Article Marketing & Online Marketing Strategies from IdeaMarketers - Where Your Ideas Shine

Article Keyword Density – A Worry of the Past?

There's good news for webmasters looking for quality articles for their sites and for people doing research on various subjects. Google's recently patented Latent Semantic Indexing technology will reward those who write intelligent, natural articles instead of those who stuff keywords into a nonsensical, useless article. Joshua Spaulding has a good little article on this at Article Keyword Density – A Worry of the Past?.

Why Do I Get Better Click-thru Results from IdeaMarketers than Other Article Banks?

The following question was submitted by virtual assistant, Lauray Walsh:

Question:
I've heard people say to use www.Alexa.com to decide which sites to submit articles to. I tried to type (3) of the article sites I use in the graph: ideamarketers.com, ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com/ and Idea Marketers came out on the bottom – which doesn't make sense because we've had the best luck with it.  My clients tell me they get more actually click-throughs to their sites from IdeaMarketers than the others. So what have I missed?

Answer:
The higher a site comes up on Alexa, the more Alexa users visit that site. It's not a hard and fast determination of traffic because not everyone has Alexa's toolbar installed on their browser.

What you're primarily looking for are article directories and sites that have Alexa rankings of about 500,000 or less. For example, www.ideamarketers.com's Alexa ranking is currently 13,186, GoArticles.com is 3,488 and EzineArticles.com is an impressive 485. It may seem like quite a spread, but put in a few of your clients' sites and I'd wager they'd do well to have a ranking at all or to even be in the top million.

As for your point about getting better results from IdeaMarketers than the other article directories and comparing that to Alexa rankings -- more traffic to an article directory doesn't always translate into more traffic for YOU. It depends on how that site features your articles, links to your site, spotlights you, and gives you exposure. At IdeaMarketers, my sole objective is spotlighting my writers. I try to think of as many ways/means I can give you exposure and get visitors to your site. Those ways/means translate into more click-thrus to your site.

Our bidding system in particular is conducive to bringing our writers traffic. It's dynamic enough to make search engines spider our site every few days, but static enough to give the search engine time to make several passes over the same content to eventually bring it up higher in search engine results.

An article that stays on our home page for 2 or 3 weeks or longer will usually come up on the first page of search results for its title. A great percentage of the time it will appear in the number one spot on both Google and MSN for the title.

Turning Articles into Revenues

I've been talking to a lot of writers about the way they use their articles to generate sales. It's important that you create a funnel-process with your articles. Make sure you have a call to action in your resource box that sends the reader to a very specific page on your site that relates to the article they just read. Your resource box might lead them to a fr.e.e report or ecourse that gives more information on the subject. This page you direct them to should give them only one option -- such as joining your mailing list to get the report or ecourse.

Jeff Horsager has an excellent article on the subject of landing pages that I recommend you read if you're serious about turning your article promotion into revenues: "How to Build Landing Pages that Convert"

It's important that your article doesn't send the reader to a cluttered home page where they'll have to hunt for more information.  Send them to a specific page that relates to the article and which motivates them to  take the next step toward working with you.

It's easy to link individual articles to individual follow-up pages. When you add or edit your articles on www.IdeaMarketers.com , there's a blank for you to put a specific URL and resource box for each article.

Premiere Sponsorship Spots on IdeaMarketers.com

Some people like to "kick it up a notch" when they're promoting themselves on-line, and so I've put together a premiere sponsorship package on Idea Marketers to give advertisers prominent positioning on our site. This promotion will not only promote their site directly, but also includes Idea Dollars for promoting books and articles and for proofreading services. A total of 16 sponsorships will be sold. Currently I have room for 12 more sponsors. As one of them, you'll receive:

• A text ad and graphic that links directly to your web site from our home page.
• A text ad that rotates with 15 other sponsors. These appear in the black strip across the top of all public pages of the site.
• $150/month in Idea Dollars that you can use to advertise your articles and books or for proofreading services.

This promotion is available on a first-come/first-serve basis. For more information go to
http://www.ideamarketers.com/services/home_page_sponsors.cfm

Reprint Requests for Your Articles

Due to the unreliable state of email these days, we've changed the way requests to reprint your articles are handled. While the system will still send email notifications, please do not count on receiving an email from our system when someone requests your article. Many isp's block server-generated emails. As a backup measure, we're keeping a log of requests you receive and you may view this log from within your writer account. Just log into your writer account. On the writer menu under the Article Admin section is a link for "Manage Requests."

You can reply to requests, mark that you've responded to them, or delete them from within this area. If you have requests pending, it will show up as a red message on your main login screen.

I've just added this feature this afternoon so odds are you don't have any requests pending right this minute, but you should periodically log into your account to see if you have requests for reprint pending.

This will keep requests to use your articles from falling through the cracks, thus enabling you to gain more  exposure for your articles.

Increase Visitors to Your Articles

IdeaMarketers.com has added a new visitor-driven method of categorizing articles called "tagging." Tags are a way for you to assign a keyword of your choice to articles on IdeaMarketers. You can tag your own articles and are encouraged to tag other people's articles that you like.

For example, let's say you find a really good article on "branding" and you have an article on "branding" that you've written. You'd tag both of the articles with the word "branding." Then when someone found the other article, they'd also be able to quickly find yours.

The idea is that the best articles on various subjects will be tagged (bookmarked with a keyword) by IdeaMarketers members and soon the site will be quality indexed by relevant topics. This way, visitors can easily find the best articles by subject. To see an example of a tagged article, go here.

Look to the left of the author photo. If you're logged in, you'll see a box where you could tag the article yourself with a keyword of your choice. If you're not logged in, this box won't appear but you can still see tags people have placed on the article.

If you click one of the tags (ex: article marketing, article promotion) it will show other articles that have been tagged with the same keywords. As more people tag articles with keywords, these pages will become a great resource on various subjects.

You need to be logged into your writer account if you'd like to tag an article. This keeps tagging peer-based and also reduces the likelihood of spammers abusing the system.

Once you're logged in, search for an article, and when you find one you like, type the word or phrase you feel is appropriate in the blank to the left of the article and press the Tag button. Then, when you need to find the article quickly, you can go to "Tagged Articles" under Tools/Stats on the right-hand side of your writer menu to see the articles you've tagged. If you ever need to remove a tag, you can do that as well under this same section.