The most powerful tool is your imagination

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Lead Generation Through Article Publishing

by CF Thompson

Make your website a lead generation machine. This is well known, but the techniques of garnering traffic from a target market are elusive. If you want your website to generate more traffic and customers, you must be The Authority in your market. Internet marketing is very cost effective. It does have to be carefully planned and executed. Article marketing is a very effective way of reaching your target audience; garnering high search engine rankings; traffic, and customers. The results need to be tracked and revised, tracked and revised, tracked and revised.

If you don't have a website built yet, I encourage you to develop a site that can be updated easily. If you already have a site built, consider adding a blog to your site. This is useful for the site owner to post their information and publish articles with ease.

Before you start writing your articles you should set up a tracking system. In order to determine the success of any marketing or advertising campaign, tracking results is essential. Tracking will tell you where your traffic is coming from, which search terms are used and which search engines they used to find you. It will tell you if your customers are unique visitors or returning visitors. It will tell you which pages are viewed and how long they are staying on your site.

Extensive and correct research should be performed prior to writing or publishing any articles. The research should tell you what search terms are garnering the traffic of your target audience, how much traffic there is using particular search terms on a given day. The research should tell you who the competitors are for particular search terms and how much money is being spent on particular pay per click campaigns.

Article titles should include the keywords and theme of the article. All titles should be intelligent and thoughtful. This works well for both the search engines and for the web-surfer. A good article often becomes viral marketing and produces better than anticipated results. It is well worth the time to produce a great article, then post meaningless thoughts. From the reader's perspective, it always starts with the title.

An individual who is looking for particular results through the use of a search engine will type between one and five words to achieve the desired results.The web surfer will enter between one and five keywords to find what they are looking for. They know that they can add more keywords to narrow their search, and get more specific results.

Place your keywords in the title of your article. This will help the search engines deliver to the readers what they are looking for. This needs to be implemented in a logical manor that will catch the reader's attention.

Write article summaries that will hook the audience and get them looking for more. Give them an overview of what you are going to present. Make it short. No more than five lines. It must be enticing, just as the article title.

Keep on target and don't overuse your keywords throughout the content. Post information which is directly related to the topics your target audience is seeking. The content should not be a sales pitch, but relative content, which satisfies their reason for seeking out the information. Keep to the theme of the site. The more informative you write, the higher you will get in the search engine rankings.

Provide them articles which have insight that they are not likely to find somewhere else. This will add value and credibility to your article. Go in-depth and educate your readers. Ensure that your readers are enlightened from reading your article and leave them intrigued so that they will visit your website for more information and give your site and the corresponding pages a sickiness or more time per page.

Post frequently, with fresh and current information. Frequent posts will provide a reason for visitors to return to your website. The more often you post, the more often you will be spidered or crawled by the search engines. If surfers find what they are looking for on your site, they are less likely to keep surfing and more likely to come back for additional information on the topic of interest.

Focus on your goal!Article marketing will help increase the number of inlinks to your site, help drive your site up in the rankings, and garner traffic. The article itself can also be marketed and rank for keywords. What you say is a reflection on who you are. I don't recommend the use of ghost writers, for this reason. Many companies miss the mark by hiring ghost writers to produce their content. The article may be well SEO'd or search engine optimized, using the necessary search terms, without keyword stuffing, but it is not likely to inform readers or drive them to your website for additional information. It is a well orchestrated marketing campaign that will drive traffic to a site and convert visitors to customers.

Website Traffic

Published June 18th, 2008

Filed in Advertising, Marketing