Another Way To Re-purpose Articles – Social Media.

Yet Another Way To Re-purpose Articles – Social Media.

I don’t know about you, but I struggle a bit at times with social media. They can be quite a time sucker, but at the same time, they are a great source of traffic for our affiliate sites… if we can manage to add great content on a regular basis and start a conversation with people in our target market.

One thing I've started doing recently that’s been working very well is to reuse some of the content I've already written as Facebook posts and tweets. Let me explain…

Start with an article that includes 5 to 10 tips on a particular topic. Now take each of these tips and use them as individual Facebook posts or tweets. If needed, you can shorten them up a bit. This is especially important for Twitter.


Create A Series Of Tips
You can also create a series of tips to encourage your friends and followers to consume more of your content. Here’s an example:

Quick Tip #1 – Drink more water to lose weight.

Quick Tip #2 – Start dinner with a big salad to consume less calories.

Quick Tip #3 – Do push ups during TV commercials to get more exercise.

Each of these tips could come straight from a 7 Tips for losing weight article. If you have a whole bunch of related tips, create a twitter hash tag for them (i.e. #quickweightlosstips).

Make It Interactive By Asking Questions:
Another great idea is to take some of these tips and turn them into questions. “Drink more water to lose weight” becomes “Does drinking more water help you eat less?”

Another option is to take the overall theme of your series of tips and toward the end of it ask your readers for their favorite way to do something. Going back to the weight loss example we could simply post on Facebook or tweet: “What’s your best weight loss tip”.

And since we’re all about reusing content, you can take the replies you’re getting to write future articles, blog posts etc.

Another option for Facebook is to take a few of the tips and create a poll from them. This gives your friends another way to interact with you and give you feedback on what works best for them.

Now that you have all this extra content that you can use on social media sites, you have to get it out there somehow. I find it hard to remember to log in twice a day and post some stuff.

I use a website called Hootsuite to help me manage my social media accounts. It allows me to access all my accounts in one easy to use dashboard. But my favorite feature is the fact that I can schedule posts to go out at certain times. This means that I can take one of the articles I've written, grab 5 tips from it, rewrite them into short tweets or Facebook posts and add them all at once. The software will then make them life at whatever date and time I specify.

And now I would like to invite you to learn more about affiliate marketing and how you can grow your own niche site in as little as 30 minutes a day using the strategies and checklists I’m using each day.

13 Article Styles that Deliver Results for Article Marketing.

13 Article Styles that Deliver Results for Article Marketing.

Ever feel like you’re in a rut when it comes to writing articles? No matter what you do, most of your material comes out in the same format with the same tone and the same style. How boring is that?!

Here’s a great way to break the monotony. These 13 article styles are just the ticket for bringing variety and interest to your writing and ensuring your readers stick around longer.

1. News Think like a reporter. You’ll need to appear un involved with the person or event being written about. As a journalist, your sole purpose is investigating the facts and delivering that information via written story. No fluff here… just straight up, unbiased info.

2. News Roundup Like a “greatest hits” CD from your favorite artist, a news roundup compiles several news stories (usually from a certain time period or from certain events with common themes) into one article. For example, you might write “Breaking Agricultural News from Around the State” that includes snippets of several stories pertinent to the agricultural industry in your area. You might also do “Top Political News for January” (or for a particular year).

3. Interview Introducing your audience to someone of interest makes for a great piece, if you ask engaging questions. “What’s your favorite color” and other such teenage-ish queries should be left for a private conversation. But if you’re able to get to the heart of issues, bring out insider tips for success or help your audience experience what life is like as a crab fisherman in the dangerous and frigid Bering Sea, you’ll have ‘em hooked!

4. Human Interest Often heartwarming, always emotional, human interest stories focus on real-life people. The homeless man who turns out to have a golden voice for radio announcing. Elementary school girls providing lawn care for senior citizens in their neighborhood. A fundraiser that saved a family from bankruptcy after their 10 year old son needed emergency brain surgery. If the thought of an event or person brings about a whispered “wow,” chances are it’s a human interest story.

5. Analysis  Going deeper into a topic can often be characterized as an analysis. Basically, to “analyze” something is to break it down and take a closer look. You’re getting more specific, perhaps explaining the who, what, when, where, why and how of a subject. Analysis articles can be written in the form of news or a comparison among other ways.

6. Case Studies This style of article is generally longer and more detailed than most. It focuses on one, specific case in point (as the name implies). These days, case studies are particularly popular in the business-to-business marketing realm, but they are also useful in many other instances including business-to-consumer marketing, the medical industry (i.e., those published in the New England Journal of Medicine), the research industry and more. Most case studies start by defining a problem then work through the creation of a solution, how that solution was implemented and the end results that followed.

7. How To  One of the most popular styles of articles, the “How To,” is an old standby that every article writer has employed on a regular basis. What makes it so user-friendly? The fact that we all love to learn how to do new things. Explain a process in your article and you’re almost guaranteed to have a hit on your hands.

8. Tips Can you offer readers several tips for being more successful at something? Put those tips into an article.

9. Best/Top  Have you done any keyword research lately? One of the most commonly searched phrases is “best ____________.” From “best laptop computer” to “best way to cure poison ivy” people are hoping to cut through the garbage and get right to the most effective info. By offering the “Best or Top 3 Ways to Spot a Thief,” (or something in that same format) you’re giving them exactly what they want.

10. Lessons Learned  Have you been through the School of Hard Knocks? Share your valuable personal experience in an article such as “5 Lessons Learned About Choosing a Puppy.” Or, if you watched a TV show, participated in an event or otherwise took part in something that you learned a lesson from, turn it into an article.

11. These Mistakes  Another wildly popular style of article involves mentioning “these” _________. For instance, “Are You Making These 3 Mistakes when Writing Press Releases?” The word “these” is very specific to what’s in your content. The form of a question added to the use of the word “these” begs the reader to dig into your content.

12. Your Introduction to  For most industries, beginners make up the largest percentage of the population. Why? Because there are almost always more people who start something and who finish/continue it. Small business owners, for example, have a frightening statistic to overcome: most small businesses in the U.S. fail prior to their fifth anniversary. Offering an introduction to some topic will have wide appeal and could catch you some followers who will stick around their entire business lives.

13. Take a Position  Political correctness has no place in these types of articles. There is no fence-riding here and trying to please everyone is a lost cause. When everybody else is doing their best not to set off flares, you can attract a lot of attention by taking a position. Pick a timeless debate (which works better: long or short copy?) or something more current (is affiliate marketing a deceptive practice?), choose a side then stand your ground in writing.

IS IT REALLY THIS EASY TO GET FREE ADVERTISING?

IS IT REALLY THIS EASY TO GET FREE ADVERTISING?

By Nicole Dean

One of the best ways to get free advertising is to simply write articles and give them away. It’s a foreign concept to many in online business, but it’s one of the best ways to get traffic, improve your search engine ranking, and sell more products.

Why Should You Write Articles?
Newsletter and website owners are desperate for content. As someone who owns websites and publishes several newsletters, I can vouch for this. I regularly search article directories, looking for quality information that will help my readers. And, every article I use from these resources gets published with the author’s information and a link to their site.

Why Give The Articles Away?
How much would you pay to include your ad in a newsletter or popular website? Anywhere from $5 to $80. Wouldn’t you prefer to have your ad placed for free? It’s easy to see the financial reward. Look at the bottom of this article. Right there, plain as day, you can see a resource box with my website included, so you have proof that this method works.

How do you write an article?
Take another look at the article that you’re reading right now. It’s short. It’s simple. I’m not a Literary Genius. I’m just being me.
Start by picking something you know about, or a problem that you can solve, and start writing. Just do it!

What should you include in the Author Bio?
Your Name
Something interesting about you or your website
Your website link – Don’t forget this one!
Special offer – Mention a freebie or special offer if you have one.
Don’t use this area to *sell*. Just get them to your site.

May you have lots and lots of free advertising!

Keys to Writing a Solo Email.

Keys to Writing a Solo Email.
By Lorrie Morgan-Ferrero

The day you hung out your shingle as an entrepreneur, you also took on the job of marketer. The minute you stop marketing yourself is when your profits dry up, so you may as well get used to your role. If you don’t let people know what your business has to offer, you will NOT run a thriving business.

You may not want to hear this – in fact it may even make you mad. But a great way to let people know you have something special for them is through a solo-mailing (an email with a single offer sent to your permission-based list of subscribers).

Solo-mailings are so prolific because they WORK. While I don’t advocate abusing your list by sending them more than a few times per month they ARE effective when done correctly. They have kind of a bad rep because some marketers have a “buy or die” attitude. They send solos out daily or every couple of days until you either buy or unsubscribe. They aren’t worried about building loyalty and trust. They just want a quick buck. (I do not share this philosophy.) Even when you offer something of great value I've found three definite trends you can count on with a solo-mailing:

   You WILL get unsubscribes
    You WILL get hate mail
    You WILL make money    You WILL get hate mail    You WILL make money

It is number 3 that I want you to laser focus on. See, I WANT you to make money. Since you have entrusted me with your email address, I consider it my job to show you as many tactics as I have learned about how to run a successful online business. That being said, here are the 5 keys to making solo-emailing work for YOU:


1. Attention-grabbing subject line. Do you sort through your email and select “delete” without even opening some? Me too. But if the subject line is intriguing the email is much more likely to get read. It’s really the headline for your email. Also try to keep the number of characters on the short side so the words don’t get cut off in the email program. Here are the maximum subject line lengths for some commonly used email programs:

    Outlook: 64 characters    AOL: 52 characters    Hotmail: 45 characters    Yahoo: 80 characters

    Some of my more successful subject lines were:

   I’m not that kind of girl    She didn’t want me to tell!    May I critique your copy?    How to get lucky on Valentine’s Day

    Are you in?

  Remember, you’re competing with hundreds of other emails so make your subject line strong.

 2. Make it Personal. Studies show an increase in response when first names are used in the copy. Think about it. If you were in a busy airport and you heard someone holler out your name, wouldn't you turn to see who it was? Of course you would. Works in email too. (Techno Tip: The code looks like this: {!name} but when it comes out it reads as the subscriber’s first name. You have to use a delivery system that supports this mail merge tactic).

3. Dazzle them with your hook. Nothing kills a sale faster than boring copy. So throw in a little soft shoe entertainment. Give your readers a reason why you are having this special sa!e or 0ffer. Tell them a (brief) story. Marketer Jason Potash does an excellent job with hooks. One email explains how he needs his subscribers help to get him out of the doghouse with his wife… so they should buy his product. Tellman Knudson caught my attention with a tale of how he was unable to sleep at night… so I should buy his product. Perry Marshall spun a brilliant story of how as a kid he wanted a robot to do his chores for him but that was just a fantasy; today he knows copy writing is as close as you get to an effortless marketing solution… so you should sign up for his tele seminar. All of these hooks tie back into the offer. A good story keeps them reading.
    
4. Don’t forget the offer! Let’s have a little chat between the two of us, k? The purpose of your solo-mailing is to generate cash. So remember to ask for it. Allow me to grant you permission to ask for business. Poof! It is okay to ask for business. It is okay to market. It is okay to make money. You, like me, are in business to make a living, correct? So marketing ourselves is a given. I expect to be marketed to… and so should you. Like the late, great Ray Charles said, “If you think in pennies, you get pennies. But when you think in dollars, you get dollars.”
    
5. Make your P.S. work harder. Your post script, or P.S. is a very highly read bit of copy. It’s that last afterthought of the email. And our eyes are drawn to it like a magnet to steel. So this is a great place to encourage them to take action NOW and place the order link. Even scanners are likely to read the P.S.

For better or for worse, we are all in sales. So face your fears, gulp hard and get out there and market!

Author Resource - Copy writing guru Lorrie Morgan-Ferrero has been helping entrepreneurs and copywriters get their marketing messages razor sharp since 1999. Get free access to 5 tips to turn your “blah” sales message into red-hot copy that ROCKS… 

The Decline of Article Marketing as we Know it.

The Decline of Article Marketing as we Know it.

By Karon Thackston

It’s funny how online marketing folks try to make old promotional techniques seem new.  Take article marketing for instance.  You might be led to believe that this was an invention of savvy advertisers in the early days of the Internet.  Oh contraire!  Article marketing has a long history in the print world of producing exceptional results for those who properly use this method.

Business owners and early publicists quickly learned that having their articles (or those of their clients) published in magazines and newspapers oftentimes worked far better than paid ads.  The credibility and authority article marketing lent to those who used it was well worth the (then) extensive effort it took to earn the ink.  My how things change.

Fast Forward to Online Article Marketing
Today, however, substandard article marketing has flooded the Internet.  So much so that Google recently cracked down on “junk” or “bulk” articles and the sites that house them.  What started online as a sound and productive promotional method has, so typically, turned into a spam fest.  This tends to be the fate of many once-legit online marketing strategies.

However, there is good news!  First, your articles don’t have to be sacrificed on the alter of quantity.  Salvation can still be found when quality is your goal.  In this age of junk articles, yours can be the shining beacon in a sea of pitifully written stories.

Second, quality article marketing is still an extremely viable online promotional method that delivers multiple benefits including:

1.  Improvements in social media visibility
2.  Increases in sustainable link popularity
3.  Positioning yourself as an authority in your field
4.  Expanding your reach to new audiences through guest blogging
5.  Garnering press coverage
6.  Engaging and converting prospects into customers and many others

Let me explain what a huge difference quality makes with an excerpt from my new Word tracker Masterclass eBook entitled Article Marketing: The Write Way to Build More Links.

Quality vs. Quantity
You’ll hear me shout it from the rooftops: Quality trumps quantity every time when it comes to writing articles!

Today, so many people are resorting to article-generating software that illegally searches millions of websites and harvests bits of text from them so it can patch together a “new” piece.  These programs sell themselves under the pretense of fair use under U.S. copyright laws (which simply isn't true).  And why?  All so the over-zealous author can crank out 100 articles a week in order to flood the Internet with yet more content on the history of toasters or some other lame topic.

Article spinners (that slightly change an original article into several different versions) are also popular.  What’s their purpose?  To save the world from the dreaded Duplicate Content Penalty (which doesn't exist as Google explained way back in 2008).

If you’re not going to write quality articles – if your only goal is to garner links by any means possible – I have bad news for you.  It won’t work.  At least not in the long term.

Article promotion works because someone reads an article you've written and wants to reproduce it on their website.  If the articles you’re writing are junk, nobody will want to republish them on their blogs or websites.  You’ll have spent the time and energy to produce pieces that are of no use to you or anyone else. What’s more, if you use automated article-writing software and get caught plagiarizing or violating the copyright of someone else’s work, there are serious legal ramifications. You could be hit with fines of up to $25,000 per instance in the U.S. plus the removal of your site from Google and the deletion of your web page (or entire site) at the hand of your web hosting company through a process of filing a simple DMCA complaint.

In order to get quality links from well-respected sites, you have to produce quality, well-respected articles that they will want to reprint.  Getting back links from scrapper blogs that have no Pagerank does little if any good.

Article Marketing is Not Exempt from Testing
You hear the cry so often online: “Test, test, test!”  Test your lead generation.  Test your landing page.  Test your shopping cart.  The value of practically everything online is proven or disproving by testing.  Article marketing is no exception.

Try a campaign of junk articles.  Track where you've distributed them, how many times they were reprinted, where they were reprinted, the quality of the sites that reprinted them, how many back links you received from each one and the number of conversions that were generated.

Then do the same with well-written, top-quality articles.  In the end, which made you more money?  Isn't that the bottom line?  Links are merely a means to an end.  If you get one solid link that produces $1,000 in revenue, that’s far better than getting 100 useless links that deliver a total of $100 in revenue.

It’s time to stop following the crowd.  Here’s my advice: instead of spending $300 for two dozen crappy articles, spend that money on one fantastic article. Carefully place that piece with websites that can get you in front of people who want your product or service then watch the magic of a quality article marketing campaign do its stuff!

Discover the step-by-step method for getting exceptional results from your article marketing efforts in Karon Thackston’s newest e-book: Word tracker Masterclass: Article Marketing: The Write Way to Build More Links available now. Get yours today at http://www.ArticleWritingBook.com.

5 Strategies For Improving Email Conversion Rates.

By Susanne Myers.

I love stats and by far my favorite stats to look at, study, and most importantly get better at are my email marketing conversion rates. Getting better at this means instantly more money in your pocket without any added traffic, a bigger list or buying advertising. Here are five different tips for you that will help you get more of your subscribers to open your emails, click on the links in them and most importantly take you up on the offers you’re presenting to them.

Stay On Topic
Make sure your email messages are what your customers are expecting. If they signed up for marketing tips, don’t start sending them offers for the latest diet, no matter how good it is. Sure, this is an extreme example but you get the idea. Stay on topic with both the free content you send them and an offers you mail about.

Use Good Copy In Your Subject Line
What makes me decide if I’m going to open an email or not is the subject line. When I craft a message to my list, I spent more time writing the subject line than the whole rest of the email. Yes, it’s that important. Use all your mad copy writing skills here and keep a swipe file of good subject lines you've seen in your own inbox.

Don’t Let Your List Go Stale
You've put a lot of effort into building your list. Don’t allow it to go stale. Send them some fresh content, a quick tip, a PDF or even just a link to something interesting on your blog. Don’t go for more than 2 weeks without emailing your list. Ideally you want to make sure you email them something once a week. Otherwise, they’ll forget about you and all the rapport you've build with them so far will go out the window.

Add Some Branding
Make it easy to recognize that the email is coming from you. You can do this by including your website name in the “From” email field. Another thing I like to do is choose a short acronym for your list, website or business. For example, whenever I email my list at AffiliateTreasureChest.com, I start the subject line with [ATC].

Share What’s Coming
I learned this particular tip from TV. Think about the end of your favorite TV show… what get’s you all excited about the next episode? The preview, especially if the messages are a bit cryptic and raise curiosity. Do the same thing with your list by hinting at what’s coming and asking them to “keep an eye out” for an important email from you next Thursday.

Is Building A List Really Necessary For Newbies?

The Wonderful World of Internet Marketing

Is Building A List Really Necessary For Newbies?

Unfortunately many new to internet marketing, underestimate the power of a responsive list and so they do everything else under the sun besides building a list.

They get involved on various social media websites like Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and Ning social networks. They advertise their products, blog, present various ideas and tidbits about themselves but at the end of the day, that contact is gone and they may never reach those people again.

On Facebook, a person could simply unsubscribe to your feed so they never have to see your status updates again and you’d never know or they might have tons of friends and your wind up lost in the sauce of their feed. It happens and then your left wondering why you aren't getting the responses that you desire.

On Pinterest, one who may be so into your pins one day, might not be the next or they might not even be following you. They might have saw your pin through someone they followed and even clicked through to your site, but when they got there, there wasn't anything to attract their attention enough to keep them coming back on their own.


We follow many people on Twitter and it’s all to easy to miss someones post, simply because you weren't on around the same time and you’re seeing countless other posts in your feed.

But what if there were a way to actually capture those people who breeze by your page so you can pull them back there again. This is what a list does for you. It gives you a way to stay in contact with people, no matter what time of day or no matter which website they’re on at the moment because you contact them directly in their email inbox.

You can use your list to provide value, show you care, answer questions, promote your products, announce your newest blog posts and more.

There are various list building companies like Aweber and some offer free list building, like MailChimp so if you don’t have a list, I suggest that you start building one.

Place the optin box in a prominent area of your website so it can easily be seen. I suggest the upper right corner, before the fold.

Use PLR content as a cool giveaway, like a report or a series of articles to entice people to sign up. Treat your list like gold and people will stick around. Remember that behind every email address lies a real, living, breathing person.

Alice Coaxum is a homeschooling mother of four, Beach Body Coach, PLR writer and internet marketer. She is the owner of  ShopForPLR.Com where you can find quality PLR articles, blog posts, emails and reports at affordable prices.