Marketing Expose

The amount of data sent and received by visitors to a website is known as web traffic, which constitutes a large portion of Internet traffic. The number of visitors and the number of pages visited determine the web traffic. The incoming and outgoing traffic are monitored by the sites that find which parts or pages of the site are popular and feel the trend.

The web traffic is monitored in many ways and the data that are gathered are helpful to structure sites. The web traffic can be increased by including search engines and through search engine optimization.

The amount of traffic seen by a website shows the measure of its popularity and so can be used to see the shortcomings, if any, and concentrate on improving those areas. In this way, it is possible to increase the popularity of a web site and the number of people visiting that particular web site.

However, it is sometimes imperative to safeguard some parts of the website by a password, by which only authorized people can visit particular sections or pages. At times, based on geographical location too, specific traffic may be blocked. Depending upon the number of connections and bandwidth too, the access to a web server can be limited.

There are many ways of increasing web site traffic. Placement of a site in search engines, purchase of advertising like bulk e-mail, Pop- up ads and in-page advertisements are some of them. The increase in web traffic can also be achieved by purchasing non-Internet based advertising.

It is quite important to get proper placement on search engines because if a web page is not listed in the first pages of a search, the chances are less to find it in the subsequent pages, as most people do not have a tendency to go past the first page. The other ways of increasing web traffic are offering e books or articles and classified advertisements, web rings and building link popularity, of which the last mentioned is the easiest.

Popularity can be built by writing e-mails to sites and asking for a link. Or else, written material can be sent to e- zines or free article sites, which accept them for free. But the benefit for the writer is that it may bring traffic to the website.

Generally, web traffic can be increased by registering with the major search engines that follow the hyper links to get to pages inside the web site, index it and store in the database. When too much web traffic occurs, it slows down the access to a web site because more file requests go to the server than it can handle-which may be due to over popularity or an intentional attack on the site, which usually happens to small web sites rather than larger scale web sites.

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With consumers and businesses being hit with rising gas prices and a stagnant economy, it is easy to assume that we are either in a recession, or heading in that direction. Either way, you need to understand some key marketing facts to be sure that your business thrives in a less-than-optimal economy.

Marketing Equals Revenue
The mistake most businesses make when their sales fall is that they immediately look to slash expenditures. Unfortunately, the marketing budget is usually one of the first to go. The truth of the matter is, according to research, that a marketing budget is directly proportional to a company's gross revenue. Cutting the marketing budget will not benefit a company from a revenue standpoint; it will only hurt it. Marketing has a direct correlation with revenue, regardless of whether the economy is thriving or stagnant.

Basic Marketing Economics
If most companies are slashing their marketing budgets during a downturn in the economy, it doesn't take an MBA from Wharton to understand what you should do. You need to keep on marketing. If you are able to increase your marketing budget, then do so; if you cannot then you will need to take a different approach. By looking at your overall marketing strategy and evaluating what works and what doesn't work, you can effectively shift money from non-producing strategies to strategies that produce results. Go against the grain by focusing heavily on marketing instead of looking at it as purely as an overhead expense. Without marketing, there is no way your company will meet its revenue objectives, especially in a slow economy.

Stretch- Don't Slash- Your Marketing
If you can't seem to find those additional marketing dollars, you can utilize these simple marketing strategies to help effectively market your company:



Networking

Acquisition of another company

Customer loyalty programs

Employee appreciation programs

Internet advertising

Internet sales/commerce

Customer incentive programs

Outsourcing of non-essential functions

Reallocate your marketing dollars toward strategies with a higher ROI

In a study conducted by Intuit, developer of QuickBooks, research concluded that despite a stagnant economy, nine out of ten small business owners saw opportunities for growth. Over 75% of these small businesses expected their business to grow within that same year. And this was during a downward economic cycle! To further illustrate my point, 65% of the small businesses tested in the research study have survived a recession before. These small businesses know what to do when the economy goes south. The short answer: keep on marketing!

Shifting Your Marketing Dollars
Intrigue Design believes that in order to have a truly effective marketing program, you need to focus on the marketing strategies that produce the highest return on investment. Some of these strategies are email marketing, search engine optimization, and pay-per-click advertising. Each business should have a detailed marketing plan that outlines which strategies yield the best results as per their market segment. If you currently have funds allocated toward marketing strategies that are not producing what you had hoped, think about reallocating your money to the above stated strategies.

Marketing - It Just Feels Right

Sound marketing logic tells us that if our competition is pulling funds and/or decreasing activity within marketing, then this leaves opportunity for a company to gain sales by reaching out to their targeted customer base. Take advantage of your competitor's oversight. Even in a slow economy, you should keep on marketing!

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This is my blueprint to internet marketing success with free traffic as your best friend. You can really earn a living on the internet with these types of techniques and the best part is that it doesn’t have to stop here because you can just repeat this process with a new website and do it over and over until you achieve your desired income. I truly hope that I was able to help you understand how you can drive tons of free traffic to your website and earn an amazing residual income at the same time

If you have a business with a website or you just simply have a website you want to drive traffic to there is a lot of things you can do for free that can drive large amounts of traffic to your website. If you have a business website of any kind getting more people to your website is usually beneficial to you but it is only beneficial if you are making money from getting more visitors to your website. It would be a good idea to focus on monetizing your website before getting traffic to your website. Monetizing your website is essentially just turning your website into cash, literally. If you have traffic or you don’t have traffic you want to have a plan of how you are going to make money from a website and then you can put forward the effort and the work into getting the traffic to your website. After having a plan to monetize your site you are going to execute your marketing plan to get free traffic to your website. There are two ways to get free traffic to your website; free advertising and/or from search engines. I am going to discuss how you can monetize and optimize your website for search engines for free and then how you can drive large amounts of free traffic to your website.

Monetizing and Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines For Free

So you have a website with some content and you want to find out how you can make money from the little traffic you already have? Great, well I want to talk to you about getting more traffic and making more money from that traffic. There are two ways you can make money from your website; selling products and services or generating advertising revenue. When thinking about making money from your website you have a couple choices to make; if you are going to be selling products are you going to sell physical products or are you going to sell affiliate products and make a commission? If you are focusing on generating advertising revenue are you going to actually sell each space or are you going to publish pay-per-click ads and get paid for every click?

If you want to start making money today then I would suggest you do affiliate marketing when selling products on your website because you don’t have to worry about making the product, packaging the product and shipping the product, let somebody else worry about that so that you can focus on marketing the product. I personally think that there is a success model in utilizing affiliate marketing to sell products, publishing pay-per-click ads and selling advertising space to generate a passive residual income from your website. Securing how you plan to make money from your website and then optimizing it for the search engines is a great way to market your website. Where do people go when they are looking for information on the internet? People go to search engines to look for information and if your website is listed within the top ten for the relevant information that they are searching for then that is more than likely going to end up in free traffic to your website. It is and can be extremely profitable to optimize your website for the search engines. What I am about to talk about is my blueprint to taking advantage 100% free traffic to your website.

Utilizing Affiliate Marketing To Sell Products From Your Website

When choosing affiliates to sell products from your website it would make sense to stick to affiliates within your niche. Your niche is the main category your website would fall under and using affiliates that are relevant to that niche is an important factor in targeting your traffic to your affiliate products. So knowing what niche is important and this will also help you greatly when you optimize your website for search engines.

When you join affiliate programs they give you your own affiliate website and access to all their promotional tools you can use to promote this business. You can take their banners and their text ads and utilize them to get traffic to your affiliates. By placing your banner ads within your content so that it merely looks like an ad and you will generate clicks going through those banners to your affiliate pages. The affiliate program has already tried and tested these pages they are already set up with the best sales copy made to convert their visitors into sales. Because these affiliate programs have already done this then it is our job to market these affiliates to targeted visitors who would be looking to buy these products and services our affiliates are offering. When the visitors are targeted it means that they are already interested in information relative to the affiliates and it is safe to assume that once they are on your website and they are interested in the information on your website then they are targeted enough for our affiliates. Using this method correctly will drive lots of targeted traffic to your affiliates that way you can earn a lot of money in commissions when you make sales.

Generating Advertising Revenue From Your Website

You have a website and now you want to earn money from generating advertising revenue? It really isn’t that hard to do that, infact you can almost automate the entire process. First I am going to start by telling you about publishing pay-per-click ads on your website and then I will tell you how you can sell ad space aswell and even ahead of time. Google is one of the leaders in PPC ad publishing and PPC advertising with the use of their AdSense program and their Adwords program. Advertisers interested in advertising with Google’s Adwords program have the option of bidding on keywords and running ads on Google’s search engine or running ads for content, which is advertising within the Google AdSense progam. People like us are the ones with the website now who publish ads from Google’s Adsense and generate money from a percentage of what advertisers with Google are bidding for their keywords. Google isn’t the only company that does this; you also have Yahoo who has now started publishing ads and Bivertiser as well. When you publish these network ads and get clicks from them you can really earn a decent pay check every month from the clicks you generate if you place the ad strips within your content. This allows you to get paid for every click to your ads and you don’t have to worry about them buying anything or not, so this allows you to generate a sizeable revenue.

You can also sell advertising space on your website and you don’t even have to be responsible for actually selling each space. Many internet marketers don’t speak about this and it truly is a great way to generate revenue from your website. You can join networks such as AdBrite and Adster that will sell your ads for you and all you have to do is publish their ad strips and they will track your traffic to your website and the ad strips impressions and display this to their network of advertisers. Advertisers can choose to purchase this space at the price that you set and then your earnings are set directly to you when space is sold. You can even sell space ahead of time and collect cash in hand from today. Imagine advertisers fighting for space on your website at the price you set. This is an incredible way to earn money online. It is also a great utility because even before you have sold the space the networks usually run PPC ads until the space is sold so you can start off by earning money per click on these ads.

Search Engine Optimization Tactics

You already know the niche that your website is catering to so it is now time for you to focus on optimizing you website for the best keywords in that niche. You find out what the best keywords are by doing keyword research with some form of keyword tool. You can get access to keyword tools from many different places but I suggest using Google’s keyword tool. Google gives you information about their search engine’s findings and ever since July 2008 they have been giving detailed information about each keyword searched within their search engine by displaying their figures instead of an approximation. You want to find keywords that are high in demand, meaning that they have been searched for a lot every month on average and you also want to find keywords that are low in supply, meaning that the websites going for those keywords aren’t too competitive. When you find keywords like these they are extremely useful to building your awareness on the search engines. You want to take note of about 5 main category keywords and 25 sub-category keyword phrases. When you have those keywords at hand you are going to always use those keywords when writing content for your website and optimizing your website. There are two types of search engine optimization; one-site optimization and off-site optimization. When optimizing your website you need to know focus on both of them so that you ensure your website is optimized properly.

On-site optimization refers to optimizing everything that is actually on your website. You want to use some of your main keywords within your website’s titles and description. You want to utilize all your keywords, your main keywords and your sub-category keyword phrases within all your content, like articles, videos and posts. Search engines are going to know your website is relevant for the keywords you chose because those keywords are spread out throughout your content.

Off-site optimization pertains to everything that is done away from your website that goes towards optimizing your website. Off-site optimization refers to building link popularity. Link popularity is important because search engines like Google use your link popularity to define how relative your website is to your niche and which websites you are linked to within that niche. The more relative the website is that is linking to your website means the more power your website will have within that niche. There are two kinds of links you can have between websites; one-way links and two-way reciprocal links. One-way links are when you a website is linking to your website without you having to link back to theirs and two-way links are when both websites are linking to each other. It is said that one-way links are way more powerful to search engines so it is encouraged to try and get as many relative one-way links as possible.

Now that you have monetized your website and optimized it for the search engines your only challenge is to continue to add relevant content to your website filled with your keywords and keyword phrases. You will soon start to see tremendous amounts of free traffic coming into your website from the search engines. This free traffic will be coming in while you sleep, while you are at school and just as you go about your day people will be finding your website on the search engines for free. Now that you have finished monetizing and optimizing your website, its time to drive tons of traffic to your website through free internet advertising resources.

Drive Large Amounts Of Traffic To Your Website Through Free Internet Advertising

There are many resources you can find online that you can use to drive free traffic to your website. Most of these resources offer affiliate programs and give you the opportunity to earn money from them but for now we are just going to focus on generating traffic from them. These advertising resources usually work on a credit system, which you earn credits that are exchanged for visitors to your website. Different advertising resources offer different ways for you to earn credits, either by visiting other member’s websites through clicking on text ads or from surfing. Some resources even allow you to advertise without having to visit anybody else’s websites, it is just completely free. I want to discuss some of these resources and the benefits they can bring in providing traffic to your website.

Free Advertising with Free Classifieds

Free classifieds are a great way of driving traffic to your website. You have the opportunity to write your own add copy and usually you can add text and pictures to your ads and you can also optimize these ads with the same keywords for your website. When you optimize your free classified ads search engines crawl it and see that a page with relevant content is linking to your website. This is a nice way to always build one-way links to your website and advertise your website at the same time.

Free Advertising with Free Traffic Exchanges

Free traffic exchanges are great utility to provide immediate traffic to your website. You join their network and add your websites to their traffic exchange and you surf other members websites for credits and then exchange those credits for visitors to your website. You can build a large amount of credits in no time and start generating traffic right away and believe me they click around and do things while they are on your website. Usually you can also advertise your banner ads and your text ads on their network and this is also a great way to generate traffic to your website. Now while members are surfing other member’s websites they also see your banner ads or your text ads. This can drive targeted traffic to your website because when a person clicks on a banner ad or text ad they only click on it based on their own interest so you are guaranteed to get targeted visitors to whatever you’re advertising.

Through these two methods of free advertising you can drive extremely large amounts of traffic to your website and it won’t cost you a dime. Sending free traffic to your website that is already monetized and set up to earn you money from all walks of life is a great way to add to your income earned from your website. This is truly utilizing the power of free internet advertising. Also the traffic you generate to your website through free advertising also counts towards your regular website visitors which will be displayed when those networks are selling your advertising space and the more visitors you have to your website is the more the space is valued and you can charge a higher price if your desire.

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How To Generate Traffic From Articles






The internet is an optimum source of information over the world wide web. As such, it is a given that people log on to the internet primarily because they are looking for something they want to know more about, read more about, or research more about. Given this fact, it becomes very important that your website is filled with useful content for people to read. It doesn't matter if you are keeping an information portal type of a website or an e-commerce site. You need content. You need articles. Keep in mind that these are the very things that could drive traffic to your site.

So how will your articles deliver a steady flow of visitors to your website? There are two ways. First, if you write about something that is related to your site and sprinkle some keywords in it, the search engines will notice your site more. Once you have your articles all written and ready, just upload it to your website. Just wait, sit back, and relax while the search engine robots crawl through them after a few days. The robots will then add those keywords to the algorithm and the search engine they belong to use them to compute the popularity of a certain keyword to your site.

If your site proves to be the one that contains the most relevant information about the keyword typed by the user, then your site will appear on the first page of the search results. It is a given that the higher your position in the search engine is, the better are the chances that the people who are using the search engine looking for something will click your site to check what you have to offer. The idea is simple - the more information rich articles you have uploaded and the more keywords you sprinkle in them, the higher are the chances your site get noticed by people.

But of course, we cannot discount the simple fact that your article on its own, can give you the traffic you want. There are slim chances that the story or the featured article you wrote about is the same with somebody else's if and when you have written it all by yourself. And so some people will definitely come looking for that piece of information you have. And if the unique articles you created contains the data internet users need, that should be enough pull.

Eventually, the same people will visit you frequently. If your website or your blog gives them the things they want, then you need not go out of your way to get traffic. Traffic will come to you naturally. There's not much technicality in this setup. All you really have to do is to upload numerous information-rich articles on your site and you should all set. But then again, you have to market your site some other way so that people will actually see your articles.

That leads us to the other effective method of using articles to generate traffic to your site. This is through the use of article directories. Article directories are websites whose primary purpose is to compile information rich articles submitted by their members. There are several of them out there today. And most of them follow stringent rules as to what types of articles you can upload. More often than not, you can only send articles that are highly informative with no distinct promotion for a service or a product.

These websites will publish your articles in their network. Your articles will then be available to all other internet users. The chances of your articles being read and spotted are higher if you submit them to article directories. This is because popular articles directories enjoy high page ranking. Your articles, provided you have chosen the right keywords, will definitely show on top of the search engine's list without much of a hassle on your part. In essence, you are riding the website's popularity and are using it to your advantage.

Now it doesn't end there. Article directories normally allow one live URL or backlink to their authors. They also provide some space wherein you can put a small description of yourself, your website, and your expertise. Therefore, with all of these working for you, plus a direct link to your website presented to the person surfing the internet interested in reading your article, you have higher chances of gaining people to actually come and visit your site just to find more information-rich articles like the one that engrossed them.

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Perhaps one of the most low-profile Internet marketing schemes is affiliate marketing. However, low-profile does not mean unsuccessful, because this type of marketing continues to play a significant role in e-commerce.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

In a nutshell, affiliate marketing works on a reward system, wherein one website drives traffic to another website in exchange for reward points. Basically, it works this way: if you are an affiliate (or associate) of an online-based company, you create your own website, which links back to that company. Any visitor to your site that you manage to re-direct to that company's website will earn you rewards points. The more points you have, the more rewards you can actually reap. Some businesses prefer this type of marketing scheme because it is a pay-per-performance package deal.

In the non-Internet based business lingo, this type of reward system is called revenue sharing.

How To Create And Use Affiliate Marketing Programs

For the first few years, online business owners only allowed for affiliates with their own websites (or at the very least, their own webpages.) These days however, anyone can become an affiliate by simply: engaging in online discussions (chats, forums, message boards, etc.); using e-mail marketing, using offline promotions; writing e-books; or writing ezine articles.

There are certain advantages though, of having your own website. One: some online businesses require their affiliates to have one. Two: since it is your site, you can creatively promote one or all your affiliate programs, all at the same time. Lastly: a website has greater potential to reach more customers than forums or e-mail marketing strategies.

How To Choose An Affiliate Program

Choosing an affiliate program is equally important. Don't grab the first one that comes along. You can visit Internet Affiliate Marketing Program Networks to compare and study different programs. Plus, most of the advertising merchants here will let new affiliates sign up for free. Choose a few of the programs that seem stable, and a few of those merchants with the longest history of sales and affiliate marketing success. Try not to be dazzled by the promises of millions of dollars, etc. etc. etc.

Once you've sized down your list, look into the quality of the products and services that these merchants are carrying. Your goal is to entice people to check out the goods. If you are not convinced of the quality of these products and services, what makes you think that your site visitors will be convinced as well? Besides, if the goods do fall short of expectations, your name as a marketer is on the line as well. Choose one (or more) which you think will be a credit to you, and not otherwise.

Creating The Site Itself

Once you've chosen from the affiliate program lot, you can either choose a program that can help you "build" your website by providing the necessary tools like banners, graphics and articles. If they can provide you with online training about how to effectively market their goods, then your life will be easier. If not, you then have to dedicate more time and energy into marketing your chosen product and goods.

Try to calculate if the time you spend creating product banners and articles is worth the compensation you will be getting from the company you've applied for. If it is not, it would be best to move on to another program.

The most essential key here is to create quality content in your site. People are looking to yours to see whether you can give them new insights or provide advice to their dilemma or verify a fact about something. A theme-based website will even bolster your reputation as an "expert" in your chosen niche, so try to limit your website to one theme only. Weave all your different affiliate programs in all your pages, but do so in a manner that will be attractive but not overwhelming.

At the end of your creative process, try to sit back and ask yourself if you are convinced with what you have on your site, and if you would consent to buying the products and services advertised within. If the answer is a "no," or a "maybe" then you may want to check out other sites to see how you can improve your own.

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How to increase your affiliate web site marketing income…
Whether you are interested in creating a stable primary source of income online or just looking to supplement your existing income through marketing affiliate programs…increasing your earning potential will be a constant concern. After all, the goal of any business venture is ultimately to maximize profits.

As an affiliate marketer there are two ways in which you can increase your affiliate web site marketing income. This is simply based upon the method in which affiliate programs work. Regardless of the type or program (i.e. pay per sale, pay per lead, etc.), all affiliate programs are all performance based commission opportunities. When you refer customers to your affiliate company’s website and the customer completes a certain action like filling out a form or making a sale, you receive a commission.

Therefore, to increase your commissions you really only have two options. Increase the number of customers you refer to your affiliate company’s sales site or increase the number of customers who complete the desired action once they arrive there. This second aspect of the affiliate commission equation is also known as your conversion rate or CR.

Increasing the number of customers you refer is of the two options available, the one which you undoubtedly have the most direct control over. The reason being is that the number of referrals you make is directly tied to the success of your own affiliate web site marketing efforts. Whether you market through banner ads, pay-per-click marketing, or what have you, once the customer arrives at the destination site the rest of the process is largely out of your hands.

Realistically, your CR will tend to vary anywhere from 1% to about 10% on the high end. But, how can you manage your all important CR? I say all important for a very important reason. Increasing referral traffic is of course one of you main objectives as an affiliate web site marketing professional, however which would you rather have? Would you rather have 500 referrals with a 1% conversion rate or 100 referrals with a 10% conversion rate? As you can see here, generating 5 times the referral traffic earns you…lets see; half the commission?

A fundamental difference between generating referral traffic and managing CR is this. Traffic generation and affiliate promotion will always cost you, either in time or money. Managing CR however, doesn’t cost any additional time or money. Your CR will directly reflect several important things.

How you reach your prospects…

What you say to your prospects once you reach them…

How you refer you prospects to your merchant site…

To effectively manage your conversion rates pay close attention each phase of your referral process to make sure you do the best possible job preparing customers to have an open-mind once they arrive at your merchant site. Pre-selling your prospects will make all the difference in increasing you CR.

In summary, you’ll want to focus on two goals to greatly increase you affiliate web site marketing income. Your first goal will be to maximize the amount of targeted traffic to your affiliate merchants by only spending time and money that produce maximum profit for you. Your second goal is to maximize your conversion rates by making the proper adjustments within your referral process to produce the best possible results.

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These days a web business has many excellent tools in the battle to be competitive in their field. One of these powerful tools is the popular Google search engine. Google is successful, so obviously, Google can make your web business a success, as well. It is a fact that 90 million visitors each and every month can pay testament to this reality. Google is one of the largest search engines on the web right now. They have tools engaged to ensure this and they have tools to help you succeed too!

What Google does, is they take the first few lines of text and put that into the search result when someone punches in your keyword. This is how you develop page rank and popularity. There are traffic monitors available to you when you use the Google service. This is wonderful because then you know when you need to adapt your words to locate additional traffic. When dealing with Google, it is extremely important for you to make the first paragraph of your page the largest impact statement. This is what is going to be seen on the search result by the viewer. You need to guarantee that is what they see, impact! This will motivate them to peruse your site. The more views you have to your site, the higher the traffic volume; the more volume, the higher the page ranking and popularity.

A good rule of thumb is have at minimum, 8% of the words you use be keywords, with approximately 300 words being used as the impact paragraph. Because this is what is going to be seen first, you have to make it count! There are what is known as spiders that constantly view sites and record content to use as indexing, for more detail go to: www.instant-adsense-dollars.com. However, you never know when they will by surfing your site. It is not always the case that they will index your full site on one trip to it, so you want to ensure that you optimize your pages. They will always start from the top of the page; this is why it is important to have the most impact near the top of the site. The best method of ensuring that your entire site is crawled on by the spiders is to place your site on Google Sitemaps. Automatic updating on the site indexing is one of the excellent perks that come with the Google Sitemaps.

The files saved are XML files; this is like having your very own direct link to Google, like a data cable. Generally, Adsense involves third party advertisements rotated on your web sites pages. Every time someone clicks on the site on your page and they leave yours, you get paid for the Adsense transfer. It is that simple.

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Article marketing has produced great success for many affiliate marketers, with the ever increasing numbers of article directory websites; this has increased article marketing greatly for affiliates and their websites.

Affiliate marketers are everywhere within the internet world. It is not unusual for an affiliate to gain six figure commission checks on a monthly basis. Article marketing is free so there is no outlay needed, but the benefits are extreme.

But one problem some affiliates are faced with is the lack of knowledge in article marketing. And this is how the top affiliates produce enough leads to their various programs. To be successful in any online business an affiliate needs various leads, for more details visit to www.article-submitters.com this can be achieved by free article marketing and including a link to their particular program, that way the leads they will receive would lead to having a great chance of turning them into actual sales.

To be successful in article marketing one must produce keyword rich articles, content must be well written and unique. 500-750 words are an ideal length for an article. Also submit to numerous free article directories, for more details visit to www.writing-fast-cash.com there are thousands out there. There is also semi-automatic article submission software’s out there you can purchase to help you with your submissions; these can be great time savers!

Article marketing isn’t just for affiliates; you may have a website selling products or even an eBay shop. Article marketing is ideal for the new business to get their name out there. One of the most important items in your article is your title; make sure your keywords are all within your title, but at the same time making it catchy to the user.

One sure way of getting your article rejected by the article directories is to have spelling mistakes and poor grammar. It’s just common sense to run your article though a spell checking program before submitting to the article directories. I personally use Microsoft word which incorporates a spell checking facility. Your article should be informative to the reader and offer something of interest.

Your article should be easy to read with the correct formatting, it’s better to have lots of paragraphs than to have a huge paragraph with no breaks. The ideal paragraph would consist of two - four sentences; just like this one

The most important part of your completed article is the author’s bio. This is where you’ll place your name, link to your website and description of your website. Make sure your anchor text includes your main keywords, so when the search engines crawls your article in the article directory it picks up your link with all your main keywords. It’s also advisable to include some keywords with your description.

It’s always ideal for some other person to proof read the article before submitting to the various article directories. If time is an issue, you might want to consider hiring a writer to publish some articles for you. Elance.com is a great place to hire writers but remember you get what you pay for. If you hire a writer check they have recommendations from previous article writing projects.

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Some larger companies have been shifting their creative, design, web and marketing campaigns in-house. While this works for the biggest names who can afford to have teams of developers and designers within the company, is it the best use of resources? What are the benefits of having your creatives and marketers inside the company instead of outsourcing them? And what are the potential drawbacks? Let’s have a look.

Creative Control
Companies who employ their creative team do benefit from having quicker turnaround on projects. They do have a greater degree of control as far as the final output, because the designers and developers are typically on premises. However, as you are paying an agency for their expertise, you may find that the creative team in an agency can offer more diverse services than what you can achieve in-house.

Cost
Is it more cost effective to have a team of developers, designers, and copywriters on staff? Depends on the company, their budget, and the amount of creative output required. For some multimillion pound companies, outsourcing your marketing and design work to agencies means you can maintain smaller offices and less staff. Keeping costs down in the office translates to lower rents, the savings can then go to multiple agencies.
This strategy does work well for some companies, like ferry giant Stena Line. If you have small regional offices, it can make sense to go this route. Smaller companies simply won’t have the budget to hire creative teams, so agencies are really the most cost effective way to manage SEM, web design, and PR campaigns.

Results
This is what it’s all about, results, which may vary depending on your brief summary. If you are using in-house teams to do your design or marketing projects, chances are they know where the company stands. They may have a good idea where you need to be, and how you’d like to get there. They should ask questions if they are unsure. You should get measurable results from their efforts. This is no different with agencies.

The better the brief, the better your results should be. Your account executive at the agency should clarify anything they don’t understand. Agencies should provide reports on campaign effectiveness, and quantify all data for the marketing department, who will no doubt be held accountable for their expenditures and ROI.

The verdict
The fact of the matter is, there is no clear cut answer on in-house or agencies. Obviously, for smaller
companies, or for those with small offices, outsourcing makes more sense. Even for larger companies, some aspects of your marketing and design may be outsourced to an agency who specialises in one particular area (like social media optimisation, for example) I do know of quite a few London businesses, however, who do insist on keeping control of design, development and marketing campaigns by keeping them in-house.

The best client/agency relationships are built on mutual respect and integrity. The perspective of the client and the agency need to work in synergy to produce the best results. Objectives need to be clearly defined, without the often dreaded “moving of the goalposts”. It should be clear to the agency what problem is to be solved, what action you want the customer to take, what goals you want to measure for campaign success.

There is no clear cut answer to agency versus in-house. Basically, it is whatever works best for your own company. A mixture of both may be an option, or having a few specialist agencies handle certain aspects of your design or marketing workload. It never hurts to utilise the experts if you do not have the capabilities in your own department to do a certain project.

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