The benefits that articles provide are putting a site high in the ranking in search results of keywords and keyword phrases that pertains or are relevant to his or her site. They also provide attraction to website visitors when they are appreciated and is linked to your site from another site or newsletter. Articles provide for the increase of the confidence and trust levels of customers to your site and company.

Many articles are also beneficial to both company and its traffic. When the readers like the articles, they would tell more of their friends, family and peers and recommend your site to them, providing for a larger volume of traffic. You get bigger sales if your traffic trusts and believes in you. Your service would be much easier to sell when they know your experience.

So ok, we have established that articles are very important to a site and to business. Articles are crucial and to keep ahead in the game, a site must have an article, it is imperative. There is one dilemma though, not many people like writing articles.

Many website owners would rather spend their time on something else, and unless you’re a big time company, you don’t have the necessary resources to use on a pool of article writers. Plagiarism or copying of other articles is frowned upon and could easily get you into trouble, worst case scenario; a hefty fine and jail time.

So what are the other options?

Well, for starters if you hate writing articles and you can’t afford to hire people to write for you then don’t. Get free articles. The first place to look at for free articles is the public domain.  Here you won’t have problems with copyright infringement and the following penalties and fines if you get caught for plagiarism.

Public domain articles are freely given to the public for public use. You can do what you want with it. You can place it on your site, name it as yours, put it in a newsletter its you decision. Always remember though that you will have to choose articles that is very relevant to your site.

The downside to public domain articles is that since it is free for everybody, many of your competitors may have access to them as well. Since every site needs to be original and unique even though you have the same niche, this could be a predicament. You may also have to edit them a bit to place more keywords and keyword phrases to make them better.

Another way to get free articles is to allow other sites which has the same subject or topic as yours to submit articles to your site. This would be only to augment your existing content or else all your articles would be leading to other sites since these articles would have resource boxes with them that could link or direct the readers to their site. You cold use your articles to link your site to other sites as well.

But, to truly feel the impact of what a good article to you, go for original ones. There are many article writers who do part time and freelance article writing jobs that charges only minimal fees. You can get good articles that have all the keywords and keyword phrases you need and people are looking for.

Positively the most burning question on site owners minds is: how do I get the most web traffic? It is easy to immediately get traffic to your website by opting for PPC but this can become too expensive for most website owners. Hence, we are going to look at some low cost methods to get traffic to your web site

Digging To Get Traffic To Your Site

Digg is a fabulous site for you to add snippets from your web site. It does not take much time to show up on their top-ranking pages, once more making for possible improvement to your website traffic.

Cash In On Your Email List To Increase Web Traffic

What, you don’t have your own list still? Incredibly lots site owners haven’t built up their own email list. The important thing about lists is you can pre-load a string of follow-up messages, or you can transmit a press release at any time inviting them to visit your site for the latest discount or news announcement and voila, an instant boost to your web site traffic.

Joint Venturing To Get Web Site Traffic Rank

Taking part in a joint venture could dramatically boost your website traffic with very little effort. When you get a bulletin from another list owner which offers a matching product to yours, then why not find out if you can propose something of value to them to offer their members by way of reciprocation. This might be a discounted service where you can split the profits with the JV partner. Suppose your JV partner has hundreds of members on their membership site – this would be a perfect way to get traffic to web site.

As one can see from the methods earlier, coming up with way to get traffic to your site isn’t hard, but some persistent effort is needed.

As you may or may not now, Twiter.com is a hot social networking community right now.  According to compete.com, in November, 2008 Twitter had approximately 3,478,239 people visiting the site.  Twitter grew 640% between November 2007 and November 2008.

So how can you harness all this growth into a relationship building system for lead generation or joint venture alliances? How do you provide value, direction, and an authoritative impression in the minds of your followers?

Here are 6 effective ways that I’ve found to contribute to the Twitter community that can be beneficial to your business or consulting practice.

1. Target your market to follow the right people

Ask yourself, “Who’s my ideal client?” Once you define your target market, finding other people who share an affinity for your products and services is much easier. Twitter may have over 3.5 million users, but that’s not your audience. More than likely your universe is much smaller than that.  Even if you’re in abroad spectrum market such as “online marketing” or “social networking specialist” you’ve got to narrow down your focus to a definable niche, industry or demographic.   Instead of being a “social networking consultant” to all companies, being more to less is a smart idea. For example, narrow your target audience or define a specific program for Graphic Designers who want to increase their sales by using social media.  Once you’ve got your target market clearly defined, you go can use Twitter based tool sites such as TwitterGroups, http://twittgroups.com/showgroups.php or the Twitter advanced search page, http://search.twitter.com/advanced to find other Twitter pages that contain specific keywords to find specific people.

2. Offer actionable advice

Once you define your target audience and search them out, you should be focusing your tweets on solutions to issues, concerns, cares, and problems that your target audience may have. Focus your Twitter posts (tweets) on providing useful and actionable solution to problems that your ideal clients are facing. You don’t want to use blatant sales pitches here. Remember, your objectives are to offer advise, direction, and act as an authoritative source of answers to your target market. Offer them advice (not just rehashed information), case studies, software, specialized articles, etc.  Anything that may help them do their jobs better, easier, faster, more efficient or provide them a higher level of achievement, joy, and satisfaction.

3. Use your 140 characters wisely

Just because your have 500, 1,000, or 5,000 followers doesn’t mean they’re all going to read your tweets.  It’s human nature to only be interested in things, ideas, and tweets that are important, interesting, or provide value to what’s going on in your follower’s life at this moment.  So consider what your followers want to hear about. This goes back to number one on our list. Targeting your market. If we’re searching out a specific audience, your tweets are essentially your headline. The reason why someone is going to take the action to click your link in your tweet to find the benefit that you’ve promised in your headline.  Don’t just write, “marketing ideas for Graphic Designers”.  Even though you’re talking to a specific group of people, the phrase “marketing services” is vague, undefined, and abstract. Use a more defined, tangible, and clear benefit in your tweet, such as “Traffic conversion best practices for Graphic Designers”. See the difference, one is a general blanket statement, yet the other is focused to solve specific problem that your target marketing may be facing.

4. Your offer and call to action

Obviously you can’t provide much of a solution within 140 characters. So providing a link back to your site, ideally your Blog first before directing them from Twitter to another site.  Think about your end objective here. If you’re trying to build your opt-in list, then posting your tweet with a link to another website defeats the purpose. What I like to do is write my tweet as a Blog post on my site first, then copy and paste my Blog post link into the tweet box. This way, I have the opportunity to get a new or returning visitor to my Blog where I can provide useful solutions to their problems or concerns, but I can also present them with the option of joining my opt-in list. You can see an example of this on my Blog if you click here.

5. Frequency of your tweets

If your serious about using Twitter as a lead generation tool, you’re going to have to tweet a minimum of 3 times a day. I’d suggest once in the morning, once midday, and one at night. Reason being is that your target audience is online at different parts of the day. If your followers have a large following of themselves, your tweet will only be seen by a small fraction of your followers.

6. Tracking your results

One way that I’ve found to track your tweet subjects is by naming your Blog post the same as what your use for your tweet post. For example, if I create a tweet called, “8 quick tactics to find joint venture partners”, I’ll create my Blog post to be, www.christianfea.com/8-quick-tactics-to-find-joint-venture-partners. I suggest you use Google Analytics to track your website traffic. It’s very in-depth, easy to use and it’s free. All you have to do is copy and paste your Javascript code into your Blog page header and every page on your site will be tracked. If you don’t know how to do this your Webmaster can set this up for you in less then 10 minutes. By doing this you’ll know exactly how many visitors you’ve gotten to visit your site and your can test different tweet topics to see which ones generate more clicks for you.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

To discover more Joint Venture Marketing Strategies join his free JV Wealth e-zine.

Niche BluePrint Review

The launch of Steve Clayton’s & Tim Godfrey’s Niche Blueprint is gearing up to be a massive launch and will be a sure-fire way of starting 2009 on an extremely profitable note.  If Niche Blueprint delivers even half of what their first product (Commission Blueprint) delivered, it is a no-brainer this product will over-deliver in every aspect.

The Product…

Niche Blueprint is an extremely high-quality & unique course that focusses on driving web visitors to obscure niche websites (translation, low competition niches that are NOT part of the internet marketing market) and generating revenue and commissions promoting real “hard” goods and not the the typical cutthroat information products.   Battling with all the internet marketers out there peddling information products (most of them being their own ‘make money’ eBooks) has become SO ultra competitive, the regular joe trying to claim their stake on the world wide web more or less doesn’t stand a chance!

Niche Blueprint students will learn how to make tens of thousands of dollars each month with ‘child simple’ niche Ecommerce sites using precise paint by numbers instructions contained within 23 videos and 26 PDF manuals.

Steve and Tim (along with their team) will be delivering the materials over a period of one and a half months although students will have their initial eCommerce store up and running with a reasonable level of traffic and income within 30 days. They are also going to be running live teaching sessions via U-steam so it will be extremely easy to follow and will ensure you are accountable during the learning process.

The Pre-Launch…

On January 2nd, the Niche Blueprint commenced their 10 day pre-launch video series with tons of great information which generated a huge amount of buzz…

They are showing a series of 4 information packed videos (no charge), giving away some cool free stuff and will also reveal massive proof that they’ve generated hundreds of thousands of dollars using this fool proof E-Commerce formula.

The Niche Blueprint team also runs through various videos and articles high-lighting their business model that was published in the New York Times and televised on Fox News.

They will reveal exactly why this is an extremely realistic business that anyone can succeed with… even if you have ZERO online business or marketing experience.

No Experience Necessary…

With the credit crunch beginning to really take hold and many people worried about losing their jobs in 2009, it is very likely that in this New Year many people will begin to look to the internet in order to find an additional source of income more than ever before…

Niche Blueprint is the perfect solution as in order to use the material effectively and make money with it, buyers won’t need any of the following…

• An Email List 
• A Product Of Their Own 
• Affiliates or Joint Venture Partners
• Additional Investment
• Any Internet Marketing Experience
• Any Technical Knowledge 

…plus there will be almost no competition from more experienced online marketers that excel in disciplines like with product creation and affiliate marketing.

This is something anyone can excel with and to prove it they’ll be revealing how they make huge amounts of cash in totally obscure markets such as ‘Train Horns and ‘Sewing Machines!  They even have an example of a small eCommerce website selling ‘Bird Cages’ that was flipped for $173,000!

Basically, they have covered everything and have even gone as far as creating a hosting company and various other services (that would usually cost people hundreds of dollars) so after downloading the main course there is absolutely else to purchase. This is a 100% complete solution.

If you’re looking for a total package to creating your first dollar online (if you haven’t managed to do so yet), the Niche Blueprint is your answer.

There are many internet marketing tools on the market these days. They usually promote they deliver 100%, but do they?

Six Important Online Business Principles

1) Preselling

What’s involved in preselling?

“Pre-selling is not about hard-selling your product, it’s about becoming an expert in the eyes of your visitor by delivering this great information. And once you’ve accomplished that, monetizing will be easy.

In order for you to sell your products or services online, you need to establish your own position your friendly adviser position.

If someone tells you, “you should buy “xyz” product, it’s good and great, blah blah blah…

You probably get turned off immediately.

On the other hand, I later come to you and present myself as a knowledgeable expert in the field of your concern (or niche in today’s Internet Marketing terminology).

Will you listen to me before you consider purchasing the product/ service?

Of course you would.

The concept of preselling is in the works here.

Got it? Great!

Preselling creates an “open-to-buy” frame of reference in your potential buyers’ mind, so when you offer your products/ services, they will more inclined to purchase from you or on your recommendations.

What criteria do you need in order to make your preselling work?

That’s where you need a “Value Preselling Proposition”. You need to establish your value proposition – e.g. where you coming from and what sort of experience you have in order to advise your customers/ clients to act the way you want them to.

That’s preselling.

Simply, preselling is sort of the same as marketing, but it’s more than marketing. Marketing simply makes your name out, but preselling creates a warm and good impression to your visitors or potential buyers – who will like you before you offer them your products/ services.

The key idea for you to take away is this: preselling creates an “open-to-buy” mindset.

Presell is getting your prospects to have an open-mind set before a purchase.

The very least you need to build successful online (or even offine business) is that you need to create an open to buy mind set from your visitors, so that when they are ready to buy, they will not hesitate to fill out the order form.

2) Keyword Focused Page (KWFP)

What’s a keyword focused page? A KWFP is no other than just a web page full of value rich content which is focused on a particular topic.

For example, if the keyword is “Preselling”, then KWFP may be something like “preselling techniques”, “preselling strategies”, “How to perform preselling to visitors” so and so forth.

Once you have your KWFP narrowed down and researched, you will be able to work wonders through your content to fulfill preselling.

The objective of KWFP is that, you deliver high value content to your visitors so that your potential customers are pulled to your site naturally through the Search Engine. People will like your content and yourself.

If you want a good keyword research software, you may download one here for free.

Got the concept? Great.

Move on…

Once you get your many KWFP(s) gathered, you will obtain your very own topic, so focused that we call it a “Niche Website”. This kind of website is very powerful in the eyes of Search Engine because it’s so focused to solve a particular topic (keyword words).

Hence, we should think “niche” before going into KWFP.

3) Niche

If I were to define what a niche is, I would say that a niche is a general area of interest, a hobby, a passion or stuff people do. It can be a big niche like health, self improvement, earning money online, etc.

A narrow niche can be “scuba diving”.

A market is a group of people who share similar traits and have common needs. E.g. people who drive, people who need to buy a house.

Now a lot of people get confused right at this point. A niche and a market are NOT the same thing.

Niche can be defined a particular market or people that have relatively similar kind of habits, likes or dislikes, he or she actions in similar manner and they have similar purchasing habit.

That’s how I would define a niche.

They will buy your niche/ specially tailored products on your online with similar kind of mindset.

Going niche is important for small business persons like you and me, because we as small business owners are limited by resources constraint (time, energy and money!)

We can’t apply Amazon business model as our business model. However, we can compete with Amazon in a sub-niche how to create a profitable scuba diving business.

Do you see how you can use niche-concept for yourself?

Focus on a particular product in a certain niche is what you need to do.

If you want to explore this more, google “The Long Tail” up, but I recommend skipping it because the whole book refers to that simple concept. I just summarized the book in one sentence above.

eBay was only some small fry, but it’s a MNC.
People selling 1-2 dollars items are earning big bucks right now. How? By going international! No long winding cases will be quoted here. They are not relevant to you.

What you need to know is this: eBay itself contains a lot of different niches. All you need to do is to narrow down a particular niche to see how you can monetarize the crowd by tailoring products to their needs.

People call this “Niche Marketing”.

To summarize, think market, go “niche”, then monetarize. There you have it – the 3 steps to online profits. Of course, you need to research and do some work before you can reach Monetarization

4) Content -> Traffic -> Presell -> Monetarization

Offline is about location. Online is about information. It all begins with your unique content.

I feared that my English was not good enough when it came to marketing online. That convinced me I would have no way to succeed online. Then, I decided to go shortcut, by using eBay and other direct method to earn the fast bucks online.

Did that earn me any money? It did, but honestly not by a whole lot. If there is one skill you need to be successfully online, you need to be able to convey your message well.

Either you speak influentially. Or you simply write to move people.

You need to keep in mind.

Following this to a T, you will beat your competition, every time.

Quality is key to customer conversion. Hence creating valuable and trustable content that people love and will come back to you and buy from you is the key here.

Do not just sell, sell, and sell. People will get annoyed and click “BACK” out of your site immediately.

Deliver valuable content on your pages, email and etc.

However, do not give away your bread and butter.

What’s your bread and butter? If you have some really valuable information that has cost you money and experience.

Do not send out your farm. Create an information product for it!

Provide testimonials of your previous customers or who have used your products with great results. Make this a product and charge for it!

I see this strategy alone pulls in thousands of dollars for one single ebook.

A friend of mine was suffering by some kind of skin problem. She digged deep into Google to find out how to heal it. Finally, she bought an ebook to find out what one natural remedy that could heal her from the rash.

It cost her $19.99. The ebook package was 6 ebooks containing thousands of pages, but my friend wanted only 1 word from the ebook. The name of the recipe. That’s it.

Could you do the same and create a similar info product – A product that solve someone’s problem?

May it be a relationship, financial, health or whatever people are suffering problem… People are paying big money on it day in and day out! If you get this, you don’t need to buy other product before you own your own piece of internet empire. And you can definitely do it!

Let’s talk about another topic – conversion

5) Conversion Rate

Say for example 100 people read a page of your and 1 end up buying your product. We would say you have a conversion of 1%. Why is this important?

Imagine you have 100 visitors coming to your site which 1% people buying your products, you end up having 1 sales.

When you increase your site visitors to 1000, you will have 10 sales, right? But going from 100 visitors to 1000 visitors, that’s 10 times effort.

Traffic x Conversion = Sales

Let’s see an illustration
100 visitors x 1% = 1 sales
100 visitors x 3% = 3 sales
300 visitors x 1% = 3 sales

Which is easier? To triple your website traffic or your conversion rate?

Tripling traffic may be a viable mean, but cost you a fortune. However tripling conversion, in a way, is under your control.

What if you can increase your conversion rate by 3%. Then you will have 3 sales.

The aim here is to increase your conversion, before we even want to increase traffic. This is great lesson. How should we approach this? By testing it extensively.

How do you increase your conversion? Let’s talk about your brand.

6) Your Very Own Brand Name!

Last lesson of Day 1, is an important one (if not the most important).

It’s about your own brand of one. What’s brand of one?

What’s are you famous for? What people remember you as an individual or as a business?

Making yourself being a recognised expert in the field is your objective. Generality does not sell. Expertise is all that matter. You can’t be all things to all people. You need to have your own voice, your own products and your authority. No one purchase from an unknown authority and character.

Try to think and outline what your expertise, what’s so special about you that no one can replace you with? For example, I am a Chinese as well as a business professional and also a site build it coach.

That’s something not everyone can emulate or duplicate. You may take away my computer, but you can’t take away my Chinese knowledge at the same time a Site Build It coach.

So, what about you in your own niche?

Grab a paper and jot down what you’ve learnt today.

You now have the resell/ giveaway rights to the report and you may forward it to those who will find the report useful.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the tips.