When you finally decided to start your own business, and you built your website for the purpose of developing your business, your goal was clear. You wanted to make lots of money and to be in business for a very long time. Who can blame you? The thought of going to a job everyday for the rest of my life kills me too. The Basic Challenges Of Internet Marketing Links, links and more links. Whether we are talking search engine results, ezines, articles, classified advertising, or other types of advertising, the link is the method used to bring your targeted customer on the Internet to your website. They click the link and visit your website to learn more. Placing the link is often the simple part of the equation. The eyes seeing your link and the mouse clicking your link is the real challenge in this Internet promotion game. See, it is possible through FFA link sites and the such to get your link posted on hundreds or thousands of pages on the Internet. But, just because your link appears on these pages does not mean that anyone will actually see your link. The same applies to search engines. Your site might be listed in Google, Yahoo, AlltheWeb, AltaVista, ExactSeek, MSN or dozens of other search engines. But just because your site is listed in their database, does not mean that the searcher will use the right keyword combination or click through the results deep enough to actually see your links. The first challenge is to get your link seen. The second challenge is to get your link clicked. You know as well as I do that not every link provides the proper enticement to get you to click the link. Why should you believe that everyone else is different from you? You shouldn't. The challenge for you is to properly entice your potential visitors to click your link and visit your website. Second Challenge, First --- The Lure Getting people to click your link is as simple as writing good copy. Depending on the placement location of your actual ad copy, you may have only ten words, seventy words, or one thousand words to seduce people to visit your website. Let me make one point very clear. Even if you have one thousand words to make your plea, the first ten words are always the most important words you will write. Press releases should always have the information top-loaded --- you must place your most important information in the first couple of paragraphs. With straight advertising copy, you should expend a great deal of time and thought to your first ten words. Those ten words are the ones that will draw people into your actual copy. Unless you can lure people into reading your copy, the value of the copy itself serves no useful purpose. Just as it was with this article, you were drawn into the actual copy by the first ten words of the article, aka. the title of the article. Note that I have used the words "entice", "seduce" and "lure" in this article. These words are essential to writing good copy. You must be able to touch on the desires of the reader, to peak their interest, and then you must leave them wanting more. In order to get more of what they want, the reader must visit your website. Master this paragraph, and you will master the art of writing good copy. First Challenge, Second --- Getting Seen One of the most common deceptions on the web is the promise to have your site submitted to thousands of search engines. Most of these so-called search engines are actually FFA sites! Yahoo! only lists 262 search engines. At one time, I had read on About.com that there were fewer than 500 search engines. Beware the fox in sheep's clothing. Many people utilize Search Engine Optimization for use with the real search engines. But, keep in mind, the search companies are always changing and tweaking the algorithms used to produce their results. You might use SEO now and get a top 10 ranking, but there is no assurance that your top listing will stand the long-term. I have often impressed upon people to do the basics well, and the results will fall into place just fine. Sponsor ads on websites do very well when the site caters specifically to people in your target market. Ezine publishing and advertising has always been touted as the best way of drawing traffic and sales to your website. There is a lot of truth in this statement. Important Notes About Ezine Publishing And Advertising As a publisher, the road is a long and hard one. It takes a lot of time, effort and hard work, in addition to a certain amount of effective advertising to build the ezine list. Of course, when it is done well, the rewards of ezine publishing can be phenomenal in the long-term. As an advertiser, you can employ the publisher who has already done the hard work, to help you to promote your business. For the creative marketer, writing free-reprint articles and getting them into the hands of ezine publishers can be an exceptional method of developing more long-term traffic and sales for their website. Publishers and webmasters are always looking for good, informative content to share with their readers. Some of these ezines are archived on the Internet giving rise to the long-term effectiveness of the articles that have been published. For the creative marketer who is using free-reprint articles to promote their business, the resource box which appears at the end of every article, is the ad copy and link that will take the reader directly to the writer's site. The article itself often serves as the greatest lure to bring the reader to the writer's website. The article creates the desire to learn more about the writer, and the resource box tells the reader what to expect when they get there. The neat thing about free-reprint articles is that between archived ezines and websites who publish your articles, it becomes fairly easy to get your copy and links on hundreds of websites, and those links will likely remain there for years to come. In Conclusion... If you are paying for link placement, you need to track your click through's (CTR's) from those links. If the links are not generating traffic for you, examine the reasons why. Maybe the reason is your copy and maybe it is the link location. Make the changes necessary to permit the link to pay for itself or get rid of it. If you are writing articles for reprint, track those links also and look at their total success rate over the long-haul. Figure out which articles provided you the best results, and make a determination as to why. Once you know why a particular article or ad is successful, then you can make good decisions about how to get the best results from your future efforts.
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