5 Tips For Effective Content Marketing

There are a lot of different ways to get your product, service or website in front of potential customers online. Marketing with content is one of the most effective ways to do it. Here are 5 tips to making your content marketing stand out from the rest and work in your favor.

1. Varying Media Types – Don’t just rely on one specific style of delivery for your content. While articles are very useful and the most common form of content marketing, using video, audio and holding teleseminars are all equally appealing options to readers. Some of these take a little longer to create, but they all have their advantages. Using multiple forms of content delivery makes it easier to reach a larger audience.

2. Social Networking – Social networking sites such as Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Digg are perfect vehicles to create your business networking contacts. You can link up with people who are interested in your service and even create partnerships with other people to increase your exposure.

3. Referral Programs – Use your clients or customers to help bring in more people through referral programs. You can offer a reward for the people they bring in or make it a contest for whoever brings in the most over a certain period of time.

4. Affiliate Programs – Set up an affiliate program so you can have other website and blog owners online market your content for you, while also referring people to your products or service. The ability to earn a commission on any sales they send your way is a must for this type of program. This costs you nothing unless the affiliate sends you a sale, but drives people who are interested in what you have to offer to your site and increases the chances for a sale.

5. SEO – Search Engine Optimization is the means to better placement of your website at the top of online search results. This is a fantastic way to position your content in those search results directly related to your product. The more keywords you are linked to, the more likely people will find your content through online searches. There are free tools available to help you streamline your keyword efficiency.

Using one or all of these marketing techniques will bring the customers to your website and have them already interested in what you have to offer.

More Proof Of The Power Of Article Marketing

Yesterday I read a great post by Leo Dimilo regarding the traffic-generating power of article directories such as EzineArticles. 

I’m a big fan of article marketing for a couple of reasons:

•  Its free.  If you’re just starting out and you’re on a tight budget there’s no better way to drive targeted traffic to your site. 
• You can use your article to pre-sell the reader on whatever product or service you’re offering.  By the time they click through to your main site they’ve already been warmed up.
• If you do it right some of your articles will send you traffic for YEARS.

Awhile back I shared some of my own results from an article marketing campaign I was running for one of my small niche sites.  I mentioned that one of my articles had been viewed 7169 times and had generated 4115 click-throughs to my main site.

Well I just checked my stats and in the 18 months it has been live it has now been read 14729 times and generated 7753 click-throughs to my site.  And that is all completely free, 100% natural search engine traffic. 

Want an even more impressive example?  While checking out some competitor articles in that niche I found an EZA article that has been viewed an astounding 1.7 MILLION times! 

I did a little reverse engineering via Yahoo’s site explorer and found the article listed in lots of blogrolls, web site footers, and other purchased link spots.  Its obvious he’s buying up links and pointing them at the article to give it a boost in the search engines. 

And oh boy is it working!  I’m finding that article at or near the top spot for one keyword phrase after another. 

That is one marketer who obviously knows what he is doing.

Article Marketing – The Traffic Generating Machine

The other day I was chatting with Danny Cooper over on his blog and I mentioned that I’ve had a lot of success generating traffic to my niche web sites via article marketing.  Danny asked me if I’d be willing to share some specific numbers so I figured I’d post it here so you can get an idea of just how powerful article marketing is.

Now there’s no way to cover every aspect of article marketing in just one blog post…so this will be the first in an ongoing series.  Make sure you subscribe to my free RSS feed so you can continue receiving each new post because once completed you’ll have a comprehensive guide to making money using article marketing.

If you’ve never heard the term article marketing you must be living in a cave.  Its simply the process of writing articles to generate traffic to your web site.  Blogging is itself a form of article marketing, but that’s not what I’m going to talk about here.

For our purposes here article marketing is writing articles and submitting them for publication to third party directories.  I know what you’re thinking…why should I give my best articles away to some directory for free?  I’ll give you a few reasons…

1.  You get free links from the directories themselves and from any other site or blog that reprints them.

2.  If done right you can top search engine rankings and boatloads of traffic through directories like EzineArticles.

image source: http://www.carrieunderwoodofficial.com

3.  You’ll win fame and fortune and Carrie Underwood will want to date you!

Ok, ok maybe that last one is a bit of a stretch.  But let’s take a quick look at a real life example so you can see the kind of traffic article marketing can generate.

For this example, I’m not going to give you the actual niche or domain that I’m sending traffic to. Its a tight little niche that I’ve done well with and I’d rather not give it away. Let’s just say it promotes a product I found on the Clickbank marketplace and its earned me several thousand dollars in affiliate commissions since I started promoting it.

Besides the niche doesn’t really mean much…you can use article marketing to promote everything from natural remedies to treadmills to internet marketing seminars.

The numbers I’m going to share with you below are from 29 articles that I wrote and submitted to EzineArticles.  They all link back to the same domain.  Almost all point directly to the homepage, a couple to secondary pages.

What this says is that the 29 articles I wrote were viewed 24,396 times on EZA and 8,882 readers clicked on the link to my site at the end of the article.  And that’s not all.  The articles were republished by other sites or blogs 82 times and seen by who knows how many more people.

That means that on average each article I wrote was read about 841 times and generated 306 click-throughs to my site.  Not bad!

And those are just averages…some articles don’t do so well, but my best one for this niche has generated an amazing 7,169 views and 4115 click-throughs!

So far.

You see these articles are still sending me new visitors day in and day out even after I published them over a year ago.  They send me traffic while I’m sleeping, on vacation, or sitting on my couch watching the game.  They’re a traffic powerhouse that should continue to send new traffic for years to come.  And the more articles I write the more traffic I get!

And this is just one niche.  I’ve written hundreds of articles under various pen names promoting many different products.  Some don’t pan out quite so well, but some pay big dividends!  If you’re not tapping into the power of article marketing to promote your site you’re missing out on some serious traffic.

Now don’t forget to subscribe to my feed because there’s a lot more to learn about article marketing. Most people do it completely wrong and never see any results. Stick with me and I’ll show you how to write articles that will bring you more traffic than you can handle!