Donna Knight's Internet Marketing Tools and Reviews

Category: Article Marketing

You’ll find articles about article marketing here.

  • Best Article Directory to Get Exposure for Your Articles

    By Donna Knight

    If you’re looking for a high quality article directory to post your articles to and you don’t have time to post to 200+ article directories. The best article directory is EzineArticles.com. The reason I rate this as one of the best article directories is that they have very, very strict article submission guidelines. This means that articles by spammers and people who don’t have a clue about writing decent articles will be rejected. This also means you really have to read their guidelines before posting and you must be up on your article writing game.

    My only complaint is their Premium article membership is very expensive at $97 per month, so it is pretty much out of reach for individual article writers unless they are making lots of money from their articles. Premium membership puts your articles near the top of the approval queue. Therefore it speeds up the approval process; however, it does not guarantee your articles will be approved. 

    They have three author types: Basic, Basic Plus and Platinum. Everyone starts out with Basic membership. After you submit 10 articles, they will consider upgrading you to Basic Plus membership. This allows you to submit 25 articles. If your articles meet have been excellent at meeting their guidelines you may then be eligible for Platinum membership.  By the way, premium paid membership does not buy you an upgrade to Basic Plus or Platinum membership. You have to earn the trust of this directory to earn Platinum membership. 

    My only complaint about upgraded memberships is that some Platinum members have only submitted two articles. This makes me wonder how someone who has submitted two articles has earned Platinum membership. I would think you need to have submitted more samples than this to earn such high level of trust. The only reason I can see for this upgrade in these cases is because the author has a high position in a company. I’m not completely sure how this makes one a trusted author because I have worked with executives whose writing skills left a lot to be desired. This makes me suspicious of elitism or nepotism or something similar, which I am not a fan of.

    While I do believe writers who are leaders in their field deserve respect, I think they should at least be required to submit at least the 10 articles that all Basic members are allowed. Only then, would there be enough of a sample of the author’s writing that clearly demonstrates excellent writing skills.

    Other than this hint of aristocracy, I do recommend that you join EzineArticles.com if you want your articles to be exposed to a high traffic highly respected article site that is not full of garbage. You can join for free at http://www.ezinearticles.com.

  • How To Promote Yourself Effectively With Articles

    A very efficient way to advertise your professional services, the products you are selling or simply to help you find a better job is to write targeted articles.

    Once you write the article, there are many sites you can submit it to. If you have a mailing list or email list of customers, you can send and email to them with the article and a link to your site or to a product you’re promoting.

    The articles can be submitted to multiple article directory or submission sitges as long as the the content was written by you; i.e. you can’t copy someone else’s work and submit it as your own. The only condition is that they must keep their original form, no altering, along with your presentation. This means actually more visibly and it is exactly what you need.

    These articles would include at the end a resource box, which is a short description about you or your business and showcase various solutions to real problems that people in your target market have in their personal or business life. They should also include a statement allowing people to copy your article as long as the entire article remains intact. Giving reprint rights can make your article viral.

    The more informative and interesting your article is, the more people will remember it and pass it on.

    If you don’t have a lot of experience writing articles, there are some ways that you will benefit from writing articles:

    • If you have a skill, you can write a technical article. You have to be sure the article is clear and understandable to someone who is not a technical person like yourself. Try to make as few assumptions as possible about what the reader knows already. Do not use too much technical jargon without defining it or it will turn the reader off.
    • It will bring you visibility to your name.
    • If it’s well-written, it will help people, and they will remember you for it.
    • You can prove your expertise in your profession. There are many people who know a lot, but the ones who write their knowledge down to teach others will be remembered best.

    Writing articles will do you no good if they don’t contain useful information. Even if the purpose of the article is to feature a link to something you’re selling in the resource box, people will be more likely to click on the link and buy if your article has already helped them in some way. Publishing articles means they have to contains mostly useful information and just a little bit of advertising.

    While there are lots of free places to publish your article, you could get better exposure by publishing with a service that charges a small fee to publish your article to multiple sites, since they can reach publishers who may be otherwise inaccessible. If a site is going to charge a fee to publish your article on their site, make sure they have high search engine ranking. These sites will generally allow you to get more visibility than submitting to low traffic new article submission sites.

    If the service is really good, they will have professionals who are experts at getting publicity for your articles. If you don’t have the time to submit your article to sites yourself, hiring a professional company to do it for you is the way to go as long as you take the precautions mentioned above.
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    Donna Knight is a Computer Trainer and Website Promotion Specialist. She has built over 250 websites and helps new site owners promote their site cheaply. For tips that will help you save money and save time when marketing online, visit her Internet Marketing Tools and Reviews blog at http://www.DonnaKnight.com. Copyright (c) 2006 Donna Knight. Permission granted to reprint this article as long as the article and resource box remain intact.

  • How to Start An Article Directory Geared for Success

    By Donna Knight

    Maybe you’ve heard that an article directory can make a killing in affilite or Google Adsense income, but there are some more things you need to know when you start yours.

    Here are the first basic steps involved in starting your own article directory: 1) Get an article directory script. 2) Buy a good domain name that gives some indication of what your site is about. 3) Buy hosting for it. 4) Set the script up or get someone else to set it up if you don’t know how to set up scripts.

    Obviously an article directory script won’t do you any good if you don’t do anything with it. The number one internet business killer is lack of action. You would be amazed at how many people buy everything they need to start an online business and then do absolutely nothing with it.

    Once the site is all set up, your next step is to get traffic to the site. Here are some more things you need to do to draw traffic:

    1. An empty directory never did anybody any good. The first thing you need to do to get some traffic to your new directory is put some articles in it. No one wants to submit to an empty directory. There are plenty of article directories out there with free reprint articles. With all the other article directories out there that you can use as a source of articles, there’s no excuse for your directory to be empty.

    I don’t recommend buying an article directory script that has articles already in it. You do not want your directory to look like everyone else’s with the same articles.

    Consider starting an article directory geared towards a niche. That way you won’t be competing with other article directories for traffic. Everyone knows that niche marketing can be more profitable than catering to an untargeted market, and this applies to article directories, as well.

    2. Don’t be the only author on your site. Start your directory out with articles from other authors. Then you can add your own articles to your heart’s content. The exception to the rule would be if this is a site where you’ve specifically stated up front that the purpose is to showcase your own work, but you welcome other authors to submit their work as well.

    3. Keep your directory backed up. Web servers are more stable than personal computers, but they’re not perfect. Data corruption and hard drive failures on web servers happen very rarely, but they do happen. Many web hosting companies do backups but some charge you to restore from the backup. When choosing a article directory script, choose one with built-in back-up capabilities or choose a web host that makes backing up your site very easy, such as Cpanel hosting.

    4. Submit your own articles to other article sites with a link to your own article directory in the resource box. Keep in mind that if you are submitting ghostwritten or private label articles to your own directory, you cannot submit these articles to other sites unless they are significantly modified–I’m talking 75% or more. Yes, that’s right! You may need to write a few articles of your own. This is not a big deal. If you have private label articles, you can use these to get plenty of ideas to write your own articles.

    Submit your article directory to the major search engines, including Google, Yahoo, and other high traffic search engines. Don’t pay anyone to submit your site (unless you’ve got money to throw away). You can do this yourself for free.

    5. Syndicate it – Be sure to buy an article directory script with RSS capabilities built in so that web content publishers can link to your site for fresh content for their own websites. One key to continuous traffic is to update your content regularly. Syndication is a great way for your updated content to get re-published over and over again. Search engines love syndicated content.

    6. Don’t stop! To keep your site alive you need to either constantly add new articles or constantly promote your site or preferably both.

    One mistake I see lots of article directory sites making is that their target market consists of article authors and content seekers. Of course you need authors, but think about it. Are authors really going to click on ads on your site? The people who are most likely to click on ads are people seeking information. Authors come to your site to get visibility for their work, not to buy something. Information seekers are frequently potential buyers doing research before they choose to take out their wallet. Market your directory to information seekers as well as authors and webmasters.

    Give visitors to your new site something useful to start with and your traffic will grow from there, along with your profits.
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    Donna Knight is a Computer Trainer and Website Promotion Specialist. She has built over 250 websites and helps new site owners promote their site cheaply. For tips that will help you save money and save time when marketing online, visit her Internet Marketing Tools and Reviews blog at http://www.DonnaKnight.com. Copyright (C) 2006 Donna Knight.