Internet Marketing Essex

You may have heard that you should be using long tail keywords on your blog and even in your articles, but what are they and why should you be using them?

Simply put, long tail keywords are keyword phrases that contain three or more words. For instance, ‘internet marketing’ is a short tail keyword, while ‘internet marketing in essex’ is a long tail keyword.

There are a couple of reasons for using them:

1.   They are less competitive – it is much easier to rank well for a long tail keyword than for a short tail one.

2.   They convert well – although there will be less searches for them, they tend to convert traffic much more effectively as they are so specific.

This can be explained using the above mentioned example. It is obviously going to be difficult to rank well for a term as competitive as ‘internet marketing’. However ‘internet marketing in essex’ is going to be less competitive, and if someone does find your website for that keyword there is a much better chance that they will use your services, as you are offering the service they want in the area they are searching for.

If you use a lot of long tail keywords you may also be surprised at just how much traffic they do bring in. Although there aren’t as many searches for them individually, when they are all added up together the traffic can be significant.

This doesn’t mean you should abandon short tail keywords altogether, but it does make sense to do a bit of research on long tail keywords and add them into your blog posts and articles too. After all, why turn down the opportunity for more traffic, especially when it is so targetted?

Whatever forms of content marketing you’re engaged in – blogging, article marketing, social media, etc – little and often is usually better than sporadic bursts of prolific output. There are several reasons for this:

First of all, the more often you add content to your website or blog, the more often the search engines will tend to come back to check for more. So adding some content on a regular basis ‘trains’ the search engines to spider your site regularly.

Secondly, it keeps your content fresh for visitors. Particularly with blogs, people expect to see new posts being added on a regular basis, and if they do they will keep coming back to make sure they don’t miss out. On the other hand, if they come back and find you haven’t added anything new they will stop bothering and lose interest.

Similarly with Facebook and other social media, if you add loads of posts one day and then disappear for weeks or months on end, people won’t bother to check back regularly and will probably get annoyed at those times when you do add huge amounts of info all at once.

However this doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to write articles or blog posts every single day or week. Most blogs, websites and article directories have the facility for you to schedule when your content is published. So if you do sit down and write a lot of articles or blog posts one day, you can submit them all at once but arrange for them to publish at weekly or monthly intervals. This helps you to be efficient while still keeping both the search engines and your visitors happy.

If you’re struggling to come up with ideas of what to write about on your blog, Facebook page or newsletters, try using these seasonal ideas to get you started. You can use each one more than once, e.g. refer to Valentine’s Day before, during and after the day itself.

Here are some seasonal suggestions: New Year, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Easter, Spring, Father’s Day, Summer holidays, New school year, Halloween, Guy Fawkes, Christmas.

Some industries have their own seasonal topics, e.g. Financial institutions have the end of the tax year, the government budget, etc.

You can also use national days such as St Patricks or St George’s day, or awareness days like Earth Day, Fair Trade Fortnight or International Women’s Day. There are hundreds if you do a search for them, so chances are you’ll find at least a couple that you can use for your business.

Fashion, retail and the beauty industry will find it easy to associate various celebrations with their products, but even if the seasons don’t relate directly to your services, you can usually still find a way to build a discussion around them. For example recruitment agencies can use the New Year to talk about career goals, Valentine’s Day to discuss finding a job you love and Halloween to talk about facing your fears when job hunting.

You don’t need to be rigid about sticking to the themes, just take the ones that work for you, or use them when you’re stuck for other ideas.

If you take the time to write a good article, there are plenty of things you can do with it to get the most out of your effort. Here are just some suggestions:

Add it to your website – if you have a section for articles you can add it there, otherwise you can add it as a content page anywhere on the website that makes sense.

Post it on your blog – you can either add it as a blog post or, if you have already added it elsewhere on your website, you can add a short introduction and link to it from your blog.

Get it published – your articles can be submitted to article directories and ezines where others can access them for publishing elsewhere (with a link back to your website of course). Bear in mind that you probably don’t want to publish exactly the same article on your website as you submit to article directories – if you’ve already added it to your website, rewrite it to make it a little different before allowing others to publish it.

Add it to your newsletter – whether you send out a printed or email newsletter, it’s a great idea to include an informative article in it, to encourage recipients to open and read it.

Use social media to promote it – post a link back to the article on your website or blog from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and whatever other social media you engage in. Add it to your RSS feed too.

Finally, once you’ve written a good number of articles you can put them together and publish them as an ebook, which you can offer as a free gift to newsletter subscribers, etc.

By making your article accessible from a number of different places, you can ensure that it gets read by as many people as possible, which after all is exactly what you wrote it for.

When it comes to writing articles, blog posts or any type of content that involves sitting down and putting pen to paper for more than a few minutes, it’s easy to put it off and leave it for ‘later’. We make all sorts of excuses why we can’t do it now, and it ends up never getting done. Here are the top three excuses we tend to make, and the reasons why they aren’t valid:

1.    I don’t have time to write

Time is always the number one excuse made for not doing something, but quite often we overestimate how much time we actually need to write an article or blog post. Provided you don’t need to do too much research you can probably allocate roughly 30 minutes to write 300 words, which isn’t excessive. Most of us waste that amount of time just making coffees!

Even if you find it takes you double this long, just schedule an hour into your day and get on with it. Allocating a specific time and day on your calendar will help you to stop procrastinating and you can feel wonderfully smug when it’s done.

2.    I don’t know what to write about

It can be difficult coming up with new and interesting topics to write about over and over again, but there are ways to make it easier. Rather than trying to come up with a new topic each time you write, why not set aside an hour one day just to brainstorm topics? Experiment with different ways to search and browse the internet, like StumbleUpon or Google’s Wonder wheel, to generate ideas. If you’re worried about wasting too much time, set a timer to buzz when your hour is up and see how many ideas you can come up with in that time.

I keep a list in Word with a variety of possible topics, so when I sit down to write I can just pick one and start writing. Some of these are from brainstorming sessions, and others are just new ideas that came to me when I was out and about or surfing the internet.

3.   I've got more important things to do

All the other excuses we make are probably based on this one. If you’re not convinced that writing regular blog posts, articles or website content is important, then it’s unlikely you’ll ever make it a priority. Perhaps write yourself a list to stick on your pin board to remind you why you need to do this. If you don’t know why, then perhaps you need to find out more about it. Once you realise the benefits of content marketing and blogging, there should be no stopping you!

You know you need to get an article written this week as well as a blog post, not to mention remembering to update your Facebook page and do some tweeting, but just thinking about getting it all done (again) makes you want to run away screaming. Before you do that, try some of these tips for being more efficient in your content and social media marketing.

Firstly, keep a list of potential article and blog ideas handy. Whenever a topic occurs to you, or you receive an interesting email or link worth discussing, make a note of it. That way, when you sit down to write you can just pick up one of the ideas and get going right away, rather than wasting half of your time trying to think of something to write about.

I’d also recommend writing several blog posts or articles in a row. Getting started writing is often the hardest part, but once you’re on a roll it’s easier to keep going. Don’t just publish them all at once though. If your software permits you can add the articles or blogs all at once, but schedule them to go out at regular intervals; otherwise just keep them typed up ready to add when they’re due.

You can apply the same principles to your social media updates. Provided the subjects aren’t time sensitive you can keep a list of ideas and links to share when you have time. Also make use of services like ping.fm that allow you to send the same update to several different places, so for example you can post to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn simultaneously.

Doing things in ‘chunks’ does make you a lot more efficient. If you schedule separate time for research, time for writing and time for actually adding the content, you’ll find you spend a lot less time on it than if you start from scratch for each post.

Every business with an online presence wants more traffic and sales, and it’s worth investing in professional internet marketing as it will usually provide a good ROI. However whether your budget is a little tight or you just want to do everything you possibly can to increase your rankings, here are three  inexpensive ways to promote your website.

1.    Social media marketing

Social media marketing is all about building relationships with your potential and existing customers. Find out more about Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc and get stuck in. The more you interact with people on these sites the more likely they are to trust you and take a look at what you have to offer. Just make sure you understand the difference between engaging with people and shameless promotion, or you may make more enemies than friends.

2.    Article marketing

This involves writing articles relevant to your industry and website and submitting them to online publishers and directories. Although you shouldn’t be promoting your business or products in the article, most allow you to add a link to your website in the author resource box that appears at the end of your article when it is published. By writing articles you are establishing yourself as an expert in the field and thereby encouraging readers to visit your website to see what else you have to say. Your website may also benefit from the links that point back to it.

3.    Blogging

Blogging is similar to social media marketing, except that it is more about building relationships with your existing visitors and customers, and is usually done on your website, rather than on external social media sites. The same rules apply though, in that you shouldn’t use your blog to constantly push your products; rather offer the readers valuable or interesting information and they will naturally want to find out more about you and your business. The benefits are also similar to social media marketing, in that you build trust with readers and encourage them to return to your blog on a regular basis. Blogs can also be very beneficial in helping your website’s search engine popularity.

We are constantly hearing how important content is to improve your search engine rankings, whether it’s content on our website or content for articles to publish elsewhere, but just adding content for the sake of it isn’t going to do as much good. It needs to be relevant.

Some people think that if they write articles or blog posts about a really hot topic and then link it to their website that they’ll attract a lot more visitors. This may be true, and it can be very effective, but only if the page is somehow related to the topic discussed. Otherwise visitors may well click on the link only to be disappointed at what they find or irritated that they’ve been ‘tricked’ into visiting that page, and this will ultimately backfire.

If you try this, not only will that person never want to visit your website ever again, but the high bounce rate (people clicking away from a website as soon as they’ve arrived) may adversely affect the way the search engines view your site.

Another problem with adding articles or pages about any- and everything to your website, is that ultimately, you want the search engines to consider your site as important with regards to your niche. When they analyse the pages on your site, they are trying to find out what your website is all about. If you’ve diluted it with a lot of irrelevant content they are much less likely to rank you highly for the keywords people would be using to find what you’re offering.

So do your keyword research and get busy writing that content, but keep it relevant.

Sometimes it’s easy to get so caught up in the details of optimising your website and articles that you forget to focus on the content itself. Of course it’s important to make your website pages and your articles as search engine friendly as possible, but sometimes it’s possible to over analyse to the point where it’s unproductive.

Staying on top of SEO trends can be a full time job in itself, so for someone who is just trying to do some of the basics for themselves it can seem overwhelming. When you try to apply everything you hear and read, checking every detail with every tool available, there’s a chance you will spend far more time on a project than is worthwhile. Sometimes it’s best to just keep it simple, or outsource it to someone with more experience.

Writing articles is a good example. We all know that keyword research is important, and that the article should make good use of the chosen keyword without overdoing it. However, there are too many articles written that are so caught up in adding exactly the right number of keywords at exactly the right places that they end up being unreadable. Often the keywords are forced in where they don’t belong, or in a strange word order, and the article’s quality suffers as a result.

It can also make adding web content and doing article marketing seem like such an onerous task that you end up dreading it and constantly putting it off. It’s far better to regularly add several decent articles or pages that are not perfectly optimised than to write only one perfectly optimised article in a blue moon.

At the end of the day, adding relevant content to your website and getting decent articles published offsite will help the search engines to take you more seriously whether they are perfectly optimised or not. Content is king, so don’t allow the paralysis of analysis to stop you from getting on with creating as much of it as you can.

When writing articles as part of your internet marketing strategy, you need to consider not only making them enjoyable to read, but also ensuring that they are acceptable to the article directories and ezines you submit them to. There are few things as frustrating as spending time researching and writing an article only to have it rejected when you try to submit it.

Different directories and ezines have different rules, so it’s advisable to read their guidelines before writing and submitting your articles. However here are some general tips to help you make your articles more readable as well as more likely to be accepted:

Spelling and grammar – This sounds obvious, but it’s amazing how many articles are clearly not proof read before they’re submitted. It’s unlikely that poor spelling or grammar will get your article rejected altogether, but it will certainly put off readers.

Short paragraphs – Huge blocks of text are very difficult to read, especially on a computer screen, so always try to break your articles up into shorter paragraphs to make it easier for readers to scan. This is something that some article directories will pick up on too.  Adding bullets and subheadings also helps, though not all sites will allow these, so do check.

Enticing title – Let’s face it, unless the title of your article sounds interesting, no one’s even going to bother to read it. Your title should either demonstrate that your article will solve a problem for or help the reader, or be intriguing enough to pique their curiosity. Some article directories only like titles that have each word capitalised, so whatever your views on this it’s best to go along with their requirements.

Category relevance – When choosing a category to submit your article to, choose one that is relevant  to the topic you’ve written about. This will stop you frustrating readers, and it will also mean that your article is more likely to be picked up by publishers serving an industry related to your website, which in turn generates a better back link as far as the search engines are concerned.

Although quantity is very important in article marketing, try not to let it affect the quality. Providing well written, interesting articles will always bring the best results.