with 8,100 searches per month.

A more specific search for “Fort Lauderdale Florida hotels” will actually cost an amazing $3.48 per click, but the hotels that are paying for those leads are more likely to get a larger portion of the 60,500 monthly searches, since this search phrase is far more precise.

“Fort Lauderdale beach resorts” only costs $2.02 per click and has 27,000 monthly searches, which is really inexpensive compared to the still-generic “Fort Lauderdale Florida hotels”.

“Fort Lauderdale resort” is even cheaper at $1.93 click, with 50,000 monthly searches.

“Fort Lauderdale beach place” gets a surprisingly high, 3,600 searches per month. It has two competitors and can be purchased at an average of $1.06 per click.

…Do you see where we are going here?

Here is where I get to drive my point home… “Fort Lauderdale reservations” gets 40,000 searches per month, and it has an average Cost Per Click (CPC) in Google of a measly 5 cents per click!

As individual searchers drill down into the search results, your chances of appealing directly to them when they are likely to make a purchase is greatly increased… And more to the point of this article, you can generate a lot more traffic for a lot less money…

If you have fewer competitors on the long-tail keywords AND you pay less for those clicks, you could very well cobble together a large list of long-tail keywords that will give you access to the same volume of traffic you would get with one high-volume search, for much less money!

Let me make my point with “Fort Lauderdale beach resorts”, which has 27,000 monthly searches at a rate of $2.02 per click, and “Fort Lauderdale resort” with an 50,000 monthly searches and an average CPC of $1.93. These two long-tail keywords co-joined will be exposed to 77,000 people at Google, and those clicks will cost an average of less than $2.02 per click.

If you simply compared the above example with the 60,000 searches for “Fort Lauderdale Florida hotels” at $3.48 per click, you will find that you can reach more people, at more than a 38% discount in PPC pricing…

In Conclusion

There are many niches where you might advertise, where your competitors are paying $2 to $6 per click in a shark-feeding frenzy, and yet you can get 5 cent clicks all day long for other relevant, more specific, long-tail keywords, with less search volume… But, by bidding on more keywords, you could actually get as much exposure as your competitors are getting, at a much lower cost…

There is one niche where I am getting as much exposure as the competition, but I am only paying 5 cents a click in MSN and Google, while my competitors are fighting among each other for the shorter, less specific keywords in the niche, at $2 to $6 per click… In comparison, I am able to get 40 to 120 times more traffic for my websites than my competitors are getting for the exact same amount of money… And the people visiting my site have pre-qualified themselves by drilling down to my extremely relevant keywords for their searches…

As a business owner or manager, it is important to target your PPC and SEO towards the actual keyword phrases that your potential customers are using to find your website… But more importantly, if you leverage the knowledge found in this article and your efforts, you might be able to discover that you can tilt the odds towards you getting the sale, and you can do it at a cost that would make your competitors envious…

Article previously published here.

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Bill Platt has been providing article distribution services since 2001 at thePhantomWriters.com/ Utilizing his nearly one decade of article marketing experience, Bill Platt created a free ebook titled, “Article Marketing: Beyond the Basics”, which will teach you why many people fail with article marketing, and how you can turn your articles into profitable and productive advertising tools. Get your copy of this article marketing ebook that has been receiving rave reviews. Download it for free here:
thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/advanced-article-marketing.html

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Sometimes it seems like the majority of online marketers change the program that they are promoting, almost as often as they are putting gasoline into their car. “Okay honey… I filled up the car today… it is time for us to find another business opportunity to promote…”

There is also another group of online marketers, who seem to make a real commitment to a specific business opportunity, but success continues to elude this group is well. The second group fails to make a commitment to a particular marketing plan that is designed to help them to achieve success. Like the first group, they change directions, as often as they put gasoline into the car.

Those who are successful online, are the kind of people who make a solid commitment to a particular business model and make a long-term commitment to a realistic marketing plan.

I am not telling you these things because I think I’m better than you… In fact, I am telling you these things because I am guilty of having done the exact same things myself.

Towards the end of 2001, I finally started making serious money online, after having spun my wheels online for more than four years, chasing one opportunity after another, until I made a commitment to a particular business model.

I managed to increase my income year-over-year, and in March of 2005, I quit my job and started working full-time online. I have continued to earn a nice living online, ever since.

My 2009 revenues were down, but primarily because I was working less than normal… In November 2008, I learned that my father was ill… I had my suspicions right away, but we did not have verification of cancer until February 2009. (Contrary to popular belief, he was a non-smoker.)

As 2008 wound down, I made a commitment to my father that if he needed any assistance whatsoever, that I would make myself available to help him. That meant, if he needed transportation to and from doctors’ appointments, I would drive the one-hour to his house, and then take him wherever he needed to go. If he needed me to come to his house to help him with anything whatsoever, I would come to his house to help him.

I made the commitment to him, and I honored that commitment to him.

My online business suffered considerably, as a result of my making that decision. But, I have no regrets… It was the right thing to do, and I am grateful that I did it.

My dad passed away in November of 2009.

I continued to miss work, through November and December of 2009, while doing those things that must be done in relation to matters of his funeral and his estate.

Just a couple weeks ago, I sat down and calculated exactly how much time I actually spent outside the office in 2009.

Not all of my absenteeism, during 2009, could be attributed directly to the time I spent assisting my father during his illness. In March of 2009, I had missed two weeks when we moved across town. My websites had also suffered a 16-day shut down in May, because I was unable to update the DNS records for my domains, when my web hosting company migrated my account to a new server. When I went to do the DNS updates, I discovered that ICAAN was in the process of shutting down my domain registrar and moving my domain registration information to a new domain registrar. Unfortunately, during a move of that type, updates cannot be made to the DNS records. So, my websites were offline until ICAAN finished its work.

All told, I missed two weeks while moving, two weeks while waiting for ICAAN to get everything moved so that I could update my DNS records, and another 12 to 14 weeks while assisting my father and taking care of the things that I needed to take care of after he passed away.

During the course of the last eight years, there has only been one year in which I was not fully committed to my business. That year was 2009. I did not walk away from my business, but I had made the decision that taking care of my family was more important than my business.

While my business, my reputation, and my income suffered tremendously in 2009, due to my frequent absences and slow responses, the commitment that I had shown my customers in previous years helped my business survive 2009 intact.

Now that I have returned to my business full-time, my revenue is starting to bounce back.

The past nine years has been a wild and exciting ride. The thrill of growing a business from nothing to something worthwhile has been an awesome experience for me.

But to the point of this article, this story would have been very different if I had not committed to a specific business model in 2001, and it would have been very different if I had not committed to a specific marketing plan for the promotion of that business.

If I had not made the commitment to develop a viable business model and commit to a specific marketing plan, I would have probably still been working 60 hours per week on a job when my dad got sick. If I had still been working in the brick-and-mortar world of retail sales, I would not have had the opportunity to help my dad when he most needed my help.

Then again, I would have had a different job than I had previously, because my last employer went out of business in January 2009.

With all that has happened in the last 16 months, I count among my greatest blessings the care and concern that was shown to me by my clients. Sure, some of the new people had absolutely no patience for my absences… But, I received a large number of personal phone calls, snail-mail letters, e-mails, blog comments, and tweets from my clients and people that I know from online, who wanted to offer their support to me, during my emotional roller coaster ride.

My greatest blessings have been realized in 2009 and 2010. I am blessed by the wonderful people, whom I have met online through my online business. And I am blessed to have a business that was strong enough to survive my frequent absences, during the last 16 months.

Those blessings were available to me, because I made a commitment in 2001 to stop chasing new opportunities every couple of weeks. I made the commitment to a business model that I believed could be successful, and I made the commitment to promote that business in a consistent and reliable manner.

When I brought commitment to my online marketing endeavors, I finally started to make money online. As I maintained that commitment over several years, I was able to grow my business to the point where I would be able to consistently earn enough money from my business, so that I would never have to have an outside job again.

To be honest, I believe that the reason my business continued to attract new customers through 2009 was because I had used article marketing to promote my businesses. The articles I write and distribute, for the promotion of my online businesses, seem to have real staying power.

The articles that I wrote and distributed, over the last nine years, continue to influence readers to visit my websites and to learn more about my businesses and what I can do for the reader.

Between September 2008 and January of 2010, I only wrote and distributed four articles for the promotion of my websites. During those 16 months, I barely wrote and distributed one article every four months, yet the traffic to my website was only diminished during May of 2009, when my sites were off-line.

I honestly believe that the reason my websites continued to attract new visitors and new customers, during this period of time, is because I had more than 150 articles online, posted on thousands of websites, doing the hard work of convincing people that they needed to visit my websites to see how I could help them to accomplish their goals.

When your articles are as useful five years from now as they are today, your articles will have the same potential of continuing to send visitors to your website for many more years to come.

If you are seeking true success online, and you are still chasing the flavor of the week in business opportunities, I strongly recommend that you pick out something that seems to have real potential for you and to make a commitment to see it through to success.

If you would like to learn more about how to make article marketing work for you in the same positive manner that it has worked for me, pick up one or both of my article marketing ebooks shown below in my author information.

Editor’s Note: Article previously published here.

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I encourage you to download my free ebook, “Article Marketing: Beyond The Basics” ebook at: thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/advanced-article-marketing.html If you find my free ebook useful, and most people do, I would encourage you to purchase the more advanced ebook, “How To Use Article Marketing To Positively Impact Your SEO Efforts”. It is 70-pages of hard-hitting information about how to make your article marketing truly profitable: thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/article-marketing-seo.html My name is Bill Platt, and I have been earning a nice living from article marketing for more than a decade. In my ebooks, I try to share with you the lessons that I have learned about how to get the most from your article marketing.

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Unfortunately, many online marketers have tried to utilize article marketing to benefit their online business and failed. After numerous failures, many online marketers decide that success with article marketing is an illusion. They decide that article marketing is a complete and utter waste of their time and resources.

As one of those people, who has found great success with article marketing, I have taken it upon myself to try to help people understand what enables some people to be truly successful with article marketing, while others will never see any success at all with it.

Some people believe that the only way to learn to be successful, in any task, is to study those who have been successful. I happen to be one of those people, who believe that studying failure can be just as useful, as studying success.

I see the concept of studying successful techniques and techniques that fail, as the yen and the yang of success.

It is one thing to study the people, who have been most successful with article marketing. If you are attentive, you can learn a lot from them. It is quite another thing to study the people, who have failed with article marketing. If you are attentive, you can learn a lot from them as well.

In my recent e-book titled, “How To Use Article Marketing To Positively Impact Your SEO Efforts”, I talk about what it takes to be successful with article marketing. But in this article, I am talking about the reasons why many people fail with article marketing.

Top 10 Reasons Article Marketers Fail

The top 10 reasons why online marketers fail to find success with article marketing:

1. Failing to create an article that carries an interesting title – a title that will attract the attention and interest of publishers first and readers second.

2. Failing to acknowledge that publishers have a vested interest in keeping their readers happy – submitting crap articles that publishers know their readers will not want to read.

3. Failing to understand that people want articles that help them solve problems and answer questions – as opposed to glorified sales copy.

4. Failing to keep the information interesting for the reader – when people abandon your articles, they will never see the link to your website.

5. Failing to present a strong call-to-action in the authors’ resource box – if the resource box does not attract a click, the article is simply page filler.

6. Failing to focus on the needs of readers in the authors’ resource box – readers, who enjoyed reading your article, want to know why they should visit your website. Don’t bore them to tears with a lengthy personal story and a lengthy brag fest about what makes you more special than everyone else.

7. Failing to expend a few more minutes during the editing process, to present your article with nice formatting – articles that break to a new line in mid-sentence are annoying and hard-to-follow. Long paragraphs that run for miles are hard-to-read and lead to eyestrain and article abandonment.

8. Failing to spell check your articles can annoy a lot of people – you may not catch all of the mistakes, especially when your Spellchecker software does not identify the misspelling to you. Often, you can get by with a few misspellings and instances of poor grammar in an article, so long as the misspelling or poor grammar does not distract the publisher, when he or she is reading the article.

9. Failing to make sure that you put the article into the correct category – when publishers ask you to select a category for your article. Do not cut corners here. If you expect the publisher to fix your category for you, they won’t… If a publisher sees your article in the wrong category, they will more often hit delete, rather than fix your article placement.

10. Failing to follow simple instructions – the easiest thing to fix is the one thing that 85% of article marketers ignore, and that is making sure your articles’ word counts match the publishers’ requirements for word counts. Article marketers, who are willing to waste a publishers’ time, by submitting articles that do not meet minimum or maximum word counts will find that the publisher would prefer to reject all of the marketers’ articles, rather than to take the time to check if the marketer finally started following instructions.

Final Thoughts

In the end, as an article marketer, you must always strive to satisfy two audiences – the publisher, who might want to publish your articles, and the reader, who might want to read your articles.

If your article fails to satisfy one or both of the people in your target audience, then you should not be surprised that your article marketing failed to achieve its intended goals.

The most common reason for failure in article marketing is actually the tendency of marketers to view article marketing, in the same way that they view ordinary advertising.

With ordinary advertising, people write sales copy to generate an immediate action.

With article marketing, the process is a little bit different. With article marketing, those who are most successful answer the needs of the reader first, before presenting the sales copy that is designed to get people to take an action. This is why successful article marketers solve problems and answer questions in the body of the article, reserving the sales copy for the authors’ resource box.

By putting the focus on solving problems and answering questions for readers, we are able to get the attention of the publishers, whom we absolutely want and need to publish our articles. By restricting our sales copy to our authors’ resource box, publishers are more inclined to give us what we want (access to their audiences for our sales message), because we have successfully given publishers what they wanted – information that their readers will find useful and interesting.

Author’s Note: Article published here.

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My name is Bill Platt. If you enjoyed this article and found it useful, then you will love my newest ebook titled, “How To Use Article Marketing To Positively Impact Your SEO Efforts”. It is 70-pages of hard-hitting information about how to make your article marketing truly profitable: thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/article-marketing-seo.html Or, you can get warmed up with my free “Article Marketing: Beyond The Basics” ebook at: thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/advanced-article-marketing.html

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The concept was made fun in the 1990′s, with the creation of The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (oracleofbacon.org) – which is a website that documents how nearly all actors in Hollywood can be connected to Kevin Bacon through no more than six people. I played with the site earlier today and the Hollywood actors and actresses I tested all connected to Kevin Bacon in only two steps… That was interesting. Even Lucille Ball connected to Kevin Bacon in only two steps.

Now, I know what you might be thinking at this juncture… That sounds fun and interesting, but what does that have to do with Internet Marketing?

Great question.

Undertakers and Wedding Planners know something that most people do not realize. With a few exceptions like Michael Jackson and Billy Mayes, most people will only have up to 300 people attend their wake or wedding. As a result, the average undertaker and wedding planner will only bring 300 chairs to the festivities.

That’s neat… But what does this have to do with Internet Marketing?

Great question.

If you really have 300 friends and you can tell them about your business, and your 300 friends share your business message with their 300 friends, then in very short order, you will have communicated your business’ sales message to 90,000 people!

If only your friends, friends would tell their friends about your business, then your message will have reached 27 million people!

At this point, your friends’ friends’ friends would only need to tell 222 of their own friends about your business, in order to have every person on this planet know your name and what your business could do for them.

But, what does this have to do with Internet Marketing ?!?

Great question.

The good news about your business begins with you. You must tell people about your business with energy and gusto. If you advertise your business with energy and enthusiasm, then your friends may be willing and able to share your message with their friends, and on and on…

But if you keep your mouth shut around your friends… You will never be able to reap the benefits of the Six Degrees of Separation!

Getting people to talk about your business always begins with your own enthusiasm for your business – enthusiasm about how you can help others achieve their goals and solve their problems.

If you are embarrassed to tell your friends about your business, then there must be something wrong! If you are embarrassed, why are you in that business?

Bring enthusiasm to your advertising, and show people how you can help them to achieve their goals and solve their problems. In doing so, you will attract people to your business by the boatload.

My primary website has 20,000 unique visitors come to it each and every month. The average person reads 8 pages when they land on my website.

My website does as it should. It shows people how I can help them achieve their goals and to help them solve their problems. Because of this fact, my website continues to grow on its own, even in months where I don’t have the time to continue build on my advertising momentum.

Although my advertising has been successful and my enthusiasm remains palpable, I can assure you of one more thing… I could not have done it without my friends…

About one year ago, we conducted an internal audit of my business. What I learned is that after Google search engine traffic, my second highest source of regular, monthly traffic was a large number of my online friends/acquaintances who were recommending my business to their friends and acquaintances!

Dozens of my online friends are sharing the story of my business with all of their online friends. A few dozen might seem to be a low number, but to be honest, not all of my friends are into online marketing. The majority of my friends do not realize the freedom offered to me by my business… Sure they know that I haven’t held an outside job in four years, but they don’t quite understand how I do it or why I do it.

To this day, I have one friend who calls me once a week to tell me about the job openings he has discovered in the course of his week… For the first year or so, I told him every time that I was happy doing what I am doing and I would not be applying for those jobs. These days, I just thank him for sharing the information with me.

I have been operating an online business since 2001. Before 2001, I thought I was operating an online business, but the IRS says that if you don’t make money with your business, it is a hobby. I hobbied for a number of years, then I wrapped my head around how to successfully advertise my business. For the first four years of my business, I worked a 60-hour per week job, then I went home and worked my business until I collapsed from exhaustion.

Then in March 2005, my online income had topped my offline income for more than twelve months, so I took the dive and quit my job. I have never looked back.

If you can bring yourself to wrap your head around how to successfully advertise your business online, then you could very well join me and my online marketing friends, associates and customers as full-time online business owners.

Getting the word out about your business is the first step, and whether you know it or not, your friends can help you, but only when you are willing to help yourself by displaying a very real confidence and belief in your business and your products and services.

Previously published here.

…

My name is Bill Platt. If you enjoyed this article and found it useful, then you will love my newest ebook titled, “How To Use Article Marketing To Positively Impact Your SEO Efforts”. It is 70-pages of hard-hitting information about how to make your article marketing truly profitable: thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/article-marketing-seo.html Or, you can get warmed up with my free “Article Marketing: Beyond The Basics” ebook at: thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/advanced-article-marketing.html

Read more articles written by Bill Platt

I have been very successful using Article Marketing to promote my online businesses, since early 2000…

I have written and distributed many articles that went on to generate sales in the five figures… But for the sake of the FTC, “Very few people will make this kind of money with Article Marketing…”

If you understand the “how and why” of writing great articles, perhaps you can generate more sales from your articles than I have from mine… But if you miss the point of this article, you are likely to never make any money at all with article marketing…

There Are Five Essential Elements of Successful Article Marketing:

1. Title – Many people suggest that you should put your top keywords at the front of your article title, but I don’t subscribe to that methodology. I do include my target keywords in the title, when I can, but an article that is well-optimized for the search engines is worthless if it does not get published… The #1 goal of your articles’ title is to get the article opened!! You must present a title that is going to get the attention of publishers and readers; you must present a title that is going to compel a person to at least open your article to see if they will want to read it…

2. Opening Paragraph – The title got your article opened, but now you need your reader to read the article… Tell your reader why they should keep reading your article and read it to its conclusion… Any reader who does not reach your website from your article is a “missed opportunity” to sell your stuff… Show people why it will be in their best interest to finish reading your article…

3. The Article Body – The article body must meet the promise of the Article Title and the opening paragraph… The article body must retain the interest of the reader to the last word… The article body must tell a story people want to read, and leave them wanting more… The article body must successfully carry the reader to your Author’s Resource Box… When finished reading, the reader must be happy to have read the article…

4. The Authors’ Resource Box – The Authors’ Resource Box needs to transition the reader from your article to your website, by offering a compelling call-to-action to get the reader to go to your website… Tell who you are, but don’t go overboard… People do not care who you are – they only care about what else you can do for them… Jeff Herring wrote a great article that elaborates a bit further on how to construct an effective Resource Box here (ezinearticles.com/?id=3624961)…

5. Your Landing Page – You should never try to sell your products or services in your Authors’ Resource Box. Instead, you should try to get the reader to your website, where you have an unlimited number of words, videos, pictures and testimonials to tell the real story of your products or services. Few vendors have the ability to sell a product or service in 500 characters, so you should use your Authors’ Resource Box to get the reader to your website, where you will do the real selling…

Tell A Story People Want To Read

Often, the difference between someone who will try to write an article for $5 and the professional writer who understands the value of his or her work can be defined simply…

The person writing an article for $5 will “beat around the bush” for five hundred words, without ever actually saying anything of any real value to anyone… The person who works for $5 an article is just putting words on a page so that he or she can be paid…

The person who demands $40 to $500 to write an article is a master of story-telling… He or she will tell a story that people will want to read, and therefore a story that publishers will want to publish…

The authors who tell a story that “people are happy to have read” will find their articles on more high-quality websites, and they will find more people visiting their websites, as a result of having read the article…

Words on a page only please search engines, but a story on a page will ALSO attract readers, visitors and paying customers to your website…

Interestingly, most online marketing gurus who advise hiring people to write $5 articles also fail to tell a truth — they fail to point out that articles that pass real link popularity to a website must have link popularity to pass on to your website…

People don’t link to articles that are nothing more than “words on a page”, but people will link to a story that needs telling… Just like with Jeff Herring’s article linked above; his story is worth sharing with you, and as a result, it has gained its own links from people who do not know Jeff personally… (I have never met Jeff Herring or talked to him by phone or email. It was an honest recommendation for a great article written by him.)

Jeff’s article has gained its own link popularity, by merit of it being a good story… As a result, Jeff’s article will pass real link popularity back to his website, because it has real value for readers and real link popularity to share…

Article Marketing Will Not Work For Everyone…

There are a great number of us who have made a lot of money with article marketing… Then there are thousands of others who have never made any money at all with article marketing…

When you want to find success with an online business, you should mirror those people who have been successful…

Article Marketing is no different… If you have ever visited a website or purchased a product, as a result of having read an article that mentioned the website or product, take another look at the article that drove you to action… Try to understand the “how” and “why” that article worked, and then try to figure out how you can duplicate the formula for yourself…

Chances are good that you will see my “Five Essential Elements of Successful Article Marketing” in those articles that you are reviewing…

Fortunately, you don’t have to take my word for what I am telling you in this article… Whenever you find an article that moves you to visit the website shown in the Authors’ Resource Box, take another look at the article to see how closely it matches with the “Five Essential Elements” I shared with you in this article… You may be surprised by what you learn…

Author’s Note: Previously published here.

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If you enjoyed this information, you will find that it just scratches the surface of what I have included in my article marketing ebook, “How To Use Article Marketing To Positively Impact Your SEO Efforts”, available for sale on my website, thephantomwriters.com/ My name is Bill Platt, and I have been involved in Article Marketing since early 2000. This article was excerpted in part, from the one shown here.

Read more articles written by Bill Platt

The difference between those who do well with article marketing and those who do not is usually a matter of education, or lack thereof…

Those who succeed with article marketing generally know a few things that others don’t, and just as importantly, these people understand the nature of the article marketing landscape.

Those who fail with article marketing do so for a number of reasons, although most importantly, the reason for failure is rooted in a lack of knowledge about how to truly make article marketing work for them, and the lack of understanding about an always shifting landscape of article marketing.

Other reasons many online marketers fail with article marketing:

Even the professional article marketers, who have a track record of making hundreds of thousands of dollars with article marketing, do not produce winners at the same level as Ty Cobb provided hits… There are no article marketers who hit it out of the park every time… As with anything else in life, article marketing success is dictated by the Law Of Averages.

So consider this: If the professional article writers do not hit it out of the park with every article, what makes YOU think that your one article is a “good test” of the technique?

The Always Shifting Landscape

Websites that are willing to accept your articles directly fall into two categories:

Those who will publish anything generally find it difficult to attract repeat visitors… Therefore, they find that attracting visitors is a struggle that never ends.

This results in websites that do not provide profits to the website owner… How many websites do you own where you will keep pumping money into them, once you have come to the realization that those websites will never turn a profit for you?

New website owners will frequently prepay up to two years of domain registration and web hosting. As you can imagine, if after two years the website has never turned a profit, the site will close when its registration expires.

The other side of this coin is that if the website is not earning money, the website owner will frequently quit working on it, well before the website expires… So if it is an article directory, don’t be surprised when you realize that the website works, but no one is home to approve your article submissions…

Those webmasters, who do have editorial standards, find attracting and keeping visitors to be much easier… And as a result, they find that earning a profit is not only realistic, but it is a way of life…

Article Directories that have editorial standards, like Ezine Articles, will continue to be around for a very long time. Chris Knight has owned and operated EzineArticles.com at a profit since November of 1999, and so long as he continues to exercise his perogative to have editorial standards, you can bet that he will continue to attract repeat visitors and to earn a profit from his website.

Quality information is the key to the survival of websites and to writing articles that will stand the test of time, delivering a lifetime of traffic and sales.

Here Today… Gone Tomorrow…

If for one minute, you rely on websites that will publish anything, to make your article marketing campaigns work for you, then you will find that most of your article submission efforts will be wasted…

The owners of a vast majority of the Article Directories are not even approving the articles that have been submitted to them…

And even if they are approving articles, most of those websites that will accept your article submissions will close within two years, due to a lack of profits, resulting from a lack of editorial standards on the part of the website owner.

The vast majority of websites, which accept articles from the public, stop approving articles within just a few months… Thereafter, when the domain expires, the website and your articles on it will disappear into the dust bin of history…

In Conclusion…

If you focus only on you or your products / website in your articles, then you will have no one to blame for your failure, but you…

But, if you focus on providing your readers information that they can use and will enjoy reading, then your article marketing campaigns could provide the level of success to you that you seek, just as it has provided success to the many authors, whose names you know and websites you recognize by name…

This article published here.

…

My name is Bill Platt. If you enjoyed this article and found it useful, then you will love my newest ebook titled, “How To Use Article Marketing To Positively Impact Your SEO Efforts”. It is 70-pages of hard-hitting information about how to make your article marketing truly profitable: thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/article-marketing-seo.html Or, you can get warmed up with my free “Article Marketing: Beyond The Basics” ebook at: thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/advanced-article-marketing.html

Read more articles written by Bill Platt

Before the Authors’ Resource Box

Hands down, the most important element of a successful article is its title. Your title must serve three masters: the publisher, the reader, and the search engines.

Before anyone can see your article, you must attract the interest of a publisher. Your title will determine how many publishers open your article, in the process of determining whether your article will answer the needs of his or her readers.

Unless a publisher decides to publish your article, your article will be forever confined to a few article directories – very few article directories have any real traffic, beyond the writers who go to that site to get their own articles submitted.

Your article title is essential to getting your article opened by publishers first and readers second. You need publishers to open your articles, so that they can consider them for publication. Once a publisher has decided to publish your article, you need readers to open your article and read it. Better than that, you need readers to reach your resource box and a visit your website, so that they can consider purchasing what you sell.

The third master that your article title serves is the search engine algorithm. Once your article is published on a third-party website, you want the search engines to find it, to index it, and to present it in its search results. But, as an individual who plays the search engines, you also want the search engines to credit your website as being related to the anchor text that you used in your links.

After The Title

Once a publisher has opened your article and began reading, you want that publisher to decide that the article content is appropriate for his or her audience.

Your title will only ensure that your article will be opened. But, it is the body of your article that will determine if a publisher actually uses your article. Your article must answer a need of people in the publishers’ target audience. If the publisher determines that your article content is not relevant to his or her audience, it does not matter how good your article might be.

Beyond relevance, the publisher must consider the article to be interesting and useful to his or her audience. As an article writer, you serve the publishers’ needs and the publisher serves the needs of his or her audience. Ideally, your goal when writing the article should be to answer the needs of a publishers’ audience. In doing so, you can gain the approval of the publisher, who stands between your article and your intended audience.

Your first master is the publisher. Without the support of publishers, your articles cannot be exposed to a much larger audience.

Your second master is always the reader. The reader must appreciate what you have written. If the reader appreciates the story that you have told, then your reader will want to read your resource box, to determine whether you can offer them more… A satisfied reader, who is also intrigued by your resource box, is someone who will be very likely to visit your website, through the link in your resource box.

Your third master is always the search engine algorithm. Once again, you want the search engine companies to acknowledge the link from a third-party website pointing to your website, and also the relationship of your anchor text keywords to your website.

The Money Shot

The publisher is seldom concerned with your actual Authors’ Resource Box. The only time a publisher will shoot down an article, based on its resource box, is when it contains offensive language or links to offensive websites.

When you construct your Authors’ Resource Box, there are four goals that you should seek to accomplish with every single article you write.

First, you want to define an author. People, who have read your article, want to know about the person who has written it.

Some marketers want to leave a name off of the Authors’ Resource Box. This is frequently done for one of two reasons.

First, companies may want to separate its content from the people who have written content. Companies rightfully consider the article to be part of the intellectual property of the company; therefore, no individual should be given credit as the author.

Second, individual website owners may want to hide behind the anonymity that the Internet offers to them.

Articles do have the capacity to deliver real people – shoppers – to your website. If your goal is to attract real people – potential customers – to your website, it will be imperative to allow your reader to connect to an individual author…

This is not to say that you have to use a real name in conjunction with your article. In fact, many marketers utilize multiple pen names, with the articles that they publish online.

For example, I utilize article marketing to promote dozens of websites online. In doing so, I utilize a new pen name with every new website I promote. Anson Werner writes about travel. Barry Prouty writes about WordPress blogs. Emerson Lockwood writes about home improvement.

Anson Werner is not real, but he is one of my alter egos. Anson lets me write about other topics that interest me, without watering down my online persona.

Anson’s most important role is to give readers a connection to an online personality, a name through whom they can find other articles of a similar nature, written by the same person.

Anson gives identity to the person responsible for the creation of the content, for the reader.

The flipside is suggesting that “Business Name” wrote the article, but that is such a disingenuous method to identify the person, with whom the reader had felt a connection.

The only thing worse than trying to convince the reader that a “Business Name” wrote the article, is to try to convince the reader that “No One” wrote the article… If you try the “No One” approach to taking credit for the authorship of the article, you will have stepped beyond the obvious, little white lie and entered into the territory of convincing the reader that you have a good reason to hide. If you must hide from your audience, then why should they trust to give you their money?

The second thing you want to is to provide a strong call-to-action to your readers. If you got a reader to open your article and read it to its conclusion, then you should absolutely be interested in getting that reader to visit your website to consider buying what you are selling.

But so many people lose the race right here, by providing either no call-to-action or an ineffective call-to-action.

The people who have just read your article are primed to do what you want them to do. But you have to tell them what you want them to do and why.

Don’t miss this opportunity to encourage your readers to visit your website and buy what you are selling.

The third item is a plain text copy of the link to your domain, which is your opportunity to brand your website with your articles. This is an opportunity that is overlooked by most article marketers.

Many article marketers make the mistake of believing that the only thing that article marketing is used for is to influence the search engine algorithms. They quickly forget that before the search engines find value in a page, people will be reading the articles.

By only providing anchor text links, your readers will not know which website supported the development of an article. But, if people know the name of your website and why they would want to visit your website, then people will be more inclined to type the name of your website into their browser bar, rather than to look for you on the search engines.

35% of my global traffic comes from people who type in the URL of my website into their browser bars.

Additionally, you want to include a plain text copy of your URL, as a matter of self-protection, if the publisher does not publish your article with your anchor text links.

The fourth and final item you want to include in your Author’s Resource Box is your anchor text links, which explain to the search engines what keywords best define your website.

If you use more than one anchor text link in your Author’s Resource Box, then you should point each one to a different URL, to maximize the value your website will receive from the search engines. This will show the search engines that more than one URL on your website is worth consideration, and it will help your overall ability to find visitors from the search engines.

In Conclusion

Too many article marketers have the idea that article marketing will only serve one master – Google. But Google will find your articles hard to appreciate if real people do not also appreciate your article…

When publishers appreciate what you have written, they will put your article into their website, giving you access to their audiences. The more publishers, who appreciate what you have written, the more of them who will publish your article, which will give you even more links from your articles.

When readers appreciate what you have written, they are very likely to visit your website to see what else you can do for them.

If you desire only to chase search engine rankings, then that is your business. But wasn’t the original purpose of chasing search engine rankings to attract potential customers to your website? So, why not chase publishers, readers and search engines with your articles?

…

My name is Bill Platt. If you enjoyed this article and found it useful, then you will love my newest article marketing ebook titled, “How To Use Article Marketing To Positively Impact Your SEO Efforts”. It is 70-pages of hard-hitting information about how to make your article marketing truly profitable: thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/article-marketing-seo.html Or, you can get warmed up with my free “Article Marketing: Beyond The Basics” ebook at: thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/advanced-article-marketing.html

Read more articles written by Bill Platt

I have a unique job, as a professional article ghostwriter, which forces me to do research on topics that I may not normally be interested in learning. Certainly, golf was one of those topics I thought I would never learn about in my life.

If I were to ever retire, I might reconsider my position on golf. But at this time, I cannot foresee a day when I might consider golf and activity that I would consider fun or worthwhile. I figure that if I have not taken up golf by now, at the age of 44, then chances are pretty slim that I would ever consider taking up that sport.

Typically, I try to talk people out of hiring me as their personal and private ghostwriter. I do that because I know that most people can find writers, who are willing to work for much less money, than I charge my customers for ghostwriting.

I charge people a much higher rate for writing, than 90% of the available writers on the Internet. I charge a much higher-rate for ghostwriting than most people, for a number of reasons:

1. I spend more time developing and editing one article, than most writers will spend writing 5 to 10 articles.

2. I know the value of the articles that I create. Many of my customers have told me that articles I created for them helped them to deliver thousands of new prospects to their websites and generate thousands of dollars in new revenues.

3. I value my own time. Through years of experience, I have learned that I have a limited number of hours in every workweek. If I take on too much writing work, then I run the risk of limiting my earnings potential, by filling my workweek with so much writing that I will not have time to do anything else – limiting my income to the number of hours I can work in one week.

4. People are willing to pay my rates to hire me to write their articles. When you produce a great product and people know it, they are willing to pay you whatever rate you require. If you can get higher rates for your work, then why wouldn’t you?

When I find people, who are willing to pay my rates to have me write an article for them, I am hard pressed to tell people, no.

But occasionally, I do tell people no. If someone asks me to write an article that I do not feel comfortable writing, I will let him or her know what my reservations are, and I will refund their money.

So last night, when I opened the ghostwriting job order and I saw that someone had paid me to write an article, offering tips for playing a better game of golf, I hesitated.

When confronted with such a job request, I will usually take at least 20 to 30 minutes to decide if there is enough information available online to help me write a good article on the topic.

I scanned a half dozen websites, chock-full of golfing tips, trying to get my head around the topic. Then, I remembered having heard people talk about golfing fundamentals. I realized, at that moment, that it would do me well to ghostwrite an article that discussed the fundamentals of golfing.

I turned to Google to point the way to information about the fundamentals of golfing. When doing research of this type, for an article, I prefer digging deeper into the search results to find resources that most people are not using.

During my research, I discovered a golf instructor, who has written a book on the fundamentals of golfing and has posted his book on his website. When I arrived at the www.ceegolf.com/ and read the last nine pages of his book, I realized that I could learn a lot from this man. Casey Eberting rocked my world.

I continued to his FAQs page and started reading. Halfway through the page, I realized that maybe I missed other important information on his website. Upon going to his home page, I realized that I had entered his site near the end of chapter 7 of his book and that the first seven chapters were also online.

Casey Eberting taught me everything I needed to know to play a golfing instructor online. But Casey taught me more than that…

Just as Sun Tzu’s book, “The Art Of War”, could teach a multitude of business lessons to the average Joe and MBA students at some of the finest colleges in the world, from within the pages of a book about the strategy of war, Casey taught me that a lot of business and marketing principles could be learned from a man committed to teaching people how to play golf.

Chapter 1 Page 1

The most common mistake made by new and experienced golfers is blocking. Blocking is a process where, when the golfer swings at the ball, the golfers’ body interferes with the fluid motion of the swing.

Rather than trying to eliminate the block, most golfers attempt to manipulate the club during the process of the swing. The manipulations permit the golfer to try to correct for the adverse effects, caused by the block.

The most common mistake made by online business people is to begin the process, with a flawed business model or marketing model. Rather than correcting the business model or marketing model, most business owners attempt to correct other perceived problems.

For example, people will set up pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns to advertise their website. People will often notice that although the PPC campaign is generating clicks and traffic to their website, they are not generating enough sales to justify their continued spending. Frequently, marketers will try a new set of keywords, a new PPC ad, or a different search engine for their advertising. Often, they will make these changes and wonder why they are not getting any traction in the marketplace.

The crazy thing is that marketers will change a dozen different factors, in an effort to turn a profit. Yet, most will not test or consider the efficiency and effectiveness of their own website. It could very well be that the sales copy sucks. It could also be that the sales copy is good, but the shopping cart sucks. It could also be that the sales copy is good, as is the shopping cart, but the price is wrong.

Rather than going back to the beginning and correcting the real problem, golfers and marketers will try to compensate for those things that they are doing badly.

Chapter 2 Page 2

Ben Hogan credited the perfecting of his swing plane, as the reason for his success. By perfecting the swing plane, Hogan successfully removed blocking from his game. But, it took Hogan nine years in the PGA to master his swing plane.

Golfers, who have not mastered the concept of the swing plane, must learn to make corrections to compensate for their bad technique (by manipulating individual elements of the swing). So long as the golfer relies upon manipulation to correct individual elements of the swing, the golfer will always require perfect timing and coordination to execute flawlessly.

Unfortunately, perfect timing and coordination are more difficult to master than a correct swing plane. The reliance of the golfer on perfect timing creates a situation where the golfer’s game is inconsistent at best, since few people have perfect timing at all times.

Online business owners and marketers, who do not structure and master their business processes, tend to produce inconsistent results. So long as a business owner continues to rely upon perfect timing and coordination, the business will continue to produce inconsistent results.

Chapter 3 Page 1

Ben Hogan once said that he did not teach, because he “couldn’t find anybody who wanted to learn.” A writer for Golf Digest said the Hogan was wrong, but Casey insists that he was not.

Casey suggested that what Ben Hogan really meant was that most golfers are not willing to “go the distance”. He explained that when the golfer learns a new technique; golfers are generally unwilling to work through the awkwardness and the uncomfortable feelings of the learning process.

Casey noted that the National Golf Foundation said that the average golfer stopped improving after only three years of play. Casey stated that he believes the reason for this is that people are unwilling to put in the practice time and to work through the frustration of doing something new.

Online marketers exhibit the same tendencies. Most online marketers will take on a new product or opportunity; work it hard for about two weeks, and then move on to the next flavor of the week. After a year, most online marketers will have attempted more than two-dozen business opportunities, but never settled on one long enough to see it through to success.

Chapter 5 Page 2

Casey Eberting teaches that most golfers prefer the Band-Aid approach to golf instruction. He calls it Band-Aid instruction, because people prefer to treat the symptoms, rather than the problems.

Most golfing instructors teach Band-Aid golf lessons, frankly, because they understand that is what their customers want. People want immediate results, but if instructors were to teach better style, it could take up to three months before the golf student would see the real benefits of the lessons.

Online business owners and marketers also seek Band-Aid solutions for their businesses. People want to see immediate results from their actions. That is why Google Adwords produced $21 billion in advertising revenue for Google in 2008.

That is also why online business owners and marketers shy away from investments in article marketing and SEO. Both article marketing and SEO have the potential to generate substantial long-term, free traffic, for those people who utilize these advertising techniques. But, neither of these advertising methods will produce overnight success.

In Conclusion

I am not a golfer, and I never will be… But I play one on the Internet… When I am called on to do so as a ghostwriter…

When I have good research materials, I can successfully pretend to be anyone I want to be, and the people who read my articles will not be able to spot me as an imitator.

My client, who hired me to ghostwrite an article about golfing, is selling a book about how to improve your golf swing… He is the professional, and I am the imitator… When he read what I had written for him, my client said in essence, “Fantastic job. I am very satisfied. Well done.”

But the reason that I wrote this article this evening, is because I wanted to share with you an incredible resource that I found for people who are intent to improve their golfing game… Casey Eberting operates the San Antonio CE golf schools, located online at: www.cegolf.com/

If you own an online business or you work as an online marketer, even if you do not play golf, I suspect that you might be able to learn a thing or two about how to be more successful, by reading Eberting’s book on his website.

The analogies that I saw in Casey Eberting’s book, which could be directly tied to your online business, were far more numerous than I could possibly detail in this article. Give yourself a couple of hours and grab a cup of coffee… And see if you agree that his book could potentially be one of the best books you have read about operating an online business – even if it has nothing to do with operating a business…

Editor’s Note: Article previously published here.

…

My name is Bill Platt. If you enjoyed this article and found it useful, then you will love my newest ebook titled, “How To Use Article Marketing To Positively Impact Your SEO Efforts”. It is 70-pages of hard-hitting information about how to make your article marketing truly profitable: thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/article-marketing-seo.html Learn about my ghost writing services here: thephantomwriters.com/x.pl/tpw/info/ghost-writing/purchase.html

Read more articles written by Bill Platt

Article marketers must serve two masters: Publishers who reach your target audience, and the Readers in your target audience.

Since 2005, online marketers have been living under an illusion that the article’s content does not matter, because there are many publishers who will accept anything that meets a minimum word count.

The underlying theory is that if publishers will publish anything, then one should not need to worry about the quality of the content, especially if the goal of the marketer is to gain inbound links for the purpose of impressing Google and its search listings…

Many people poo-poo my opinion on how to write articles, because they think of me as an Old-School Article Marketing Purist…

Alert! I am not the “purist” that many people suggest I am…

And there is nothing wrong with “old school”, because it worked just fine in 1995, 2000, 2005 and even now in 2010. People have profitably used “old school article marketing” since the early days of the Internet to generate substantial sales and profits for their online businesses. We “old school article marketers” also do pretty well in the search engine ranking game, by using “old school article marketing” to influence our rankings in Google and the other search engines.

In this article, I am going to tackle some of the problems inherent in the “article marketing for SEO” techniques that so many online marketers want to trust as gospel…

Content Does Not Matter… Or Does It?

Yes, it is true that there are many online publishers that will accept anything and everything submitted to them, provided the content meets a minimum word count…

But this is what you have never been told about this article marketing strategy… If you think about what I am going to tell you here, you will have no doubt that what I am getting ready to tell you is true…

If you only post content that those who have no editorial policies will publish, then you can comfortably rely on your inbound links disappearing, nearly as quickly as you can create them…

Is Anyone Home?

I have developed a list on one of my websites, of 1200 article directories that are available online, at: www.techcentralpublishing.com/more-article-directories.php

On the surface, it would seem like you should be able to acquire thousands of links to your website, by submitting your articles to article directories…

But here is what you don’t know about article directories…

All article directory software has been designed in such a way that the directory owner will need to manually verify all content submitted to the article directory…

And most new article directory owners quit approving articles within just a few weeks, because they never imagined how much work an article directory would actually entail…

As an example, I took one of the directories from the beginning of the above list: abunchofarticles.com

On the front page of the website, they have the Most Recent articles listed on the front page. I clicked through to the first article on the list, and it shows that the article was submitted on 2009-08-26, and today is 2010-01-17!! That means that this website has not approved any new articles in 4-1/2 months.

Another sample from the list is: allbpi.net. The last article approved on this website was submitted on 2009-09-19!!

You can submit your articles to these websites ALL DAY LONG, but when done, there are probably fewer than 40 article directories that approve articles regularly…

It should be clear to you at this point that if you ignore the quality of your content:

Publishers Who Have Editorial Policies Have Specific Expectations

Publishers who have editorial policies do so, because they understand their visitors and work hard to keep the loyalty of their readers…

They work hard to ensure the loyalty of their visitors, because it is cheaper to retain loyal readers than it is to acquire new visitors.

By ensuring visitor loyalty, these webmasters are ensuring that they are able to retain their current income and grow the revenue opportunities for their website.

As a webmaster, you have the free will to choose the content that you place on your own website. And the publishers whose audience we should want to reach with article marketing also have the free will to decide what they will publish on their sites…

Link Popularity In The Search Engine Marketing Game

Those guaranteed links through article directories are not as guaranteed as you once thought, are they? Even if you can get those cherished links in the article directories, will those links ever gain any search engine link popularity to share with your website?

For your articles to be able to share link popularity with your website, they must develop their own link popularity, where ever they sit on the Internet.

If you write and submit junk articles, who in their right mind will link to those articles that you have made available to the world?

Alert: People only link to articles that they believe that their audience will appreciate. If they link to junk, then their audience will lose confidence in their recommendations…

Serving Your Real Masters…

Your real masters in the article marketing game are the publishers who are going to choose to share your articles with their readers, and the people who read your articles…

As should be obvious to you by now, the publishers who have a real audience with whom to share your articles will only publish quality content…

Some publishers have audiences in the hundreds of thousands. When your article gets posted on many of the big publisher websites, it is not uncommon for the readers of that publication to either post a copy of your article also on their website or to link to your article on the publisher’s website.

Winning the approval of large publishers can result in your article being published on additional websites, and more for the benefit of the search engine optimization game, people will link to your articles on the big publishers’ website…

How does this benefit your website? More copies of your article on more websites, and link popularity being funneled into your articles on third-party websites, which in turn will pass link popularity back to your own website…

Publishers, who are committed to earning a profit, want to publish articles that its readers will want to read…

So your first master is always the publisher, and your second master is always the reader who will be thrilled to have had the opportunity to read your article…

If you serve your first and second masters well, then your articles will develop real value that the search engines will recognize and credit you for having…

A Recent Issue Of Playboy Revealed…

As I wrap up this article, we have finally come full circle to the point made in the title of this article…

The title that you select for your article will determine in large degree how successful your article will be….

David Jackson, a fellow writer, recently pointed out that “On average, 8 out of 10 people will read your headline, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest of your copy…” (reviews-by-customers.com/showthread.php?t=253)

His point was the same as mine is today in this article: Your article title must stand out among the thousands of other articles on the Internet… Your article title must attract attention to the article and get the article opened and read… Even the best article on the planet is worthless, unless someone is actually reading it…

Just today, someone commented on one of my videos on YouTube. He said, “It’s funny… this (video) is gold but nobody is watching here on YouTube!!”

He was right of course. The video was posted to YouTube on October 18th, 2009, but only 120 people have watched it… bit.ly/5WEWqO

The video carries a factual title, but not necessarily a title that will pull people into it by the droves…

But this article here… Be honest with yourself now… Did you start reading this article because the title absolutely caught your attention and appealed to your curiosity?

I am confident in telling you that you would not be reading this article right now if the publisher did not have an overwhelming desire to see what my article was about, based on its title… And because the content delivered more than the publisher expected, the publisher felt that YOU needed to read what I have written here today…

If I have done my job well, then you will be glad you took a few minutes out of your day to read what I have written… And, you will reward me by reading my Author’s Resource Box shown below, to see how I could further help you achieve your goals…

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My name is Bill Platt. I have been doing article marketing since 1999, and I have operated The Phantom Writers Article Distribution Service since 2001. My most recent article marketing ebook is titled, “How To Use Article Marketing To Positively Impact Your SEO Efforts,” and you can buy your own copy at my website: thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/article-marketing-seo.html The information in this article merely touches on information that I teach in my ebook about how to leverage your article marketing for real SEO success…

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