Bill McRea

Before you start rolling your eyes at the mention of article marketing because you think it’s ‘old school’ or passé, think again. Article marketing is still an effective, viable, online marketing strategy that can benefit your website in three powerful ways:

1. Article marketing creates high-quality, relevant backlinks to your site for improved SEO
2. Your articles will establish you as a trusted authority and subject matter expert in your niche
3. You create a flood of the best kind of targeted traffic to your site—visitors who have already consumed some of your content, so they are looking for more of what you have to offer

Article marketing was very popular back in the day for good reason—it totally works. Article marketing does take some time and effort, but once you invest that energy, your articles will continue to send you targeted traffic and sales for years to come.

How does article marketing work?

For those who are not completely clear on the concept of article marketing it’s very simple. You write a 400-600 word article based on the primary keywords for your website, include a link back to your site in the resource box at the end, and then your submit the article to an article directory. Visitors find your articles when they are searching for your keywords.  Email newsletter editors may grab your article from a directory and publish it to their audience spreading your link even wider.

What is the goal of article marketing?

The basic goal of article marketing is to generate targeted traffic to your website. Don’t overlook the opportunity that articles present for you to expand your brand, and establish your credibility in your niche.

You want to craft articles that will inform, entertain, engage and entice readers, but leave them wanting more of what you have to offer, which they will find when they follow the link back to your site. Think of your articles as an hors d’oeuvre—a tasty appetizer where the content on your website is the main course.  The content of your articles should showcase your unique strengths and what sets you apart in the marketplace without giving away the store in free content.

Tips for your article marketing strategy

• Write quality, original articles.
• If you re-write your articles, do it with an eye towards quality and making re-write able to stand on its own and convey the same sense of quality and originality.
• Spinning article content is a personal choice. Spinning produces a lower quality product, but it gives you exponentially more exposure. One alternative is that you can point the links from your spun articles back to the other articles that you have published online, blogs where you have guest posted and content sharing sites.
• Post your (original) articles to content sharing sites such as Hub Pages, Squidoo, Scribd, and a whole host of other sites of that nature.
• Post your articles on free blogs such as blogger, zimbio, wordpress.com, tumbler.com, etc. All of these properties will give you relevant, high quality backlinks.

Article marketing is made super-easy when you use ArticleBot software because the more articles you write, and the more places you submit them the more money you will make. Submit your articles to 400 directories and watch the traffic start rolling in. Visit, http://www.mcreasite.com/blog for tips and strategies for Internet Marketing.

As an Internet entrepreneur you know how crucial it is to the success of your business to build a big email list. When you have built your own list of subscribers, you have an asset that can bolster the success of your online business.

A responsive list of email subscribers means that you have your own targeted audience who has raised their hand to say that they are interested in hearing from you again. You have the opportunity to build a relationship with them, to gain their trust and increase the know and like factor so that they will feel comfortable buying from you again and again.

For those Internet marketers who have more ideas and enthusiasm than they have technical skills, creating squeeze pages or opt-in pages can be challenging. You either have to pay your web designer to do it, or you might try downloading a template and muddling through inserting your copy and fiddling with the HTML codes. Then you realize that you’ve still got to figure out how to add the code from your email auto-responder program.

You know that a squeeze page is a proven, effective way to build your list quickly. It can allow you to offer an “ethical bribe” in the form of a free product in exchange for the subscriber’s contact information. When this product is something of value to them that demonstrates your expertise, and whet’s their appetite for the products that you have available on your website it can be a great way to build a following of loyal subscribers who may one day become valuable customers.

There are several aspects to creating an effective squeeze page, and if you have never created one before you might feel like you are stumbling in the dark a little bit in the beginning.

Wouldn’t it be great to have a selection of proven squeeze page templates to choose from that you  could simply plug your compelling copy into and have a custom squeeze page without paying a designer or barely even breaking a sweat? Well, when you have a WordPress theme like OptimizePress creating squeeze pages is really that simple.

You have 10 squeeze page design templates that you can customize to fit your topic and your branding scheme. These templates have been tested and optimized to provide excellent conversion rates.

Finally there is an easy way to integrate your autoresponder code. Simply copy and paste and you’ll have a working opt-in box. Adding your headline, choosing the font, and adding bullets is simply a matter of ticking the right boxes for the page elements that you would like to include.

Now, in just a matter of a few minutes and with minimal hassle, you can have a custom squeeze page that you built yourself that you can start sending lots of targeted traffic to so that you can start building your list.

If you do any kind of Internet Marketing, and you want to eliminate the need to hire designers to create custom pages for you, and you want to feel a bit more in control of your campaigns, then you should take a look at OptimizePress.  Check it out today at, http://imsafelink.com/OptimizePress-article

Every business needs leads—qualified leads in order to stay in business. As an online business and information product publisher, you are looking for business opportunity or ‘biz-op’ leads, which are people who have expressed an interest in finding a business opportunity.

Lead generation is a very competitive space on the Internet right now. You know that this is true if you have ever been in the position of buying leads. In this article we are going to explore a strategy that you can use to generate your own biz-op leads using affiliate networks. This is a method that requires a few steps, but if you are willing to put in the effort you will reap the rewards.

What is an affiliate network?

An affiliate network is simply the matchmaker of sorts between affiliate marketers and merchants who offer affiliate programs. They help affiliate marketers find the best programs to promote to their audience, and they help the merchants find the best audience for their programs.

In an affiliate arrangement, the affiliate earns a specified percentage of the sales price of the product that the affiliate’s leads purchase using their link. CPA networks offer CPA, CPM and CPC-based Marketing programs.

CPA works by affiliates generating leads. The affiliate attracts visitors to their website who are already searching for what they have to offer. The affiliate makes money when the visitor clicks on an offer that appeals to them and takes the desired action (the “A” in CPA). This action can be anything from putting in their name and email address, to signing up for a free trial membership.

Creating the offer

The first step is to create an offer for, “how to make money online,” and then pay your affiliates $1.50- $2.50 for each lead they send to you. You can market this offer using an affiliate network.

Here are some examples of affiliate networks:

• Clickbank
• Click2Sell
• Commission Junction
• Share a Sale
• ClickBooth

Creating a sales funnel

The next step is to create a sales funnel that will generate the income needed so you do not lose money on the incoming leads. This is called a “Self Liquidating” lead source. Self liquidating leads simply means that you generate leads that cost you some amount of money, but then you quickly turn around and turn an immediate profit from those leads.

Inside Tip:

Be aware that as with any other business model, there is the problem of fraud. There are less than scrupulous affiliates who try to cheat the networks by generating fake leads. There is a platform called Direct Track, which is an affiliate marketing and tracking platform that has a focus on affiliate fraud prevention.

In the end, your goal is to generate a sizzling hot list of people who are already searching for what you have to offer—information about how they can make money online—and keep them on your list so that you can create a community of biz-op seekers and present them with offers that provide them with what they are searching for and make you money.

Are you ready to learn more about generating biz-op leads and other online marketing topics? Visit, http://www.mcreasite.com/blog, where you will find tons of tips and resources for making money online and having some fun in the process.

Webinars are a popular way to sell information products for a good reason—they work. A webinar is simply a seminar that is held online. Participants register in advance and receive the special link to participate in the webinar through their email. All they have to do on the day and time for the webinar is click on the link to join the presentation.

Hosting a webinar is much easier than standing up in front of an audience at an event and speaking. You get to run the program from wherever you are while you are talking into a headset and mic. Your presentation is prepared in advance, so all you have to do is follow the script and you will be successful.

There are two ways to use webinars to make money:

1: Sell info products directly
With this first model, you the presenter are either the creator of the product you are selling or you are an affiliate who gets a commission on every product that you sell. You might be interviewing the product’s creator, or someone who is a celebrity or well-known subject matter expert in that particular niche. Basically, you want someone that will draw a large audience to participate in the webinar.

2: Create new products
The second model for making money with webinars is to create the product from the webinar content. You can interview an expert, or present what you know about a topic that is in demand by your audience. How do you find out what is in demand? Ask them. Create a short survey and ask your audience what they struggle with and what they would like to learn. Create a presentation and then invite your audience to attend. Allow participants to ask questions and incorporate those questions into the content of the presentation. When the webinar is over you can divide the recording up into segments and sell it as a video course, have the audio transcribed and sell it as an ebook, or training course.

Webinars are powerful because you are speaking directly to your audience and you are teaching them what they said they wanted to learn when they signed up. Hosting webinars helps to increase the know like and trust factor between you and your audience. After participating in a webinar with you for an hour they get the feeling that they know you better. You become more of a real human being to them, and if your presentation was successful, they think more highly of you than before the webinar.

Webinars are interactive, and if you take live calls, people enjoy getting their questions answered right there on the spot. You are teaching people new skills–turning the light on in their minds and they will remember who they learned that valuable information from thus improving customer loyalty.

There is so much more to say about the power of webinars, so if you want more, go ahead and visit, http://www.mcreasite.com/blog, where you will get lots more information about the different ways that you can have fun making money online.

Do you have a brand new blog that’s waiting to be discovered? Why not create a fun contest with an innovative software tool called Contest Burner. This software is designed to take the drudgery out of Marketing your website and creating an incentive for your visitors to do it for you.

When you set up a contest with an exciting line up of prizes that your visitors will find appealing, your visitors will be falling all over themselves to promote your site in order to win those prizes and the prestige and bragging rights of being crowned the winner.

If your blog is really new, you’ll want to make sure that you have got a hefty supply of good content on it that your visitors will find valuable and want to share. People share good content because they are fairly confident that the recipient will find it useful, and because they know that it makes them look good when they have shared something that helped solve a problem for a colleague or a friend. So, make sure that you are creating content that is worth sharing and holds the potential for going viral.

The whole point of Contest Burner is that it creates a win-win for you the website owner and your visitors. They get a chance to win valuable prizes and have a little bit of harmless fun, and your website enjoys the benefit of a fresh flood of backlinks, targeted traffic and lots of positive exposure.

Your new little blog could emerge from relative obscurity to your becoming a blogging rock star when your contest takes off. A good strategy to try for a new blog that does not have a lot of followers is to arrange a series of guest blog gigs on popular blogs in your niche. This is an excellent way to begin to get your name out there and to get your content in front of a fresh audience of readers. If you schedule your guest blog ‘tour’ leading up to your contest you can leverage all of the attention that you will be getting from having appeared on those top blogs so recently.

Additionally, a few strategically placed press releases of your own can help spread the word about your blog and about the contest so that you start attracting a nice flood of visitors to kick things off in grand fashion.

Running a contest on your blog is a great way to attract more subscribers to your opt-in list, so make sure that you’ve got one set up before launching your contest. Your email list is a prime asset to your online business, and all of this exposure and buzz that your contest will be generating will help you add lots of eager subscribers quickly.

So, when you are looking for a way to inject some fresh life to your website, or you want to generate some exciting buzz around a new book launch or event, Contest Burner is the software tool that can help you accomplish all of those things virtually effortlessly and you’ll have a ton of fun watching the targeted traffic roll in.

Do you want to attract tons of new traffic and exposure for your blog? Contest Burner might be the answer. Visit, http://mcreasite.com/ContestBurner, where you’ll discover this fun software that automates your marketing.