Internet Marketing

Friday, June 6, 2008

Making Online Article Marketing Work for an Insurance Agency

You have a successful insurance business with a large client base and a regular flow of prospects. So why would you write articles for the internet? There are a number of good reasons to use internet articles as part of your marketing mix.

First, it's effective it's easy and it's no cost. And once even one article is out there it's available for people all over the world to read anytime, any day. And if you are licensed to sell in other locales there is no reason to not do business in those areas.

Second, articles position you as an expert in your field. This may not seem terribly important to you, but people like to know that they're buying from the best, no matter what they are buying. The easiest way to position yourself or your business as an expert is to be published. And published is published whether it is on paper or on the internet.

Third, articles help you build an email mailing list that you can then use to do email promotions in all the areas where you are licensed. Once people have opted-in on a list like this, they are more predisposed to buy what you sell than people on a list acquired any other way.

You're probably already communicating with your prospect base with a newsletter. If you have created the content within your company (articles on the internet must be original content) that same kind of information is fine fodder for an internet article campaign.

To illustrate what an article writing campaign might look like for an insurance business, let's look at some of the article ideas a variety of insurance businesses might used to drive people to their websites, and we've barely scratched the surface.

•Employee Health Insurance: Seven Qualities to Look for in Health Insurance for Employee Benefits:

•The Role that Benefits Play in Employee Retention

•Employee Benefits: The Benefits A Small Business Can Offer to Get and Keep Good Employees

•7 Critical Issues to Consider When Evaluating Life Insurance.

•Pros and Cons of Term and Full Life Insurance

•How Much Would It Take to Replace Everything After a Fire? How to Evaluate Your Homeowners Insurance.

•Home Owners Insurance - what Isn't Covered.

If you would like to learn more about internet marketing tactics to use for your brick and mortar business, I invite you to look at http://www.BusinessOnTarget.com

From Jane Trevaskis and Success-Catalyst.com.

SEO Tips for Improved Houston Search Engine Rank

Use Header Tags

Header tags are used to specify headings within an article on a web page. For example, using H1, H2, and H3 header tags make it simple for readers to quickly skim your web pages for content that they want to read, rather than having to trudge through all of your content. In fact, most people will not read through all of your content if it isn't simple to read. Online surfers have little patience and will leave a website that doesn't quickly give them useful information in an easy-to-read format.

Bold and Italicize Keywords

Bolding keywords will make them stand out to readers so that they know right away what your web pages are focusing on. This is another way to keep people on your website for an extended period of time, helping them become more familiar with your business and website.

Use Title Tags

A page's title tags tell people who are scouring search results on Google, Yahoo!, and Live (formerly MSN) what your web page is all about. You should use a different title for every web page, and the title should always be written specifically for that web page. If possible, include the title of the article on the web page in the title tag. The title should be the primary keyword that the web page is focusing on, as well.

Write a Unique Description for Every Web Page

Since every web page is unique, they should each have their own unique description. Try to use your keyword one or two times in the description. Overstuffing the description with keywords will not likely improve your search rank.

Use Unique Keywords for Every Web Page

Each page should also have its own set of keywords. The primary keyword that a web page is focused on should be the first keyword in the list of keywords. This improves the keyword's prominence, which is a very important factor in search engine optimization.

Only Use 100% New, Unique Content

Content that is copied from another website is counted as duplicate content by search engines and will not be likely to improve your website's search rank. Write your own unique content or hire an SEO firm to write optimized content for your website.

Make Your Website User-Friendly

The first two SEO tips in this article discussed how using header tags and bolding/italicizing keywords helped maintain your readers' attention. These tips also improve your search engine rank because search engines look for these optimization techniques because they want to deliver quality websites to their searchers.

There are many SEO tips that can improve your search engine rank, but your website is not likely to see the first page of a search engine for search terms that your visitors are actually using without the help of a Houston search engine optimization firm. You may show up for second-rate search terms and what are called "long-tail keywords," but the competitive keywords that targets markets actually use are often targeted by big-budget retailers and service companies.

Andre Zayas is a professionally syndicated author.

Search Engine Optimisation Services Specialist Discusses Website SEO Part 9

In an article you can be very personal. You cannot or are not allowed to blatantly advertise. You need to provide very good pointed original information in your article. There are maximum and minimum limits, set by the company, on the number of words allowed in an article. From an SEO view point you will need to study the "posting rules" of the specific article submission company that you subscribe to, in order to know these limits.

From an effective search engine optimisation outlook a good average is to keep your articles to the three hundred to five hundred word limits. Most Ezine article companies have a two hundred and fifty word minimum limit. Certain article submission companies have their maximum limits set as high as fourteen thousand words. These companies will delete your article if it extends beyond their maximum and minimum limits.

If you choose a reputable, professional article submission company, which is also free, be prepared to go through rigorous and strict testing of your writing ability. This type of company is a good testing ground for a search engine optimisation specialist or practitioner to see how good a writer they think they are. These companies are very particular about the content of your articles and so they should be. They have many rules that you need to adhere to.

You may have to submit your search engine optimised article many times before it is passed for them to publish it. You often need to submit a certain minimum number of articles for approval before you can graduate to their accepted 'Author' level. They will still check all the articles you post after you have qualified as an acceptable author. So you need to prove your writing ability to these companies and to yourself. This is a good thing if you want to hone and sharpen your search engine optimisation writing skills.

These reputable and professional article submission companies are very powerful from an SEO standpoint. You will achieve many first page rankings on the Google search engine for your articles. Those articles will also maintain their position on the Google search engine for a very long time and obviously improve the effectiveness and success of your related website marketing campaign. Unlike the press releases, your articles are more reliable and dependable for top Google search engine ranking.

Clyde Thorburn
Search Engine Optimisation Services Specialist
Johannesburg South Africa
http://www.mortgageleadgenerationonline.com
clydesseoservices@freemarketingsystem.net
Landline: 2711 432 2225
Skype ID: clydethorburn
Yahoo IM: crthorburn

Best Article Marketing - Revealed - 4 Responsive Secrets to Impact Your Article Marketing

Article marketing is considered as the ultimate income-generator in the internet today. It has made a lot of marketers richer by just writing and submitting their articles online. If you want to be one of them, you need to make sure that your articles and your marketing techniques can create an impact online. Here's how:

1. Keep your articles focused. By this, I mean making sure that all the ideas you present on your content are all related to your topic and are able to help your readers better understand your points. You can easily do this by preparing an outline before you write your content. List down all the ideas and information that you think will be useful to your readers and arrange them properly so you can present them in a logical manner. This will make your articles flow smoothly and sound highly organized.

2. Distribute your articles to submission sites. Submit your articles to leading publishing sites. To increase the chances of your articles being accepted, make sure that you follow all the guidelines set by publishers.

3. Proofread and solicit feedback. Check your articles for possible grammar and spelling errors. Also make sure that all the information you present on you articles are fact-based so you won't mislead your readers. It would also greatly help if you can show your articles to small group within you target market to make sure that your content is targeted to their needs.

4. Know how to create killer resource box. You main objective in writing your articles is to convert your readers to potential clients so you can augment your sales leads. That can only happen if your resource box is powerful enough to move your readers to take action. Keep it short, direct to the point, enticing, and appealing by communicating the benefits that awaits your online visitors or by offering freebies.

To learn more, download my free guide, "How to Generate $15,000 Per Month Online" here: "How to Generate $15,000 Per Month Online"

Sean Mize is an internet marketing mentor who teaches people to generate over $15,000 per month online via automated systems and product funnels.

Article Marketing and Duplicate Content - Is Mass Submission a Killer?

In the past, submitting your articles to as many article directories as possible was a very effective technique. The search engine algorithms were not nearly as complex as they are today and the multiple links were very valuable.

Today, mass article submission is not nearly effective. As a matter of fact, the search engines look at it as a form of spam. SEs like to see unique, quality content and the same article appearing on hundreds of sites is not unique.

Is mass article submission duplicate content? Actually in Googles eyes, it is not. But, that does not mean it is OK to mass submit and this is why. Google defines duplicate content as the same exact content on the same site. When they come across this there is no penalty, they will just index one of the pages and leave the other out of their index. Since articles are submitted to multiple websites and each page has a different style and layout, it is not duplicate content and many of the pages will get indexed.

So why not mass submit? Although many of your articles will get indexed, they will not receive as much weight in the SEs as they would if they were only submitted to a few authority sites. Is it possible for an article to rank high for a long tail keyword after being mass submitted? Absolutely but that same article would have ranked even higher if it were only submitted to the top few sites.

To sum it all up, do not mass submit. But, do not limit your submission to the top few article directories. Find some good ezines in your niche and ask for inclusion. If they like your article they may include it and that has the potential of bringing in a blast of target visitors. It is also a good idea to seek out a few authority websites in your niche that are not necessarily article directories. If you can get your big competitors to publish your articles on their site you can brand your name and be known as an expert in your field.

There are many factors that must be calculated in order to conduct a successful article marketing campaign. Hopefully I have laid one rumor to rest and you can use this newly obtained information to help better serve your home business.

Joshua Spaulding is an Author and Webmaster who has been educating Internet marketers on effective Article Marketing for over 2 years. Joshua invites you to take a look at the #1 Article Marketing Ebook on the market at http://www.articlemarketingdomination.com/ where you can learn all of the advanced article marketing tips and trips that will drive loads of targeted traffic to your website or blog.