Article marketing can be a great way to get your message out to the masses. Many of the best and most successful entrepreneurs in the world utilize article marketing as a way to bring in prospects over the Internet. Here are the basics of article marketing and how it can help you with personal branding.

Article marketing is very powerful for a number of different reasons. First of all, it can help you create a brand for yourself. On the Internet, people run across information overload. There are so many people out there trying to sell their products that it is very difficult to separate one from the other. If you want to create customer loyalty and make as many sales as possible, you need to create a personal brand in order to do so. The only reason that a customer has any incentive to buy from you is if they feel comfortable with you. They want to deal with the expert in the industry that can help them with their problem.

When you utilize an article marketing strategy, you appear to be the expert. By writing targeted articles that portray valuable information to your potential clients for free, they will believe that they can gain even more vital information by doing business with you. This creates an incentive for them to contact you and ask to do business with you.

In addition to using article marketing for personal branding, it can also help you bring in traffic to your website. When you write a new article, you should be able to submit it to many different article directories. Webmasters frequently use these directories to come up with content for their websites. Therefore, if your article happens to be about a topic that a webmaster is searching for content on, they might republish it on their website or in an e-zine. This will essentially turn out to be free traffic for you because they have to republish your link as well. This will bring in a plethora of new leads for you to work with. On top of that, these leads will automatically think that you are an expert in the field.

Article marketing is also a great way to help boost the search engine rankings of your website. One of the most important criteria with search engine rankings is the amount of inbound links that you have to your site. By creating an article and submitting it to numerous article databases, you are getting your link out onto the Internet. The more places that your article goes, the more places that your link will be spread across the Internet. This will have the effect of boosting your search engine ranking and increasing your traffic. When your traffic increases, your search engine ranking will be boosted even more. This creates a snowball effect that was started by a consistent article marketing campaign.

If you are an independent professional such as a real estate agent, consultant, financial planners, or insurance salesman, this type of strategy could be invaluable for you and help you separate yourself from the masses.

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Businesses anywhere in the world are able to create a powerful brand and rapidly project it to a global audience. This is all the more apparent when one considers that the major social media websites are indexed by the major search engines and thus appear among the first search results when the relevant keyword is searched for. What does this mean for the way that you do business and how do social media help you build your brand? A solid social media marketing strategy is where one must begin and the following are five techniques that you can use social networking to build your business and brand.

• Community building is perhaps the number one way to build a brand through social networking websites. Sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn can be used to help connect you to other people who operate within your niche. These connections are then leveraged for not only networking, mentoring, and mind mapping, but also for referrals, and recommendations. Your brand is built through a constant interaction with the people in your industry and those already using your service.

• For community building to be effective, it must be supported by building an informative profile. When someone goes to your Twitter, or LinkedIn profile they will only stay for a few seconds before they move on. They want to know what you are about, what you do, and how you will help them. Place this information at the foremost part of your profile as possible and make it as concise, clear and yet exciting as you can. Also (where possible) use colors that match your brand and incorporate your business logo on each social media site you use as long as it allows you to.

• Excellent customer service and speedy complaint resolution is something you must actively aim to achieve through any social media you use as it plays an important part in your overall brand position. Many of the world’s largest companies including those that would be considered to be in traditional sectors such as banking, are using social media as a platform to address generic client issues or communicate client-important information. So even if you are a small business owner, you can do the same thing.

• Another way to use social media is participating in industry specific forums online. This is one of the best places to sell your business both directly and subtly. As you become more visible in your conversations, interactions, and by providing solutions, people will start to talk about you, link to your blog, and recommend you to people interested in the products you have on offer.

• Finally, combine all your social networking profiles so they are linked together to lead to even more online visibility.

Branding yourself online seems like it would be a monumental task. However, when done in gradual and well laid out steps like the ones outlined above, you can build a strong brand that continues to grow and benefit your business over the long term.

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Just about every month without fail I get emails from clients asking for a CTR report for their ads. This is definitely a measure that needs to be considered but I don’t believe it should be the sole measurement or the most important measurement when advetising online.

I recently read an article by Katie Risch, the Director of Media Relations for Centro. So,I thought I would share it.

Click Throughs, Not the Final Answer

By Katie Risch, Centro’s Director of Media Relations

We’ve all been victims of campaigns with never-ending optimizations. Just when you’ve finished moving impressions from one ad unit to another and have reissued new IOs, your client wants you to shift budgets to a different ad unit or site that is showing higher click-through rates (CTR). Oh, the infamous CTR. This rate seems to be considered one of the primary performance drivers in the industry, but when you think about it, how effective is the click through rate as a success metric?

In my opinion, CTRs shouldn’t always be the be-all-end-all measurements of campaign performance. A recent study conducted by comScore, ”The Silent Click: Building Brands Online,” focused on measuring ad performance beyond click-throughs and looked at three specific user actions across 80 brand campaigns on 200 sites over a month’s time. These specific actions were:

1) searches related to the advertisers’ brands;
2) traffic driven to advertisers’ sites; and
3) e-commerce tied to advertisers’ brands.

The control group (users who saw the ads) took action after they viewed the ad, which showed that although they didn’t click on the ad, they were still connected and engaged with the products they were exposed to. They were much more likely to visit that brand’s website later in the month and spent 50% more time on the product’s website than the average user.

Whether the user clicked on the ad or not, when they saw it they still were much more likely to engage with the brand at a later point in time than someone not exposed to the ad at all.

Another study conducted earlier this year by CBS Vision and McPheters & Company examined a similar theory stating that ads do not need to be clicked to be deemed “effective.” In their analysis, Internet users were asked to surf the web for 30 minutes. During this time, they viewed ads which were placed in relevant content and ads that were not. Ads running on Web sites with related content were 61% more likely to be recalled than ads running on sites with unrelated content. Search and portal sites generated the lowest recall levels. Local sites have a unique advantage in the industry. They have the ability to marry their content with advertisers who want to create a connection with the local community. Where else on the Internet can you do this?

The results of these studies bode well for marketers who are looking for other ways to measure and optimize campaigns versus solely relying on CTRs. This year more than ever, it’s important to reevaluate the placements on your site and be open to creative units that will suit online branding campaigns with a tailored local message. As more of these studies are released, advertisers will continue to see that click-throughs are not the final answer.

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