You don’t sell explicitly. But you can “sell” in a very subtle manner. In other words, you don’t ask for the sale directly in your articles. Your content is meant to generate goodwill, and to screen the readers. You want to make sure that you attract the right target audience. Usually, those who are not truly interested in what you have to offer will leave the web page after just reading the first two sentences.

If a reader finishes your entire article, and then proceed to click on your links, you have a red hot prospect in your lap. It’s up to you to convert this visitor into a paying customer. You can increase the chances of getting the sale if you pre-sell the customers.

How?

By sharing information that really works. There is really no magic bullet to success. Either you have the solution, or you don’t. All customers want to know is that you have genuine value to provide. In other words, they are not going to buy your solutions only to find that they don’t work at all! In that case, they will never buy anything from you again.

So use your articles to build trust with your potential prospects. Give them some genuine tips that will really work. Sometimes, they may not buy right away. But they may come across your content again in the future and finally decide to buy something from you – just because you gave them some tips that they used and found that they really work!

Wait! There is more.

Learn more about various website promotion services.

Special discount coupon code available for website promotion guide – How to write 400+ articles in a single month.

Tip 1: Avoid self advertising in the article body. Try not to promote yourself or your products and services anywhere in the article. If you do so, your articles may get rejected by the editors. So what’s the point of writing content when you can’t promote yourself?

Well, you can promote yourself. Just that you can’t do it in the article body. You are allowed to add 2 links back to your sites in the author box. In the resource box, you are free to advertise your businesses.

Tip 2: Create visible links. The sale doesn’t happen on the articles. The sale has a chance to occur only when visitors click on your links and visit your site. Therefore, it’s important that you promote your links. Offer free gifts or do whatever is necessary to encourage the reader to click on the links. Don’t hide the links in a bunch of texts. Keep the author box nice and simple, and invite the reader to click on the blue links.

Tip 3: Provide real value. Think of your articles as some form of “sneak preview”. In other words, give away the best portions of the solution that you are offering. Of course, you should be careful not to give away EVERYTHING. Leave the reader wanting more. That will get you more clicks and sales.

Looking for more web promotion tips? There are many types of web marketing methods. Article marketing is proven to be a highly cost effective promotion method.

Learn more about various website promotion services.

Special discount coupon code available for website promotion guide – How to write 400+ articles in a single month.

1) How to write proper article titles.

This is important because it helps draw the reader in to read the rest of the article. This is where everything starts. Without good titles, traffic levels will suffer.

2) How to summarize an article.

A good summary can make a good introduction. Learn how to summarize an article into one single paragraph.

3) How to write interesting articles.

The content has to be interesting enough for the reader to want to read the entire article. Case studies, examples, personal experiences, know-how, tips, etc. can all be interesting content.

4) How to create the perfect author box.

The author box is one of the most important components of article marketing. If you don’t get this right, you won’t get a high click through rate. Remember, you are writing for traffic. And if visitors don’t click, you don’t get any traffic. Then your efforts have been wasted. Learn how to write proper author boxes that will get you clicks.

5) How to write a good concluding paragraph.

A concluding paragraph is not always mandatory. Sometimes, when an article is of decent length, I end the article abruptly. This helps to build traffic because the reader is left hanging and he wants to read more. So he is more likely to click on the links in the author box and visit my website.

But a good concluding paragraph can be useful if you want your articles to be more memorable. For instance, you have made a few important points in the article, and you hope that readers can remember what you have just written. So you re-emphasize the important points in the concluding paragraph.

I have written hundreds of free article marketing articles to teach you all about article marketing.

Sometimes the lenders were perhaps too anxious to lend, and the borrowers somewhat too ready to borrow.

There was very lax underwriting for all sorts of loans, both in the commercial and private sectors, and many were granted loans, mortgages and remortgages that many would never be able to repay.

There was particularly reckless lending in the buy to let and property development sectors, and some verging on being no better than spivs, were advanced huge sums of money and often based on a self declaration of income.

Self declarations, or self certs as they were known, meant that a self employed applicant for secured loans, mortgages and remortgages could simply write or state their own net profit on a bill head, without providing any official proof that the earnings stated were in fact genuine.

This lead to many obtaining commercial loans as well as remortgages, mortgages and secured loans that were far too expensive for them.

It also lead to lenders facing the prospect of serious arrears.

This helped cause the recession, and as a result lending criteria went from one extreme to the other with underwriting being tightened up to such an extent that many who could afford to pay a secured loan, etc., that they needed were no longer eligible.

Mortgages, which are the loan needed to buy a home, declined and the sale of houses, in particular new built properties fell, and builders were left with vast numbers of unsold homes, as new estates stood like ghost towns.

The lack of confidence in employment security made people unwilling to move house, and this further caused the decline in mortgage applications.

With the drop in property prices, many homeowners were no longer able to obtain secured loans or remortgages, as these also depend on the equity available on a property, with equity being the difference between the value of the property and the mortgage balance.

Secured loans which are also called homeowner loans are secured on the asset of a property, and in the past homeowners had sufficient equity to take out a secured loan which they could use as a low interest method of buying such things as a caravan or a car, paying for home improvements or even for debt consolidation.

The same thing happened to remortgages which homeowners applied for at the end of their current mortgage deal.

A remortgage involves moving a mortgage to a new provider, and before the recession, if the person had been at his address for a number of years he would have sufficient equity to obtain a low rate, as good equity is required for a low interest rate.

Now things are stabilising, and in fact looking on the up, with the rise in property values and the low rates available.

Also self certs are back to some extent with the reintroduction of self employed loans on a self cert basis at 60% LTV

The first thing which is important for an optimized website is content. Content is always king. You will never rank high for any keyword if you are not offering fresh and original content. When writing always try to keep the word count above five hundred words. This might seem like an easy target, but when actually writing you’ll soon get stuck at some point that you just can’t write any further. When writing this text, try to put the most important keyword of your website in it a few times. This is the word which you want to rank high for. Do not spam your keywords all over the content. This will not work in your advantage, but in your disadvantage. As with everything; don’t overdo it. Google will penalize you for it which will even take you down in the search results. Stacking keywords used to be a good strategy for ranking high, but Google smartened up and created a mysterious algorithm which determines how high your website should rank. Anything which will seem unnatural to it will receive a penalty. If you aren’t gifted with extreme writing talent you can even buy a few articles to offer your readers some original content.

Content might be one of the most important things when optimizing your website, there are other factors which are important as well. Always fill in a good three to five word description in the title tag. This tag is shown in the search results. Putting important keywords in this title is a must! As mentioned before, don’t overdo it. Three to five words is more than enough to give a good description of your website. There are two other tags which aren’t as important as they used to be, but it can’t hurt to add them. These tags are called they keywords and description tag. In the keyword tag you can put up to twenty (don’t overdo it!) keywords which might be important for your website. In the description you create a short description of the designated page of about 160 characters. This description will also show up in the search results, so it might be wise to give a fitting description which corresponds to the title tag.

Another factor which is extremely important are styling options. Text which is displayed bigger with an h1 tag is valued higher then plain text. Always make your content fluent by creating headers and titles with the h1, h2 and h3 tags. Even text which is displayed bold or inverted is more important then plain text.

Avoid technical stuff and stick to plain HTML if possible. The Google spider can’t read the fancy Flash and Javascript you put on your website. Especially if you use Flash or Javascript for your menu, ditch it as soon as possible. The Google spider can’t follow the links in your menu and your pages aren’t indexed.

Use breadcrumbs when creating your website. It creates a better structure in your links, but it’s also user friendly. Visitors can see where they are and where they came from.

All the above factors are on page and actually rather easy to do. The external factor is a lot more difficult to do because you need some help of other websites. You need so called ‘back links’, links from other websites referring to your website. One link from a website will count as a ‘vote’ and will give your page a certain rank; pagerank. Pagerank is nothing more than a rank from one to ten which gives some insight on how many back links you have. There are a few ways of gaining back links. The easiest way is to create solid content which people want to link to. Once again this proves that content is king! The better your content, the more people will link to you. For a blog about technology, or a specific niche this is rather easy to do. For a web shop it is really hard to get back links. The only websites linking to you are most likely link portals which have little to no value at all. Another way to collect back links is commenting on other people their blogs. You will most likely have the option to leave your link. This will drive some traffic to your website, but also counts as a back link which is what you were after for in the first place.

Search engine optimization isn’t as hard as all the ‘experts’ make it look like. You can easily do it yourself. There are thousands of tips and tricks out there for optimizing your website. Even ways which are illegal according to Google. Whichever way you use to optimize your website, content is ALWAYS king.

About the Author:

Mr. Carr is an active consultant/web developer, and is responsible for day-to-day operations within the firm. Mr. Carr is extremely passionate about technology in general and has developed websites and online companies for over 14 years. Prior to founding CMA, he launched and subsequently sold LandTek Holdings which was a successful online media and training company. See his latest site at http://www.justclickauctions.com/ which has website auctions to buy and sell websites.

So how do you ensure that your articles get ranked AND you get your own site to rank as well?

The answer is this -- It’s all in the keywords!

I know this has been said a million times, but so many marketers still promote distribute articles that are without proper anchor texts.

There can only be 2 reasons.

1) Ignorance -- newbies tend to do this because they don’t know about SEO.

2) Negligence -- just couldn’t care much about the links.

With proper anchor texts, traffic can increase by as much as 50% to 100%. So why not make the effort to insert the right keyword phrases?

If you are new, it’s best that you start by choosing long tail keywords. Any keyword phrase with 3 or more words in it is considered as a long tail keyword phrase.

Conduct a search in the search engines and you will see that usually these keywords have less competition (less than 200k search results). That means it’s easier to get your articles or website to rank for those keywords. This strategy always work, especially for new sites. If you are trying to target a keyword phrase like “make money online”, then you better know how to acquire very strong links. Otherwise, you don’t stand a chance.

Here is a video that you can watch:

You can watch it here, or you can go to YouTube to watch the bigger version. It’s a video that’s about long tail keyword research.

Why long tail keywords work.

Long tail keywords will give you more targeted visitors. Obviously, someone searching with a very specific keyword phrase means that this individual has a keen interest in the subject/product/service.

As a marketer, you want your visitors to be as targeted as possible. If your traffic is not targeted, it’s going to affect your conversion rates. No conversion means no money. So be sure to learn how to drive targeted traffic.

The more keyword phrases you rank for, the more targeted traffic you will receive. Of course, this means a little bit more work on your part. You have to create content/articles with the keyword phrases in them. But in the long run, this is a much better traffic generation strategy.

When you have enough pages ranking well in the search engines, you can try to rank for more competitive keywords. Now you are the owner of an authority site, and that gives you a better position to compete with other websites that have been around longer.

To be clear, the type of online shopping malls we’re discussing are those sites that display links to many online stores. These sites provide a valuable service to Internet shoppers by making it simple to find what they need.

From a website publisher’s standpoint, the best of these Internet shopping malls not only offer users easy shopping, they also contain useful content related to the domain owner’s primary business.

Confused? Let’s break down what you might expect to see from online shopping sites created through a service such as www.freemalls.com. This, by this way, is one of the easiest tools for setting up shopping malls online, and there’s no cost if you already own domain names. A typical www.freemalls.com mall site will contain the following content:

1. A categorized directory of links to online retail sites.
2. Content such as videos and articles related to your primary business.
3. Affiliate links for Internet marketing services.
4. Affiliate ads for Google AdSense, ClickBank and any other online advertising program you’re enrolled in.
5. Banners for products and services you wish to advertise.

The beauty of using a service such as www.freemalls.com is that you can set up your shopping mall sites quickly with little effort on your part. Once created, those formerly expired or unused domains go to work earning affiliate commissions and driving traffic to your primary websites. And did we mention there’s no cost to you?

So, what’s the catch? There really isn’t one, if you’re willing to promote your shopping malls through web linking. The more links connecting your site to other quality sites, the more money you can expect to make. Doesn’t that sound way more profitable than letting those unused domains sit on the shelf?

Explore this possibility for yourself, to learn how quickly you can monetize your domains. Take a tour of www.freemalls.com and look over the websites of their satisfied customers. Read their client testimonials. Start thinking about how to group content, related links and videos you already have to promote your domains. And then take the plunge.

Don’t let expired domain names go to waste. A service like www.freemalls.com takes the work out of monetizing them, so what do you have to lose? It’s hard to find something free that delivers so much value, but people like you are making money right now from mall sites.

Online shopping malls sites are a no-risk, high return way to earn money fast from your unused domains. They create several streams of passive income and multiply your online presence. They can push you into the realm of the truly successful Internet business owners. And isn’t that the reason you set up shop online in the first place?

Now that you understand the concept by definition, let’s take a look at what that definitional means. The size of your business has minimal, if any bearing, because the bottom line is that you need to establish and maintain a presence in the natural search engine rankings of the top search engines and this can be accomplished by using scalable natural search engine optimisation solutions such as keywords, internal linking, competitive analysis and content analysis. These are natural solutions that must be managed by an individual or team of experts, depending on the size of your website.

More specifically, when it comes to keywords, you must pick the proper phrases for your website to ensure that these words place you at the top of the search engines. This includes proper keyword density, which means you cannot overload your pages with certain words in the hopes that they will get targeted higher in the search engines. You must use these keywords properly in your content, Meta tags and other applicable areas.

Internal link building is regarded as one of the more challenging facets of SEO. Many people consider it problematic because it directly impacts the power of your website to be found in the searches. Building internal and external links is a critical ingredient for the recipe of a properly optimized website so you must have access to the ability to build links that are strong and purposeful.

Equally as important is your content when it comes to natural search engine optimisation, where content is recognized by many as king. Starting with content volume which is a part of optimizing your web pages and including content analysis which is an introspective look at not only what the content of your web pages say but the ability of that content to achieve one of the major goals of your website: to attract traffic that comes to your pages and purchases your goods or services.

With all this focus on building keywords, structuring content and properly labeling Meta tags, it is important to make sure that established websites receive regular reviews to track the results of your SEO workings. Whether you’ve done the work in house or sourced it out to the professionals, you need to know what results your SEO is achieving for you. This is accomplished by tracking the results of your traffic, rankings and conversations. There are far too many different types of reports to narrow it down to just one or two but a part of staying on top of your game is to understand that the power of the search engine is constantly changing. This means you must adapt and change your website to meet the search engine criteria.

When you have addressed these basic areas, another basic consideration is your website’s reputation. As a rule, you want your website to express a positive image of you and your company. This can be accomplished with proper management of your SEO reputation. Take care to reduce negative PR and enable searchers to find content they are looking for by increasing your rankings with positive experiences with customers and the right natural search engine optimisation focus.

1) Primary keywords in page title.

This is an easy technique that everyone can implement. Always include your target keyword phrases in your article title. That will help boost your search rankings. Don’t just use your company name or domain as the page title. If you really wish to include your company name, place it after the primary keyword phrase.

2) Use of unique Meta tags.

Although Meta tags are invisible to the visitor, search engines still rely on the information to rank web pages. Try not to use the same Meta tags for all the pages. The two most important Meta tags are the “keywords” and “description” tags. Use unique tags for each web page.

3) No duplicate content within the same website.

The search engines are coming down hard on websites with duplicate content within the same domain. Websites may be banned or penalized. If you have websites that require duplicate content (e.g. print friendly pages), always use canonical urls to specify the primary web page.

4) Back links!

Don’t forget to acquire as many relevant back links as you can for your website! Many webmasters tend to spend too much time generating content, and they forget to acquire back links. More traffic doesn’t guarantee more traffic. But more back links will get you more traffic for sure!

There are more that you can do. But the above techniques represent the bare minimum. In other words, you must implement these techniques for your site to rank well in the search engines. Here is how you can practice and improve your SEO skills.

1) SEO contests.

This is the number method for perfecting your SEO skills link in the current promo junkie contest: Oes Tsetnoc . In order to find out how good you are at SEO, you must pit your skills against other webmasters. Usually, those who compete are new to SEO, so the competition is fair. Besides, everyone can share their experiences and learn from one another. It’s a great way to put SEO into practice.

You can find out more about SEO contests from blogs, forums, and other webmaster communities. Word travels fast on the Internet. If you are well connected, you will hear about them sooner or later. The best part is, while practising, you stand a chance to win great prizes! For every contest, a few generous sponsors tend to sponsor prizes such as cash, gift vouchers, digital products, etc.

2) Webmaster forums.

SEO contests can take a month or two to complete. If you don’t wish to participate in such contests, you can join webmaster or internet marketing forums to learn more about SEO. Many members are more than happy to share real life experiences with the rest of the community. If you have questions, just ask. You will be surprised at the number of members who are happy to provide you with great answers. In time to come, you will become an SEO expert. Now it’s time for you to share what you have learned with the community.

When you issue a press release, think of it as an SEO campaign. (You can read more about SEO news here). What do you usually do when you are performing SEO?

You want back links from authority sites right? Well, when you distribute a press release, you are sending your PR out to many well established sites such as Cnet News, InboxRobot, EINNews, etc. These sites have been around for years, and links from them are very valuable.

Valuable in the sense that you can boost your search engine rankings. In today’s age, any marketing campaign must involve the Internet (read more about Internet marketing news here). For all you know, the bulk of your business will eventually come from the Internet.

As the major search engines own the lion’s share of web traffic, it becomes impossible for business owners to ignore this traffic source.

To perform SEO properly, your job is not just to get back links. Back links MUST come from authoritative sources. Otherwise, your site may get penalized for link spamming. In addition, make sure your links come from relevant articles. This isn’t too much of an issue since in a PR, you have full control over what you want to include in the release.

Note that a PR is different from an article distribution. You can’t use articles to promote your business directly. The article directories will reject your articles. But you can use PRs to promote your businesses directly. Talk about your new products, new shipments, new customer service policies, and so on.

Your PRs will help you attract targeted visitors from Google News, and other major news aggregators. They will also stay online indefinitely to help you gain more traffic in the long term.