In Article Distribution Consider Your Readers

Putting it in the most direct way possible, we put a lot of effort into article marketing in hopes of achieving one simple objective: Get more traffic!

Our syndicated article help us in this way in two potential ways.  On the one hand, we can receive visitors directly from those articles when the readers click a link in our resource (or author’s) box, and/or, alternatively, the major search engines can notice our article link and give greater important to that landing page on our site.  This latter option leads to more traffic, eventually, by sending us visitors who have found our page in the search engine results. 

Trying to maximize our results from those two methods causes a problem.  The pages on our site to which we might want to send the article readers may not be our most desired pages for maximizing our search optimization resources.  Let me explain this problem in a little more detail.

We normally want to give our greatest SEO love to our most competitive pages.  Those are often the pages that directly generate income.  With those pages, we try to reach search engine users who are already in a mindset to buy. 

Our distributed article readers are not yet in they buying frame; instead they are usually at a stage of beginning information gathering.  That’s why they came to our article rather than going directly to a store or service provider.

Now, hang onto those two competing states of mind for a moment, while we consider how we construct pages on a business website.  One fundamental rule of marketing that applies to a good website design for a business is that any given page should be directed toward moving the visitor to one and only one action.  Whether that action is to buy our product, sign up for our mailing list or scratch their noses, we focus all our energy on that page toward achieving that single end.  So, if we absolutely obey the marketing rule, we can’t possibly optimize our most important pages and satisfy the reader of our article–can we?

That is the dilemma we face.  Should we focus our article marketing efforts on search engine optimization or on providing a landing page for our readers that will offer them what they truly desire at their current stage of decision making (or procrastination, in some cases)?  Should we abide by the simple, common sense marketing rule, or should we magically try to successfully incorporate two disparate objectives within this single site of the page?

We must consider these options carefully in both our article syndication decisions and our copywriting decisions within the website itself.

So You Want to Begin an Online Business Venture?

If you’ve been considering starting an ecommerce business, you’ve probably been asking yourself what you will need to learn how to do along the way. If you haven’t been asking that, you should have been.

The set of skills that you will need are rather straightforward. However the depth with which you need to be familiar with each of the knowledge areas depends upon how much of the work you plan to do on your own and how much you want to leave to professionals. To a lesser extent, it will depend upon the type of online business you plan to develop.

I assume you know about the legal requirements in your jurisdiction (for example, your state in the U.S. or your province in Canada). If not, either check with your own authorities (you’ll find a great deal of information online) or consult an attorney. It is also a good idea to check with your insurance representative and your accountant prior to actually making your business official.

While those concerns are important for any business enterprise, here the focus is about those specialized skills and knowledge areas that are essential for an Internet enterprise. We’ll look at the knowledge areas that you or someone associated with your business, whether it is you, a partner, someone you employ or an individual or a company with which you contract to perform some of the specialized tasks involved.

Basic Computer Knowledge: If you know how to use email and a word processing software, you are halfway there. In the early days of the development of the world wide web, you needed to know computer programming. Now though, there are many software tools that make most things that you need to do quite easy. Of course, if you don’t have a lot of computer knowledge, you will be learning much more about computers along the way, but the best of the ready made tools tend to have excellent manuals or video tutorials. If you are reasonably interested, diligent and willing to spend a bit of money on software solutions, this is really no great worry. As you become more experienced, you will become faster at each computer task.

Search Engine Optimization: This skill set, often referred to as simply SEO, involves knowing how to create and promote your website in such a way that the search engines will be able to find it and that it will show up high in the listings if a web user is searching for a relevant product, service or information that your business offers.

Design: Someone has to decide on the appearance of your website, what it should be able to do and be able to build it in such a way that it facilitates reaching your goals. Designing for the Internet is not the same as designing for any other communication medium. One of the most important principles in web design is that pretty is not the same as effective. You need a business website that is easy to more around, where the information is clearly marked and that the user is facilitated in achieving your desired goal (for example, buying your product).

Writing for the Internet: Most new Internet marketers are very surprised to learn how much writing is involved. If you are not a writer, don’t fret. People with lots of experience in writing for the web and with excellent skills are abundant. Writing is one of those tasks that you can hire done rather inexpensively. You can actually find an Internet (or web) writing service that specializes in just the kind of writing you need. However, if you don’t have the resources to hire good writers as often as needed, or if you don’t have the ability to do it yourself, consider another venue for your business.

Patience: In any business, it takes a while to begin to see positive cash flow. Don’t be hoodwinked by claims in advertisements that promise great wealth in a few weeks or a few months by employing these supposedly “secret” techniques. You have a better chance of getting rich in a hurry by buying a lottery ticket (and I don’t recommend that, either). Persevere, and you can succeed.

There are plenty of good resources on the Internet to help you learn the skills you don’t have and further hone those that you do. A great deal of the knowledge you need to acquire is available online for free. Unfortunately, much of that information is wrong. You can increase your learning curve dramatically by purchasing high quality information or hiring consultants. However, if you are very patient, you can learn almost everything on your own and without much cost. In fact you can sometimes sign up for excellent cost-free learning resources such as a how to start an Internet business course, which also should point you to other valuable learning resources and tested software.