Mediación y traducción: ¿dos conceptos iguales o diferentes?

When you submit a high-quality article to a Web site that serves the needs of your potential customers, your article will typically be “published,” or added to that site’s newsletter, blog, or other regular communications. Rarely will it be published in print using this formula. (For print publication, see Advertis-ing Strategy 2, “Broadcast a CompellAdvertis-ing Press Release.”) Luckily, online pub-lication is much faster than print—in fact, it’s nearly instantaneous.

Of course, aside from merely informing readers of your expertise, article marketing has many other substantial benefits. Most importantly, it tends to get you higher rankings on the search engines.

Here’s why:

Search engines determine the quality and relevancy of your Web site based on how many other Web sites link to yours. It’s like a voting system. If instead of having only five votes (that is, five other Web sites that thought well enough of you to talk about you at their site), you have 300 votes (300 other Web sites that are linking to you because they posted your article on their newsletter page), your ranking in the search engines will skyrocket. Whenever someone searches for products and services in your industry or area of

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expertise, your Web site will appear higher up on the list than that of a com-petitor who doesn’t do article marketing.

To begin creating massive traffic using articles, follow these steps.

Step 1: Decide What Your Objectives Are

While most small business owners want to turn their article-marketing effort into product sales immediately, others simply want to build a large opt-in list for a future sales effort. If you don’t have a product to sell yet, you can still profit from article marketing by building a list and offering consulting serv-ices, a subscription series based upon your expertise, or some other knowl-edge product.

Suffice it to say that article marketing works beautifully regardless of the business model under which you operate—even if it’s simply to help build in-terest or memberships in an online or offline special-inin-terest group or hobby club.

Step 2: Build a Web Site That Sells Your Product or Service

The best use of article marketing is to drive prospective customers to your Web site for additional information in the form of a free report, a short course delivered via autoresponder, a fact sheet, a checklist, or some other giveaway item—which then does the work of converting the reader into a buyer. Re-member the two-step campaign strategy from Prospecting Strategy 2, “Run a Two-Step Campaign”? Article marketing is a classic two-step method.

But you must support your article-marketing effort and your free give-away item with a Web site that features compelling sales letters that convince readers to buy. Put links to these sales pages in your free giveaways, so that read-ers can click over and buy. That is how articles ultimately get turned into cash.

Step 3: Make a Short List of Topics

If you’ve been operating your business longer than a few months, you have the ability to become an expert in your industry. In fact, you know more than you think you do.

To begin developing your expert articles, look around at your own cus-tomers and clients. What are their challenges, opportunities, and interests?

What problems keep them awake at night? What do they respond to? Make a list of these topics.

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Next, list those subjects that you already know something about or need to research—even if you’re only somewhat familiar with them.

Step 4: Create Subthemes of Your Topic

If you are a therapist and relationship expert, for example, you can develop articles about teen love, divorce recovery, workplace hostility, and single motherhood. While all these themes are related to relationships, articles on them would be submitted to very different Web sites. Make yourself an expert in multiple markets by locating subniche markets with Web sites where po-tential customers might congregate.

Step 5: Write the Articles or Hire Someone to Write Them

If you’re not a natural-born writer or you just don’t have an interest in writing these articles, consider hiring a professional. For about $200 for a series of ar-ticles, you can find freelance writers—many of whom are career journalists looking for some side work—at Web sites like www.elance.com, www.guru.com, or www.rentacoder.com. You can even review portfolios of their past work prior to hiring them.

Don’t worry about optimizing your article with many of the Internet tricks that worked a few years ago. Just use the most common phrases and buzzwords that would normally be used in your industry, then craft the rest of the article in normal, everyday language and grammar. The search engines have gotten wise to keyword stuffing and other optimization tricks, anyway.

Let your good content rise to the top of the search engines on its own.

Each article should be about 500 to 700 words* and contain these four parts:

➤ An introductory paragraph that gets readers excited about the rest of the article and presents what they’ll learn in subsequent paragraphs.

➤ Three body paragraphs that contain the most important points about the topic and present your opinion, recommendations, or information on the subject.

➤ A concluding paragraph that summarizes the subject discussed and presents a solution or suggestion.

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* For best results on the Internet, be sure your word count is no less than 450 words and no more than 1,000 words.

➤ A resource box that contains two to four sentences about you and your services, then offers a valuable free report, checklist, audio interview, discussion forum, or other giveaway via your squeeze page.* Don’t talk about yourself; talk about the benefits of what readers will receive free when they click.

Ideally, selected topics should be turned into a multipart article so that you get follow-up publication at Web sites that publish the first segment.

Step 6: Submit Your Articles to Free Article Directories

There are hundreds of article directories that will accept your articles and post them for free downloading by registered users. These directories are a good way to get the process started.

But the best way to submit articles is to submit your subtheme articles to specific niche Web sites that speak directly to avid readers. To find such sites, do an online search using keywords that help narrow down the results to those niche sites. Then contact the Web site owner by telephone to ask that your article be used.

Many sites today also have submission forms that you can complete on-line with your name, Web site name, article headon-line, and body copy. To make this process easier, Jason Potash publishes a software program that not only automatically completes these forms for you but also helps you manage Web site contacts for future submissions and even teaches you how to craft superb articles that get published.^†

Step 7: Repeat the Process

Articles also tend to live a long time on the Internet. They get indexed, archived, and sent virally by many thousands of people. This is one reason why, while massive traffic can be generated virtually overnight by broadcasting a single article,“critical mass”—according to Jason Potash—typically occurs after you have 20 or more articles circulating around the Internet.

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* See Internet Strategy 1, “Launch a Viral Report and Squeeze Page,” for more details on how to develop a squeeze page.

† You can read more about Jason Potash’s Article Announcer tool at the Instant Income Resources Page (www.instantincome.com/resources.html).

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