ARTICLE SUBMISSION SERVICE
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2009 Business Plans

Plan to Grow Your Business With Article Marketing in 2009

Another year has come and gone. Now is the time to reflect and to learn the lessons from 2008, and plan for the year ahead. In this letter, I hope to provide you with some real value by suggesting various ways you can grow your online business.

Everyday, I work with clients to promote their websites using article marketing. Most are already quite experienced in this arena, but there are some who are still new to article marketing.

Let's be clear. There are 2 primary goals you want to achieve when you embark on an article marketing campaign.

1) Direct traffic from the links in your articles and

2) Getting your sites to rank better in the search engines.

Article marketing is a very effective method to get your site to rank well in the search engines. Ultimately, everything boils down to keywords. Your online fortune will depend on how well you rank for targeted keywords. In other words, you want to target keywords with traffic, and keywords that will convert.

So how do you know which keywords will bring you traffic, and which keywords will convert?

Keyword Research.

There are many keyword tools out there that will tell you whether a particular keyword has got any searches or not. If there are very few searches, chances are you will see very little traffic. But that does not mean that the keyword is not profitable.

It would take an entire ebook to expand on keyword research and analysis. And it's not within the scope of this letter to cover this subject.

If you like, you can use this free Google Keyword Tool to find out the volume of traffic that a particular keyword will bring.

Choosing keywords that will convert is a little trickier. Pay per click (PPC) experts will tell you to test whether the traffic will convert or not by buying clicks. Say you have a small budget, and each click costs $0.50. You can buy 100 clicks for $50, and see if you can get the keyword to convert. Obviously, this method can cost you a bit of money if conversion rate is not that good.

Fortunately, you can still test traffic without having to buy clicks. You can do so by making educated guesses about keywords that will convert, and then use article marketing to drive traffic to your website. As the owner of your very own Internet business, I would expect you to be in tune with your target customer. In other words, you have to really know what your customers are thinking before you can execute any kind of marketing campaign. Here is a quick example.

Assume you are in the medical profession, and you know alot about healing remedies. But as you conduct your keyword research, you find that most people are searching for "home remedies". If you know the market well enough, you can guess the intent behind the searches right away. Ask yourself, why are people searching for the keyword phrase "aaa home remedies" or "bbb home remedies"?

If I am to guess, I would probably guess that these people are looking to save money. By looking up home remedies online that may actually work, they end up saving on medical costs. For instance, someone with an acne problem may be searching for "acne home remedy", hoping that the search will return some fruitful results.

In theory, it is easy to say that once you know what someone is searching for, all you have to do is to give them the solution and they will pay for it. Unfortunately, that is not how reality works. Not every single product will sell on the Internet, even when there are tons of searches for the information.

Again, understanding the mentality of your target customer helps to identify whether a product will sell or not. Let's return to the acne home remedy example. You have to ask yourself if the searchers will pay if you have the solution to their problem. There is no straight forward answer to this question. To make a smart guess, you may have to consider these issues:

• What is the demographic? Will they have money to pay for the product?
• Is this a badly needed solution?
• Is the solution freely available on the Internet?
• What are some alternatives? (E.g. Acne cream, medications, etc.)

Finally, always check to see if there are similar products in the market available for sale. How are these products selling? If the products are selling well, it's a clear indication that your products are going to sell. That is a very good sign.

Now that you know the product will convert, all you have to do is to drive traffic to the website. Here is when you have to ask yourself what keywords are likely to convert. In general, the more specific the keyword, the higher the conversion rates. But you get less traffic.

For example, it's harder to guess the intent behind a keyword phrase such as "acne home remedies". Is the visitor searching for free information? Or is the visitor looking for products to buy? You can't really tell. But if the visitor searches for "acne face cream", that's a different story. Logically speaking, "acne face cream" is more likely to convert than "acne home remedies".

But this is not an either/or situation. You can have both keywords working in your favor. Some tweaking may be required, but as long as you can get the visitor to your site, you can always test things out.

In this aspect, article marketing can be very useful. You see, when you get a site to rank well in the search engines, you get to test the traffic day in day out without spending a single dime. So what if the keyword gives you just 100 visitors a month. From the 100 visitors, you may stand to profit handsomely, depending on what you are selling and the business model you have adopted. The key is to keep your focus when you are implementing article marketing.

Here's the right way to do it:

1) Choose, from your keyword research, a few keywords to target. These are keywords that you think will be valuable to you.

2) Focus on these keywords and write and submit at least 5 articles per keyword to a bunch of article directories.

3) Check the search engines to see if the keywords are highly competitive. It's then up to you to decide whether you want to compete for that keyword or not. If a keyword is highly competitive, that doesn't mean it's impossible to rank for that keyword. It just takes a lot more time and resources.

4) Within a few weeks, you should see your website ranking for the keyword you are targeting. Of course, some keywords are much harder to rank than others.

5) Once you get the first set of keywords to rank, move on to the next set.

When you work like this, your website is going to be successful. It's just a matter of time. Soon, you will start to rank for many different keywords, giving you more traffic. It doesn't matter if you are doing this full time or part time. You stand to profit from your own efforts.

Part time article marketing.

Part time article marketing works because everything is on autopilot once you get your site to rank. Once you start getting traffic, you can choose to monetize the traffic using different methods. One of the most popular methods for part time online businesses is placing advertising on your website.

Advertising can be in the form of static text links, banner ads, or pop up ads. You get paid when you place a link on your website, or when somebody clicks on an ad on your website. You may also get choose to get paid for displaying image ads on your site. This provides passive revenue for you. There is no need to answer support emails, no products to ship, and no phone calls to answer. All you have to do, is to keep driving targeted traffic to your site.

In fact, some marketers have become so successful with this method that their passive income have far exceeded their full time income.

But I'd still recommend this business model for part time businesses. Mainly because there are still some limitations for this business model.

1) There are only so many ads you can place on a single web page.

This limits your income potential. If the visitor experience declines because of too many ads, traffic levels tend to drop off as well. So in order to keep the revenue growing, you will need more and more traffic. It's an uphill battle.

2) You cannot market to the visitor again.

Once a visitor clicks on an ad, he or she will leave the website. You have lost the chance to keep in contact with a potential customer. That leads to loss of future revenue.

Due to the above reasons, you find that you need A LOT of traffic (thousands per day) to make a decent income. But if you can drive thousands of visitors to your website, why not adopt a more powerful business model? You find that the business will be more stable, and you will do better in the long run.

Full time article marketing.

If you are already running a profitable business full time, things can get really exciting. You can make full use of the Internet to scale and grow your business.

You can really earn a full time income just from article marketing alone. Here is a realistic example of how article marketing can substitute a full time income. Let's start by taking a look at some numbers.

- From previously recorded statistics, it is safe to assume that an article brings in an average of 10 visitors per month.

- You run a membership site that charges a fee of $47 a month, and for every 100 targeted visitors, you acquire 1 customer.

That means to acquire your first 100 customers, you need 100 x 100 targeted visitors. That is 10,000 visitors - something to shoot for.

Let's say you want to bring in 2 customers each day. You will need 200 visitors per day, or 6000 visitors per month. That means you need to put out AT LEAST (6000 / 10) 600 articles.

Can you write and distribute 600 articles? That sounds doable. If you outsource, you can write and distribute 20 articles in a single day, and complete 600 articles in 30 days.

And what if you do your keyword research really well, and each article yields an average of 20 visitors instead of 10? That will help you accomplish your goals quicker.

100 customers will give an income of $47 x 100 = $4,700 per month. Even when you take the attrition rate into consideration, you can still grow your business month after month.

Here's what you must learn - When you adopt a powerful business model, you don't need a lot of traffic to make a full time income. That's why full time article marketing is so exciting! You are doing $4,700 per month AT LEAST, with just 200 visitors a day. You don't need thousands and thousands of visitors to make this work.

But all that is just on paper. To make things happen, you have to put them into concrete plans, and follow through with your plans. Perhaps now is a good time to look at some business plans for 2009. Here is what my plan looks like:

My Plans for Year 2009.

• Setup a network of niche sites to provide more SEO opportunities. - Target time frame: First and second quarter.

  This project will take up the bulk of my time. Besides SEO benefits, there are many other features that I'm sure you will be interested in. (More details will be released.)

• Release article writing tool - Target time frame: Second quarter.

  A prototype has been sitting in my computer for ages. With this tool, you can build your own database of content, conduct online research based on keywords, and create macro articles. All that will be stored in your account, and you can draw on your own unique content again and again. As you continue to work on your account, your database of content starts to grow. Writing painfully will be a thing of the past.

• Top Secret Projects - Target time frame: Third and forth quarter.

  It's a little too early to be leaking details for projects that are planned for the last 2 quarters of 2009. So I'll keep them secret for now. But you can be sure that something is brewing.

Are the above items cast in stone? Absolutely not! What happens if I miss the target time frame? I think that's okay. The important thing is to have a plan. Circumstances do change along the way, and when that happens, the plans must change too. But when there is a plan in place, changes can be made accordingly.

With that, I've come to the end of this (rather lengthy) letter. I hope that you find the information useful, and will put them to good use.

Here's wishing you a smooth sailing and happy 2009, and I look forward to helping you achieve your goals for the coming new year.

Happy New Year!

Sincerely,

Article Distribution Service
P.S. You have seen my plans. Now work on yours. See you soon!