Read Start Your Own Business Online
Authors: Inc The Staff of Entrepreneur Media
Start Your Own Business (98 page)
Before you submit your articles online, make sure you read submission guidelines to ensure timely approval and posting. There are hundreds of article marketing sites on the net. Here are a few top sites:
•
businessknowhow.com
.
If your content can help businesses grow, then this is a great site to submit articles and tips to. Business Know-How is known for providing practical information, tools and resources for starting, growing and managing small and homebased businesses. The Business Know-How website reaches about 3 million individuals each year.
•
Ezinearticles.com
.
This is a matching service that brings realworld experts and ezine publishers together. Experts, authors and writers are able to post their articles on this member site. The site’s searchable database of hundreds of thousands of quality original articles allows e-mail newsletter publishers that need fresh content to find articles that they can use for inclusion in their next newsletter or blog post.
•
Goarticles.com
.
With a membership exceeding 135,000 authors, this article search engine and directory boasts more than 1 million indexed articles. The site receives more than 10,000 article submissions weekly. Their goal is to provide authors, publishers and visitors with the best and largest free content article database on the web.
•
articlealley.com
.
This free article directory was started to help authors promote and syndicate their content. This site allows authors and promoters to get their articles out with the potential of being read by millions. They now have a loyal author base of more than 90,000 active authors and more than half a million pages of content.TIPPost articles to chosen sites and link back to blog/client or campaign site. Make sure to include tags and keywords relevant to your content topic when posting.
Once you’ve posted your content on the article publishing sites, you’ll want to track their success. If you posted your content on
EzineArticles.com
, you can get a fairly good idea how many people are republishing your articles in newsletters or other nonwebsite sources. On each article, there’s a quick-publish button that spits out an HTML-formatted version of the article, allowing publishers to copy and paste the content into a website or e-mail. Authors are provided with statistics on how many times the button is clicked as well as how many times the article has been viewed, forwarded by e-mail and a few other neat statistics. Total views (page views) are also included in the statistic. Top authors report figures in the hundreds of thousands; however, they’re publishing over 100 articles per month. You get back multiples of what you put in, and depending on keywords, titles and subject matter you can expect varying results.
EzineArticles.com
, you can get a fairly good idea how many people are republishing your articles in newsletters or other nonwebsite sources. On each article, there’s a quick-publish button that spits out an HTML-formatted version of the article, allowing publishers to copy and paste the content into a website or e-mail. Authors are provided with statistics on how many times the button is clicked as well as how many times the article has been viewed, forwarded by e-mail and a few other neat statistics. Total views (page views) are also included in the statistic. Top authors report figures in the hundreds of thousands; however, they’re publishing over 100 articles per month. You get back multiples of what you put in, and depending on keywords, titles and subject matter you can expect varying results.
WORDS HEARD ROUND THE WORLDH
ere are a few quick tips on how to take an article and make it viral on the net:•
Post on discussion boards and forums
. Post snippets of your article or the article title in forums and on discussion boards that are related to your target market or topic focus. Don’t forget to include your full name and website or blog URL where the article is located.•
Compile articles into an e-book
. Compile the articles into an e-book. For example, if you own a gym and want to get more people in to work out, offer an e-book on the top ten ways to motivate yourself to get to the gym. Take these e-books and distribute them either through your website, to your e-mail list or via safelists. Give your readers the right to distribute them as well. This is viral marketing at work. If your e-book is for sale, offer to share revenue if readers distribute it to their list and sell it. This is called an affiliate marketing program.•
Write a variety of articles
. The trick to reaching a massive amount of people is to create a variety of articles. For example, if you want to promote your public relations service, you could post content on how to write an article, how to come up with attractive article titles, what’s the right format and ideal word count, how and where to distribute the articles, how to submit to hundreds of article directories within the shortest time, etc.•
Add a disclosure in each article at the end or bottom of the article
. Your disclosure statement should say something like this: “This article may be freely reprinted or distributed in its entirety in any ezine, newsletter, blog or website. The author’s name, bio and website links must remain intact and be included with every reproduction.”
Another great analytics tool you can use to track where visitors are coming from, what article pages they visit on your site, and how long they stay is Google Analytics. It’s a free service and fairly simple to set up. Go to
google.com/analytics
to set up an account. The analytics site offers a complete tutorial; however, if you’re still unsure how to use it, you can ask a web programmer to set it up for you in a matter of minutes.
Social Marketing Automationgoogle.com/analytics
to set up an account. The analytics site offers a complete tutorial; however, if you’re still unsure how to use it, you can ask a web programmer to set it up for you in a matter of minutes.
With all the social site tools available, often the best way to be effective with your social marketing is to automate the process. First, you need to decide whether automation is right for you and, if so, which automation you should set up. Automation can be key in turning your contacts into profits because you can post less, but at the same time, you get more exposure. Social automation, however, can be considered spamming, so be careful with how you set it up.
How does social network automation work? There are tools like
ping.fm
where you can automate your social networking sites or tube
mogul.com
to automate your video posting. These sites can submit a link or post to not just one or two sites but, in some cases, up to 60. Sometimes, though, the link posted isn’t relevant for the site it goes out to. In other words, the links aren’t even relevant for the members of the network, and sometimes they’re not properly tagged or categorized. This eventually leads to negative votes on the article or post submitted, so make sure you set up your automation properly.
ping.fm
where you can automate your social networking sites or tube
mogul.com
to automate your video posting. These sites can submit a link or post to not just one or two sites but, in some cases, up to 60. Sometimes, though, the link posted isn’t relevant for the site it goes out to. In other words, the links aren’t even relevant for the members of the network, and sometimes they’re not properly tagged or categorized. This eventually leads to negative votes on the article or post submitted, so make sure you set up your automation properly.
There are many automation capabilities and options available. Here are some automation suggestions to get you started:
•
Twitter to Facebook.
Every time you post on Twitter, it will automatically post to your personal Facebook newsfeed.
•
Facebook Fan Page to Twitter
. Every time you post to your Facebook fan page, it can post to Twitter, which will, in turn, post to your personal Facebook newsfeed.
•
Link your blog to Facebook.
Click on the NetworkedBlogs application in Facebook (
apps.facebook.com/blognetworks
), and add your blog information as prompted. There’s a verification process that Facebook will walk you through to make sure you’re the author of the blog.
•
Link your blog to LinkedIn.
Go to Applications and click on WordPress if you have a WordPress blog, or go to Applications then Blog Link if you have a TypePad blog. LinkedIn will walk you through the process step by step.
•
Link your blog to Twitter.
Twitterfeed (
twitterfeed.com
) is a handy, free website and application that will “feed your blog to Twitter.” Go to Twitterfeed, sign up for an account, verify and log in, then click “Create New Feed” button, and add your blog. It might take a couple of hours to start working. Once going, it’s fairly reliable unless Twitter goes down or has API issues. Check the stream once a week.
One of the best ways to automate your blog so it posts to the social sites you’re active on is to set up widgets and add plugins. You can do this for sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Squidoo, Delicious, Digg and many more. The way a widget works is every time you post on one social site it will go out to your blog as an update. First, you need to make sure your blog allows widgets. Some blogs won’t allow widgets unless you host the blog on your own site. Once you determine whether you can add these widgets, log in to each of the sites you want to add a widget to and go to the search box, type in widget, and that will take you to the most current directions on how to upload or generate the HTML code needed to post widgets to your blog.
Plugins are applications that can enhance the capabilities of your blog, such as the All in One SEO plugins available on WordPress, which helps you optimize your blog for search engines, or the WPtouch iPhone Theme on WordPress that transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme. There are thousands of plugins available, and they’re usually found on your blog platform under plugging.
chapter 36
CAN YOU RELATE?
Social Media Networking
T
he days of in-person networking are quickly being overpowered by connecting on the internet. In the past five years, connecting on social networking sites has rocketed from a niche activity into a phenomenon that engages tens of millions of internet users.
he days of in-person networking are quickly being overpowered by connecting on the internet. In the past five years, connecting on social networking sites has rocketed from a niche activity into a phenomenon that engages tens of millions of internet users.
According to Nielsen Online, a global research company, “member communities” are now visited by more than two-thirds (67 percent) of the global online population, which includes both social networks and blogs. It has become the fourth most popular online category—ahead of personal e-mail—and it’s growing twice as fast as any of the other four largest sectors (search, portals, PC software and e-mail).
Throughout this social movement, this new approach to networking has continued to be overlooked as a marketing vehicle for business owners. Now, instead of connecting at an in-person event, you can reach hundreds, even thousands, of potential customers online. Social networking can help you reach new markets and enhance your customer service.
e-FYICheck out
Meetup.com
, an online networking site that facilitates offline networking. Members can create and join groups of people with similar interests who live in their area, and they can easily organize real-life meetings. It’s a great way to meet potential business partners and clients. Cost to participate in monthly meetup events: free to $19 per month.
In today’s networking space, you need to be efficient with your time and even more effective in regard to whom you choose to connect with. It’s important to know how to choose whom to connect with online. There are two different types of networkers online—the posters and the seekers. Your business is a poster, which means you actively post valuable information, resources, tips and offers. The seekers are your customers—they’re actively seeking your products and or services. You’ll find seekers in discussion areas, forums, groups and engaging on fan pages.
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