The first thing you must do is your research. This means looking at the free Google keyword tool so that you know what keyword terms people are putting in to find sites like yours. It does you no good to just guess at keywords that you want to rank for. Instead, you must know what buyers are searching for and then fill that need.

Next, you will want to create a list of keywords that will form the basis for your marketing campaign. You will be working down this list of keywords over time, or possibly outsourcing it to your own writers.

Make sure that you always include your primary keywords in the title of your article or blog post. It is also important to put them in the first sentence as well. This helps with search engine optimization and getting your articles or blog posts ranked in Google.

You want to use your secondary keyword terms in your subheadings and throughout the content. You might want to use one or two of these secondary keywords in your article, but don’t overdo it. That is called keyword stuffing and looks unnatural to Google.

You should also make sure to use your main keyword phrase in your alt tag and caption of any images being embedded in your article. Images are great and make the reader stick around, but make sure to tag them properly for better SEO.

Always use keyword loaded anchor text to give yourself a good backlink. In other words, if you are trying to rank for “red widgets”, then you should create an HTML text link using those works to a relevant page or post on your site.

You can use a related articles type plugin on WordPress that will pull in related content from your own site for your readers. This will show them other content you have written that might also help them.

Article marketing does not have to be a tough job. The main idea is to put out quality content that your readers need. Solve their problems and you will be in demand!

Choosing Keywords For Your Articles or Blog Posts is a post from: online marketing with smartzville

Related Posts

• Blogs and Online Marketing
• What is a…? Internet Marketing Terms

Allow me to explain…

A blog is a website or part of a website. To learn how to market a website, or part of a website, cannot be accomplished by reading a 1,200 word article. Sorry.

How Blogs Differ From Other Websites

Blog marketing – Using your RSS Feed, WordPress blog plus a little promotion and marketing savvy.

There are some aspects to a blog (and the marketing of it) that differ greatly from other website types.

• They are chronological. Newest content displays at the top of the website page.
• Blogs are often (but not always) more personality laden and opinionated.
• Blogs are created, managed, and maintained through an administration panel that is generated via CMS running on a website server. Now if that doesn’t sound ‘geek’ enough to make you run for the hills, blogs are generally much easier to set up, add content to, and maintain than the more traditional website.
• Blogs, good ones anyway, generate an RSS Feed for the blog proper, every directory within the blog and even on a post-by-post basis (there’s more to this that’s beneficial, but too advanced to go into here).
• Search engines are naturally drawn to blogs for a number of reasons – the skinny amount of code, the organized content delivery, the consistently updating content, and the syndication aspect of a blog’s RSS Feeds.

A Blog’s RSS Feeds and Marketing

This, really, is all I want to discuss on this page. If you’re here because you don’t know how to set up a blog but want one I strongly suggest grabbing a $5 hosting account here: fast self-hosted blog setup. Your account will be cPanel access, you’ll have 24/7 chat and phone support, but you only need to click a few buttons to install a WordPress blog.

As you read above RSS Feeds are the part of blogs that truly make them a marketing dream. After all, getting the word out is a huge part of marketing – both online and off.

While you’re busy with your website (by adding content to your blog), your blog is doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes. A self hosted WordPress blog does this by dynamically generating the RSS feeds that run the blog and notifying update servers on the fly.

These RSS feeds may or may not be used by other webmasters, may be subsribed to by your website visitors, may or may not be picked up by newspapers or journalists.

Many people will tell you that your feeds being using on another person’s site is a terrible thing. This is, after all, your hard-written content! Yet (to the untrained eye) the other websites are getting all the credit for it.

This is most certainly not the case. Your feed, when used by other webmasters, includes a link to your website as the originating source. As your feed is used on multiple websites you are gaining one-way back links to your website, thereby positioning you (in the search engines and in the reader’s eyes) as the authority on the subject.

As with anything there are techniques to protect yourself, techniques to ensure that other website owners aren’t using your content for their credit and not linking back to you, techniques to make a reader want to click over to your site from their site, etc. Those are advanced techniques I’ll save for another article.

Promoting Use of Your Blog’s RSS Feed

The final step to blog marketing, promoting your feed. You want to get the word out to the search engines and other webmasters that you have an RSS feed (or a variety of them). This step will ensure your content is indexed and frequented by the search engines. You can manually visit over 80 top feed submission sites today and add your feed to their lists or purchase a one-time service license and/or software to manage the submissions for you. Even though there are many more than 80 rss submission sites – only 20 deliver the lion’s share of benefit to bloggers like yourself.

Blogs and Online Marketing is a post from: online marketing with smartzville

Related Posts

• RSS Feed Guide
• Create An RSS Feed

Marketing Terms and Their Definitions

If you’ve just started your business online no doubt you’ve heard a pile of new words and terms for running an online business or promoting a website.

It gets confusing…

So I’ve put together this list of terms for you – to help make sense of it all and to use as a resource you can return to from time to time.

Marketing Terms – Marketing Definitions

Ad Tracker

Software that records the number of click-throughs or sales per link you’ve set up on your site.

Affiliate

A person who markets, promotes, or advertises someone else’s product or service in return for a commission. Online salesperson. You can become an affiliate for free at ClickBank and start earning right away.

Affiliate Link

When promoting a product or service as an affiliate (see above), you would use a specially coded hyperlink to ‘point’ to a sales page. That hyperlink code would be tied specifically to your account at the vendor’s site. Affiliate links vary across merchants and networks and are generally well explained on the merchant website. Sometimes your affiliate code is numerical, alphabetical or of your own choosing. If you’re in the internet marketing field you should check out this affiliate network – I’ve had great success promoting their products.

Auto Responder

Software or a paid service that sends email to your list of subscribers on a pre-determined schedule. My recommended auto-responder service.

Blog

Short form of Web Log. The trend began as online diaries that, dependent on the blog writer, may have solicited collaboration. Blog software is now widely used as an easy way to run a website. Smartzville’s Web 2.0 Blog is here. Another of my blogs on Web 2.0 Traffic is here.

CAN SPAM

This is a legislative act on email content and delivery meant to minimize spam, but is now a cornerstone of regulations on email marketers.

Classified Ad

A small text ad with a link to the advertiser’s site, used in newsletter marketing online.

CPM

An advertising standard. CPM = cost per thousand readers of an advertisement.

Content

Content is essentially the words on your web page or within your site but may also refer to an RSS Feed’s text. "Content is King" is a buzz-phrase passed around for the last few years when large search engines (such as google) changed their top results listings to the larger, content-rich sites.

Copy Writing

Effective written copy. Used to sell or teach.

Co-Registration

Services offered by some companies to assist you in building a subscriber base. Cost per subscriber varies by market and service provider.

CPA – Cost Per Action

CPA is a model used for advertising online where the rate for every action taken by a user is preset. The advertiser and publisher agree on what actions (a sale, a sign up, a site visit, etc.) will be tallied, registered and a commission rewarded.

CPC – Cost Per Click

CPC is the model used for advertising online where the rate is tallied, registered and rewarded for every actual ‘click through’ that results in a new visitor to the advertiser’s website.

CPM – Cost Per Thousand Impressions

CPM is the model used in advertising online where the rate is set for every thousand impressions. In other words, an advertiser pays a publisher $40 for displaying their advertisement 1000 times.

CTR – Click Through Ratio or Click Through Rate.

The number of people who clicked on an ad vs. the number who viewed the ad.

Database (Relational)

Not to be confused with a datafeed (something I write quite a bit about on this website.)

A database is a file that contains many ‘strings’ of information that is searchable and usable in a variety of software applications.

A phone book is a database of names and phone numbers although I’d never use one for internet marketing because mine, personally, isn’t in computer ready format. In the computer sense, a database I might use would be the names, emails and telephone numbers of my past customers and a list of their purchases over the years.

Lately I’ve worked extensively with MySQL databases (which I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy but if you have a geek-ish mind, you’d find them quite powerful for content management and creating and managing online stores.

Directory

A finely tuned category of information. Yahoo for instance serves their search results based on directory headings.

Double Opt-In

Where email subscribers must verify (even after subscribing) and confirm that they did indeed want to be on your list.

Download

Saving files from the internet to your computer.

Ebook

Electronic Book. Ebooks created in PDF format can be read on both MACs and PCs. Where we once used ebook software to create our ebooks to sell, now we pretty much all use PDF since they have low risk of carrying viruses.

Ezine

Electronic Magazine, generally delivered by email.

Follow-Up

A sequence of email messages sent to a subscriber usually by an Auto Responder (see auto responder).

FTP

File Transfer Protocol. The means of getting content on your hard drive to the internet. Also used for downloading entire websites from the internet and onto your hard drive.

Forum

An online meeting place of like minded individuals.

HTML

HyperText Markup Language. The programming code that displays web pages.

Joint Venture

JV – Two marketers team up to present, sell, or share resources for the sale of a product.

Lead Generation

Similarto Co-Registration but also any means necessary to get people to sign up to a marketer’s email subscription. The ‘pre-sell’ part of follow-up.

Moderator

King (or queen) of a particular forum or forum topic. A moderator ensures that posts to the forum are appropriate and follow the forum’s guidelines.

MP3

Audio file format for computers or MP3 players.

Name Squeeze

A hot new way to tease a reader into subscribing to your follow-up messages. Used for lead generation and invented and tested for efficiency by marketing guru Jonathan Mizel.

Niche Marketing

Categorizing your potential customers by their likes, age, similarities. Finding out what they want to buy and how to reach them, then selling your product or service to them. Frank Kern was one of the big marketers who talked and trained extensively on niche marketing.

PPC

Pay Per Click. An advertising charge system where the advertiser pays for every click from the ad to his/her website. Perry Marshal is the expert on Google Adwords PPC opportunity and he has a free course here.

PDF

Portable Document Format. The file format most often used for ebooks.

RSS

Really Simple Syndication. A way of using varying programming code to syndicate content. See my RSS success story here.

Sales Letter

Text written using copy-writing skills to entice buyers.

Solo Ad

A one time, focused advertisement sent to a list of subscribers.

Split Test

A way of testing the effectiveness of copy. 1/2 potential customers are sent to one version of a sales letter, the other 1/2 to a different version. Each action is recorded and copy is tweaked as a result.

Syndication

Displaying content of one site on another site. See RSS.

Target URL

The landing page for a click through.

Target Marketing

aka Niche Marketing

Teleseminar

A conference call where learning is achieved.

Thank You Page

A special page (usually with download information) where the customer is directed after ordering.

WYSIWYG

What You See Is What You Get. Used to describe a type of web page creation software.

What is a…? Internet Marketing Terms is a post from: online marketing with smartzville

Related Posts

• Blogs and Online Marketing
• RSS and XML – What Is An RSS or Syndication Feed?

What does RSS or XML mean to your online marketing?

It could mean market domination and phenomenal success, if you add it to your marketing mix – but do it sooner rather than later!

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and uses XML (eXtensible Markup Language) formats such as rdf, rss or xml.

Sounds like a lot of ‘techno geek speak’ doesn’t it?

"More and more surfers have discovered the ease of use and time saving process of surfing and searching by RSS feeds."

Let’s look past the definition and onto the usage of the RSS Feed. I think you’ll see that RSS is the new marketing darling.

Group 1 Site Owners use RSS Feeds to announce news, website updates, and events (or any other newsworthy announcements).

For the Internet Marketer or website owner, RSS Feeds are a way to attract more visitors, obtain higher search engine ranking and provide another venue (vs. email) to stay in touch with subscribers.

Group 2 Site Owners will use RSS Feeds to add constantly changing content to their websites (written by Group 1 site owners) for search engine favor (search engines love to see regularly updated content on websites).

Internet Surfers use RSS Feeds to quickly check current headlines, weather, or new articles on their favorite sites.

This new style of acquiring information from the internet saves the surfer time – in comparison to visiting a search engine, surfing through pages of irrelevant results, or even accessing websites through their browser’s Favorites menu.

Internet Surfers use browser-based RSS services (via a website) or an RSS Reader (software installed on their desktop) to read RSS Feeds. Internet Marketers create an RSS Feed and submit it to feed directories – it’s really that simple…but there are some marketing techniques to ensure success.

Free RSS Document

Grab this awesome free pdf – 28 content rich pages on creating, promoting and marketing with RSS Feeds.

RSS and XML – What Is An RSS or Syndication Feed? is a post from: online marketing with smartzville

Related Posts

• Create An RSS Feed (Stampede Launch)
• Blogs and Online Marketing

I’ve always maintained that a blog, when created solely for the purpose of boosting search engine rank, doesn’t have to be anything more than a brief listing of articles available on your website that you update on a fairly regular basis. (No, not update the articles, just update the listings on your blog like a mini, ever-growing, sitemap. You can link to old articles on your website and it won’t make a lick of a difference – higher rank and positioning will follow.) Now this isn’t the ‘blog’ we think of today, but it is just as capable of bringing in website visitors and getting noticed by the search engines when made correctly. And, it takes far less time for the webmaster…

I’m telling you this here only. While other marketers push their ‘How to Blog’ ebooks and home study courses, the secret to higher ranks is in the RSS Feed, yet so few marketing books cover it – and those that do, don’t really explain the reason for it’s success!

The results of one year’s testing and tracking on the effectiveness of blogs and rss feeds for search engine positioning. This article discloses my take on having a blog just to get search engine rank…

You don’t need a blogger account, you don’t need to install software on your server and best of all you don’t need to spend hours writing a new article every day (as so many other marketers would have you believe).

Many small business owners like you and I, are far too busy to blog every day.

Many of us don’t want to learn how to install and manage blog.

But most of us do have 5 minutes a day to spice up their marketing.

If you are a ’5 minute marketer’, you can get all the benefits of a blog by learning how to promote your site with an RSS Feed. An hour to learn about them, an hour to create your first one and submit it to the top 10 directories – then just a few minutes every day adding a new item and new link to the feed. That’s all!

Want More Blog Techniques without Writing to a Blog Every Day?

Marketing with RSS or a Blog – Case Study

Smartzville.com is a perfect case-in-point. When I first started testing in July 2004, the site was relatively new, small and in a highly competitive market. Yet I had obtained a google page rank of 4 (which isn’t great but it is fabulous for a new site with very little content). I didn’t update the site’s html pages for quite a while (5 months to be exact) yet it kept its google page rank and moved up in hits and search engine positioning consistently.

How was this accomplished?

I ran an RSS Feed on Smartzville – which I only updated once every 3-4 days (updating was simply a matter of adding one new RSS item that pointed to an existing html page). That’s how I kept the page rank and grew my positioning, even though I barely did anything to the site and no other sites were linking in, by updating the RSS Feed with one item every few days. One sentence, one link, once a day – 5 minutes.

The RSS Feed – A Fast Worker for Busy Website Owners

After co-authoring The Stampede Secret with internet marketing expert Joe Vitale, and really pushing the beauty of RSS Feeds onto my subscribers (as opposed to pushing blogs simply because they are easier to teach), I have been performing some research and tests to ‘back my theory’.

What’s the theory? That an RSS Feed gets the best return on investment in this marketing mix and if you are ignoring it, you’re simply spinning your wheels with the entire Blog trend.

Stage 2 of the Marketing Strategy – RSS or Blog

Next I wanted to test and see if having a ‘true’ blog for this website would increase exposure, search engine positioning and google page rank. So I started up a Marketing Blog, optimized it for the search engines, drove traffic to it, advertised it every place I was told and knew to, and updated it frequently with oodles of original content.

What happened? Nothing new. I kept the old page rank, had about the same positioning in the search engines and saw no more traffic than could reasonably be expected given the marketing practices used. (What I’m saying here is that I could have received just as much of an increase if I’d created static html pages with that content.)

Stage 3 of the Marketing Strategy – RSS or Blog

Today is October 8th, 2005. Google is due for an update any day now and I’ll be able to report at that time whether the site sees increase in page rank and listings in the engine. (My guess is that nothing will change.)

But as of today I will only be adding to my blog infrequently (because I have a loyal following and I don’t want to disappoint my readers), I will re-submit my standalone RSS feed to the RSS directories (not the blog’s generated RSS Feed, but my .xml hand coded one) and begin updating on a twice weekly basis again. In three months or so (mid-January) Google will ‘dance’ once more and I am confident that at that time Smartzville’s home page and many inner pages will jump to a page rank of 5 or 6 and traffic will increase substantially as well as positioning in search engine results.

So come on back to this page in January of 2006 if you want to see the results. And, if you want high ranking results for your own site, grab your copy of The Stampede Secret so we can work together on your project!

Stage 4 of the Marketing Strategy – Enter Web 2.0

During testing and tracking I began to notice some disturbing trends on my websites. After months of research on user behavior online I discovered the trouble and the solution. As a result of all that work I re-wrote the Stampede Secret to include a Web 2.0 Marketing strategy that every business owner could use to custom-develop his/her own traffic generating activity.

Add the Smartzville Marketing RSS Feed to your feed list today to stay up-to-date on online marketing trends and tools.

www.smartzville.com/rssfeed.xml

RSS by Software Use: If you are currently using a RSS Feed Reader, simply copy the url for the News Feed (above) into your aggregator.

RSS by Browser: If you are currently using an RSS Feed Service, (i.e. bloglines) search for the Smartzville Marketing Blog in your service directory window and add us to your list of feeds.

A Blog or RSS For Higher Search Engine Rank is a post from: online marketing with smartzville

Related Posts

• What is a…? Internet Marketing Terms
• RSS and XML – What Is An RSS or Syndication Feed?

If a 40 year old chicken farmer living in back woods Ontario could figure it out and use it to double her newsletter sign-ups every month, you can do it too!

Now:

• Even if you’ve read about Blogs and RSS Feeds before,
• Even if you’ve tried them and quit because they were too difficult or time consuming to learn,
• Even if some other marketer told you that RSS was a passing fad…

Understand that:

• Even ifs don’t put subscribers in your auto-responder sequence…
• Even ifs don’t feed your family…
• Even ifs had no idea that RSS Feeds are attracting the best pre-targeted, pre-disposed-to-click readers that a marketer could dream of, no matter what you are selling!

This could make all the difference in the world to your online business…

The report covers:

• All you need to understand as a website owner about Blogs and RSS Feeds. What they are, who uses them, how they access them, and the reasons why Blogs and RSS Feeds are gaining in popularity and simply not going away!
• How having an RSS Feed and Blog can have oodles of high quality new prospects reading your site headlines every hour, every day, or every week – you decide when!
• How to increase, by the busload, the number of visitors to your site just by creating and submitting your RSS Feed in
  the right places and in the right manner. (We’ll show you where and offer all our notes in the password protected area – for your eyes only!)
• Instructions on creating blogs using existing content, and both the content and format to follow to create an RSS Feed. Hey don’t worry if you’re not the page-creating coding type – this is super easy! As a matter of fact we’ll even provide access to the tools we use to effortlessly create feeds on the fly – it’s a simple fill in the blanks and press a button process – all you have to do is provide the content – instant news feed – it’s that easy!
• A separate instruction sheet to pass onto your webmaster showing them exactly how to create and edit RSS Feeds, bringing them up to speed in this fast-evolving field. (This is no more difficult than the most remedial html). You don’t want to give your site designer/editor the entire report – as it could be used to push too many other sites up the ladder!

So whether you are selling your own products or promoting products as an affiliate, you need to download this report and get started today.

Get on the first ship as it sails out to rich seas…let the other marketers go after the high-speed city-slickers who have oodles of time to wait for videos and stick men to load on screen.

You know there’s just as much money to be made from busy people who don’t like wasting time – busy people who just want the facts, not the flashing pictures.

Busy people who would rather click the order button and have their questions answered quickly than to spend all day surfing around, kicking tires, and looking for freebies.

You know who your market is…

You know the person who’ll click the order button and not the X…

…and with a Blog/RSS Feed on your site, you’re bound to attract more of them!

Click the book cover to visit the official site.

The Stampede Secret: How to Get More Targeted, Smart, Affluent, Hungry Traffic Than You Can Imagine Using Blogs and RSS Feeds.

Order now, before all those other marketers finally figure out this best kept traffic secret!

To Your RSS Success!

Create An RSS Feed (Stampede Launch) is a post from: online marketing with smartzville

Related Posts

• RSS and XML – What Is An RSS or Syndication Feed?
• Blogs and Online Marketing