Articles for website marketing

Many sites, large and small, use articles to promote themsleves. Articles work in two directions at once.

First, reader see what you have written, see you as an expert and visit your site.

Second, with some article publications, the article is published on a website and in return the page links back to your site. So you have a source of one way links.

Either way is goog for business. The former is best whilst the article is new and being distributed in e-zines, but like the second, SEO, aspect as long as the article is displayed on websites with the links live then there is the chance of benefits.

But what sort of articles should you be writing? Articles should be honest, whilst not directly selling your product. You should be writing impartial advice and using the information imparted to convince your reader that you know what you are talking about and tempting them to read more about what you have to say by visiting your site.

Articles should be unique and have something in the title that makes them stand out - why should a publisher publish your article rather than someone else's? Getting your article picked up by publishers is vital - else you are wasting your time.

Fliers to market your website

Fliers can be an efficient way of marketing a website, or any business for that matter. You only need to look at your post and the free newspapers to see how many people rely on them for your business.

You need to put together a good looking and well presented convincing flier. Spell out what you offer quickly and plainly. Spell out the advantages of your services against the next guy's and make sure the leaflet looks the part.

Leaflets that drop through my door on badly cut cheap white paper, with less then perfect printing find their way to the bin even quicker then the better quality leaflets. And those with bad spellings and apostophes in the wrong places get the speediest trip of all!

So make sure leaflets are well written and spell out why a customer should use your services. They can then be rapidly distributed around your target audience. If your audience is householders or general public, then dropping the leaflets on a door to door basis is ideal. If you are looking for commuters, then car parks could be what you need. But if you are dealing with businesses, then leaflet dropping around the relevant businesses is the only option.

Targetting small businesses can be trickier - especially if they are so small that they are typically ran through private homes - are there are a lot of those around here. With them, you are best getting a list of businesses and their addresses to drop the leaflets to. But be aware that not all directories like you making marketing lists from their data.

Free Directories CAN Drive New Business

Getting your site listed in free directories, including top sites lists, can drive in new business to your site. Now it depends on what you are selling and how many sales you are after, but this can give your business a boost.

Particularly if your market is dealing with a topic where people browse around a lot, then getting listed in free directories and top site lists can be to your advantage. Whilst promoting a dating site a few years ago I listed it in a few of these such sites. I monitored it and noticed that most traffic came from a couple of very good "top sites" lists.

Now I was never going to retire on the income from this affiliate scheme - I gave up actively promoting the services in favour of other schemes because I found the conversion rate to be very low. (It was one of my early ventures when I was looking for any idea to work on!) But it did get plenty of taffic sent to the provider and even though I don't work on this any more and haven't done so for years, I'm still getting people joining up through my links from the top sites list!

For the small amount of effort in joining relevant lists and maybe uploading banners or links to your own site, you can possibly gain yourself a steady stream of visitors for a long time. It's free to sign up - so any sales you make are a wonderful profit.

The Cottages Site's Links Directory

I've noticed testerday that the number of link requests for my cottages site is up significantly - at a guess, I've had more requests today than the whole of last week, and possibly the week before as well.

I was wondering why so many were coming through and then I noticed in my Google Adsense account that the traffic was up - helped of course by displaying the Adsense adverts on the link exchange pages. But it was only seeing that which reminded me of the effort I've put into that site recently! I'm not exactly known for my memory!

I suppose I'm watching for traffic being up on the website as a whole, not an increase in the link requests. But there could be a catch 22 situation here - in a postive way. Refresh the site and get it more popular with the search engines. Maybe not popular enough for the content pages to list highly, or high enough to show extra traffic, but a little higher.

But it might not just be the content pages that search engines take a shine to - why not the whole site? Although I've not yet updated the links pages to the new style (I forgot - my memory...) so I'll do that in a minute, it's possible that a slight improvement to the site could bring more traffic to the links exchange. There was another good day a few days back.

So maybe the links pages are being found more and the result will be more link swaps with suitable sites. That will hopefully bring the PR of the whole site up and as well as meaning yet more people are finding the links pages, ultimately eventually hopefully more customers will find the pages and begin making bookings.

Fingers crossed - I hope it wasn't all a big waste of time!

Using Blogs To Promote Your Website

Like using forums, using blogs to promote your website can be extremely rewarding, but should be done carefully to stay above board and not upset the owners.

There are two ways to use blogs to promote a site. First, using your own blog to promote your own product and second, visiting other people's blogs.

So, using your own blog - how's that done? Well, it can be as simple as running a blog for whatever purposes and the blatantly going "See my Mortgage Rates website." - see, just done it there for myself! If the blog / post is well page ranked, then it's a one way link into your website... Plus, if it is applicable to your audience, then there's a good chance of traffic following the link.

The next step is to tun a blog specifically for your product or services, either independently or on your own website. It can be a general blog designed just to create lots of content and therefore the chance of numbers of people finding it, or it can be specifically to mention and discuss various aspects of your products and services.

You can also post comments on your blog about posts on other people's blogs and link to them. Sounds crazy - probably is - but if the blog has got features such as trackback installed then they are likely to link back to your post. This might have the rel="nofollow" instruction of the link, if so it doesn't help for SEO. But even if it does, if you found the post then so will others. And they will be interested to see what you had to say when you linked to the blog, so an amount of traffic can start to appear.

Posting comments onto other people's blogs is the same idea as the trackbacks. These can frequently be covered up by the rel="nofollow" instruction, but visitors will see the comments and some may follow if your comment is interesting. If it's just blatent self publicity, then it's likely not to be followed and possibly even deleted.

Work with these people, not against them. Do unto you as you would have others do to you and everyone will be happy and your website traffic will increase.

Using Forums to Market Your Website

Using internet forums can be a good way to market your site - but be aware of rules and regulations, else you might upset someone and be reported as spamming!

Carefully, and properly, used forums can drive genuine visitors to your website, for free. All it takes is a bit of time and effort on your behalf. Furthermore, the same techniques can also sometimes count as one way link building - possibly a great benefit!

Why only "possibly"? Well, for a start, many forums have been so blighted by spammers in the past that they now take action against people posting links. Some are quite harsh - removing all links and hiding them. Some only allow links to be posted by long standing member whilst others hide the links from search engines using the rel="nofollow" instruction, which was developed by Google especially for this sort of work.

Add to this that search engine programmers know that it is far too easy to get a one way link from a forum and have coded the weighting behind forum posts links to be far inferior to normal links, and you might start to wonder if you are wasting your time.

But you are not! About 18 months ago I was reading a running forum about a well known UK half marathon and many people were struggling to find accommodation for it. I posted a link to a page of mine on which there was an affiliate link to a hotel provider. Straight away I saw a few commissions appear and even now, when I am no longer promoting this scheme and even they entire site I was using for it has closed, I am still getting odd commissions for bookings on race weekend.

Such is the power of blogging that by one quick post I generated traffic to send to an affiliate scheme, that repaid my time handsomely. I could take this further and be more proactive in the forum and post recommendations to more of my own pages for running equipment affiliates, but it's a matter of getting the time to set that up.

But with careful posting it is easy, and allowed, to post replies including links to your websites. Quite often you will get warnings and bans if you take it too far - creating threads just to publicise your products, but if the reply you post is honest, helpful and happens to include a link to a supplier, which may be you, then no-one should complain.

Keep above the line and you can work this well. Look at it more as driving genuine traffic than search engine optimisation and you will be satisfied.

The first cottages reload

The new style holiday cottages site has been live for over a week now, so I thought I should, as planned earlier on, reload the database.

The agreement with the provider is that the reload is at least monthly. But with my new style of website, an essential element is listing the latest cottages on the site's home page, plus the home pages for the areas. Within each of these lists, only the 10 most recent additions are displayed. So with the load today, 13 new properties were added. this means that only a randomly chosen 10 will appear on the home page.

Does this matter? Well the purpose of putting this information on the home page are: it adds regularly updated content to these page; it makes the search engines find the new property pages a lot quick (if they are visiting the home page that often). So there's a balance.

If I update every day, for argument's sake, then the new properties will drop down the list one or two positions at a time. If I update every month, then a new 10 are picked up each month.

On balance, creeping down the list is best. This way every new property gets a chance of being on the home page, and the content changes slightly, with blocks staying the same for when the search engines come back. Ideally encouraging the search engines to the site every day would be ideal, but a weekly visit is most likely. So being prepared for that visit is probably the target.

Therefore, I must be uploading the new file at least every week, probably twice a week to cope with cases when search engines return after 6 days etc. So it looks like that's the routine I must develop.

How to manage link exchanges

How do you manage your link exchanges? I think that if you are running link exchange for SEO then you really do need a tool. It should be able to allow other site owners to add their site to yours; it should allow you to add sites - before they add a link and it should run various checks that the sites supposed to be linking to you actually still are.

I've had various attempts at writing this for myself over the years, but they are never as efficient as an off-the-shelf links directory. You need tricks such as when another site owner requests a link exchange the software much check their site to ensure that the link exists where it says it does. And preferably it checks the robots.txt file and for rel=nofollow in the link.

No software is going to be perfect, but I always use linkmachine for my links directories. One customer was unable to install it onto their website as their hosts has unusual security considerations, but on the whole it is quick and easy to install. It does check that the link back already exists and helps you as the site owner to get more links in. And whenevery you want to, at the click of a button it goes off and checks every link pointing to you is still in place, checking the sites where it can't find the link in case the link has moved.

It's not perfect, but the free version is fine for my requirements. I like it and believe, especially in some cases, that it has really helped the positioning of some of my sites.

May Cottages Benchmark

I said that I was going to benchmark the holiday cottages website for the month of May, and I nearly forgot. But the way the commissions are going between the two sites, it's really no wonder!

Between them, the 2 sites managed 4 bookings in May, and 3 have been rejected. So a fantastic commission for May of just £26. Wow. Last May it was 5 bookings and only 1 was rejected, earning a still pathetic £56.84.

As far as traffic goes, the cottage-holidays site (unchanged) had 4,914 page impressions, against 1,018 for cottages-4-holidays, which will include a few of my displays during testing. So traffic compares well to April. As for income, well it was $169.62 and $32.30 respectively, again, very close to April's figures.

So, thanks to the reduced commissions, the income between the sites is down to around £160, from £200. And I thought April was low. I'm not expecting great movements this month - give the searcb engines a few weeks to find the new pages etc. But these figures serve as a benchmark for my changes.

Sorting your link

You have decided what link building software to use, you have got a list of sites to get in touch with and put their links into your linsk directory, but should your link look like?

Most take the format of:

UK Mortgage Rates - compare all mortgage rates online.

That's three elements - the URL, the title and a description.

The description is the easiest to deal with - just describe what your site offers - it's not important for search engine optimisation (yet!). The URL - well the obvious thing is to link to your home page and many link exchanges demand that. But also consider requesting that some of the links point to your internal pages - this helps get traffic up over the entire site.

Then comes the important bit - the title or link text. Much has been written about this and there is a great deal of care required in any search engine optimisation - too much and the search engines pick up on this and you can get banned.

Most advice is that having keywords in the anchor text - the title - is advantageous in getting you rated higher for those keywords. So, if you want to rate higher for cottage holidays, thne use them.

But if suddenly you get 100 links in using the same keywords then it is obviously artificial. So don't just target one keyword. Try cottage holidays, holiday cottages, UK holiday cottages, cottage holidays UK etc. Really going for link building? Then if you are building heavily find an even wider variety of anchor texts. Try Cornwall holiday cottages, Devon cottage holidays etc.

Variety is the spice of life. Combine the wider range of anchor texts with linking to the relevant website pages - for example, Dorset Holiday Cottages would point to the Dorset home page. Simple!