Ah, those were the days. Being in business used to be so easy. Promoting my business used to be easy too.  I was a painting contractor in Los Angeles in the 80’s. The competition was fierce but I knew what to do. To get my business going in a certain area I would drive around, find a good area and start door knocking. Personal contact was my forte. I never went more than an hour before I had a job. Another thing I did was to have my local flyer distribution service pass out a couple of thousand flyers and voila – WORK! It was that easy and that predictable.

But times have changed. If you don’t have a presence on the internet you’re nothing – second rate, behind the times. So you make the investment in setting up a web site. It feels good – hey, look at me I’ve now exposed myself to millions of potential customers. This is going to be easy, I thought. Welcome to the new world of the Internet. After the initial excitement of having my beautiful web site floating somewhere in cyberspace, I wondered why I wasn’t getting any calls. After all, I just spent $4,000 for this beautiful web site; the jobs are just going to start pouring in. Right? WRONG! It just doesn’t work that way, as I came to find out. Because of the staggering number of people searching the web, it has tremendous potential BUT you’re just a drop of water in a huge pond.

How do you stand out? How do you get them to come to your site over all of the others vying for their business? It takes a strategy to create links that point back to your site from hundreds of other sites related to your product. And you have to keep it up. One of the main ways of creating traffic to your site is through the use of article submission. For example, you write a short article about how to handle peeling paint. You then submit it to an article directory so others can find out how to handle peeling paint. They see your site listed on the article so they come to view your site as being an expert on what to do about peeling paint. And so it goes.

But don’t expect people to come flocking to your site immediately. You have to be committed and to stay the course. After all, you are competing with thousands, if not millions, of other people in your line of work and they all want to be in the number one spot when someone searches for a painter, florist, etc. in their area. If you can persist in writing and submitting articles that are relevant to your field, you will see your name moving up in the search engines. It’s wonderful to see your website show up on the first page of a search – and how profitable. The fact is that after the first page of a search most prospective buyers have found what they were looking for and the number of buyers who search the 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th pages drops off dramatically. So what do you need to do? It’s obvious; get your site on the first page. If there was a magical way of doing this everyone would be doing it no matter the cost because the return is big! How big? As big as the web itself.

 If you have not yet researched out article submission as one way of gaining exposure for your product on the web then you should consider it in your marketing budget. It’s a long range strategy that has proven to work time and again. If you can talk about your business for just a couple of minutes, then you can write that same thing down as an article and have an article submission service submit it so it gets out to hundreds of sties that all point back to you as the source. People like to know about things that concern them. If the paint kept peeling on my house, I’d like to know why and the fix for it. So your hard won knowledge earned over the years is important to people. Let customers know you’re the expert and you’re the guy to call to get the job done. It’s not enough anymore to put a sign on your truck and drive around. To be credible, you have to have a web presence.

For me, I rather liked walking up to someone in the neighborhood, introducing myself, handing them my business card asking if they would like to get an estimate on getting some painting done on their house. It seemed much more personable and a much easier sell. But that was then, things change and you have to know how to play the new game without dropping out things that already work.

You can bet that your competitors know how important a high ranking website is to a prosperous future. From my perspective, marketing today is not as simple as it once was. There’s a new game in town and its here to stay. Part of your marketing budget has to embrace this new media. Its’ potential is immense! It would be difficult to over state it. It used to be so easy. But, why not, I like challenging new adventures in my life even if I have to change some old ways of doing things.

Have you ever written a blog post?

Have you ever written an article?

Have you ever written anything on the web?

Has everything you’ve written been indexed and placed by Google in the exact search terms you wanted?

Well if so, then close this window and move on with life. For the 99.99 percent of you out there where this is not the case, read on, because I have some pointers that will help with this.

I was talking with a client last week, he was saying that Google wasn’t indexing the articles he wrote in the search terms he was going for. I asked to see the articles he had written. I read them over and spotted exactly what his problem was…

He was not using the words he wanted his article to show up in, he was using words related to these. I then checked with a few other people that claimed they had the same problem. One-for-one I found the same thing; they thought that Google would index the article for the search terms they wanted because it was RELATED to what they were talking about. Unfortunately, they forgot that, although Google is a very efficient “smart” search engine with millions of dollars in development, it’s not a sentient human.

Let’s take a specific example of using this. The keywords that we are trying to get this article to show up in are Good Green Grass (name of the company) and Lawn Care:

Article Title:

The title is an important place to put keywords. Being the nature of titles, Google will look at this and see what your article is about, given the content in the article matches up it index the article accordingly.

Bad: Green Grass is the best grass

Good: Do it yourself Lawn Care by Good Green Grass

Article Summary:
I recommend that you don’t just take a paragraph or two out of the article and make it the summary. Write a summary, taking advantage of keywords where you can to gain the most exposure for your articles. A lot of the article directories will have listings of articles with the title and summary being shown. What’s written in the summary is one of the factors Google takes into account on where to index you on pages that show listings.

Just as an example, I wouldn’t have a summary like this, “Lawn care by Good Green Grass has Lawn care services so you don’t have by Grass, but Good Green Grass.” As a reader I would think that you are writing for search engines, negating me as a client.

Take advantage of having captured your clients attention this far by saying things like, “Good Green Grass is providing do-it-yourself lawn care tips for those who want to have a beautiful, green lawn, by doing it themselves.” You can see the additional keywords you get by doing this, beautiful, green lawn, etc.

Article Body:
It’s important to use the search term you are trying to get the articles ranked for as keywords in the article itself. You are going to have to use your own judgment on the frequency of your keyword, but a good viewpoint to use is, how many times would you want to see it if you were reading the article as an actual human?

One difference in articles from press releases is that articles need to be informational reports for people to read. They can’t be too self promotional. Take the time to make yourself the authority on your business and having given your customers free information, become their friends. When you become that, you will have more business than you know what to do with.

When writing the body of the article think of different variations of the keywords you are going for. These will help get ranked in related keywords, gaining more exposure.

Resource Box:
Most sites have a resource box a.k.a. an author’s bio. This is the place where you can put your self promotional message. If the site allows links to be placed in the resource box, do it, because then you are gaining inbound links as well as all the other advantages. I will be writing more articles covering the details of how to properly format a resource box and covering each of the different fields you can fill out on an article in more detail.

Keywords:
Put the most important keywords at the beginning of the list. Most sites give you a limit of the number of keywords or number of characters. A lot of the sites that we use limit you to 150 characters in the resource box, this is going to vary from site to site.

Summary:
The main point is to get creative in how to word the search terms you are going for. You need to make it so that it doesn’t seem like you are writing for the search engines, but clients. You must include the keywords though, otherwise your article is less relevant and will not show up to the extent it could. The more you give to other people (not necessarily cash, talking more about information in this case), the more you are going to get back in the end. If you make it a little fun to read while writing, that’s another plus.

Rafferty Pendery
CEO Studio98