If you decide to market your website with a paid advertising campaign (such as pay-per-click), if you’ve done your keyword research well you should find your website’s traffic increasing. The longer you can afford a PPC campaign, the more traffic you’ll see. 

Yet if you have the time - or if you have more time than money - you may want to try article marketing.

 Article marketing is a marketing technique that sees you writing keyword-rich articles of about 400-600 words on different aspects of your niche. You then submit your articles to a few or several of the hundreds of free article directories that exist on the web. 

You don’t get paid for placing the article there, but neither are you charged. The directories exist so that ezine (online magazines) editors and publishers can pick up the article and use it in their publications. They are required to publish the article as it is - no changes - and that includes the “resource box” you will have put at the end of the article - a box that includes a link to your website. 

Several things can then happen (if you’re consistent in your efforts): 1) the more ezine publishers who publish your article, the more people will read the article and - if they’re interested or intrigued about what you’ve said - click on the url to your website for more information. 

2) The more likely result - and it’s really the better one - is that search engines will pick up the article from the directory and when folks do a keyword search, your article will show up in the results. And, once again, if your reader is intrigued enough by your article to want more information, he or she will likely click on the link in the resource box that leads to your website. 

Write dozens of articles, submit them to a few choice article directories and watch the number of your website visitors grow. 

Yuwanda Black, a free-lance writer, SEO content producer and writer/publisher of many ebooks, performed an article marketing experiment for one of her e-books. She submitted an article a day, five days a week for 30 days to six of the top article directories on the Web. Her e-book sales increased by 166 percent.

 Article marketing really does work.

As you build your opt in email marketing list via article marketing and pay-per-click, you may want to consider some other ways to get more people to your site so that they can “opt in” for your free newsletter, report or e-book. 

All of these cost you nothing but your time: 

Start a blog. Sprinkle your keywords through your posts - not too many that your posts read awkwardly, however. Give your readers good information and aim to post at minimum twice a week. Three times a week is better, five days a week is best. Allow comments and start dialogs with your readers. Be sure the link to your website is prominent. Even better, also offer your free report/newsletter on your blog. Your opt in email list will grow. 

Social networking online is another terrific way to get people interested in your offerings. Sign up for a Facebook, LinkedIn, or MySpace account. But if you do nothing else remember this, these sites are for socializing. Do not sell. I repeat: Do. Not. Sell. Be a friend. Offer advice. In fact, you could give away a ton of free advice. Such largesse will come back to you many times over. Give of yourself. Give a ton of yourself. You’ll get back tons in return. 

Visit the online forums that your customers frequent. Do you sell comic book storage units? Visit comic fan forums. 

Once there, remember, Do. Not. Sell. Post thoughtful and helpful posts. Offer information. Advice. Tell the time you had a challenge and overcame it. Most forums allow you to post a link to your website in your signature line. As you gain a reputation as trustworthy, forum members will start to click on your website’s link. Many of them easily could end up signing up for your free report. 

Finally, don’t forget your past customers. As you sell, you’ll undoubtedly learn of your customers’ e-mail addresses. Be sure to add them to your email list. 

Once again, I want to emphasize your need to allow your email marketing list members to “opt out” of your missives. Be sure you give the recipients of your email marketing campaign a simple way to let you know they no longer wish to receive your emails.

As you get ready to start an opt in email campaign, you’re probably wondering how you can go about getting the email addresses of potential customers, those folks to whom you will send your email marketing messages.

And that’s an excellent question.

The short answer is that you want to send email marketing messages only to those people who have “requested” them. Sending emails to people who have never contacted you, who don’t know you, who never asked for you to contact them, can easily move into  spam. And, as you know, sending spam is a huge no no. So I recommend you refrain from purchasing an email list.

But how do you get people to ask you to send them emails?

Short answer: offer them something in return for their email address. On your website, offer them a newsletter.. A free e-book. A short, free report. They’ll sign up for the freebie with their e-mail address.

And they’ve just “asked’ you to send them emails. This is called an “opt in.”

Yet, if you’re brand new to the Web; if your website has just been launched and no one knows you exist, how do get people to visit. No visitors, no opt-ins.

First, make sure your site has been keyword optimized, so that it may rank well when people do a search for the kind of service or product you sell.

Then, you can try one or more - or all - of several different ways to get traffic to your site.

You can start a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign with one or more search engines, such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN.com, etc. Potential customers will see your ad, click on it, arrive on your site and then, you hope, stick around, like what they read and ask for more information via your newsletter, free report, etc.

You also can write keyword-rich articles and submit them to article directories (ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com, and so on) and, at the bottom of your resource box, direct them to your website. If they like what they see when they get there you may pique their interest enough that they “opt-in” to receive your free report or newsletter.

As you start sending email marketing efforts to your email list, you’ll need to be sure they can “opt out” of receiving e-mails from you. At the bottom of each e-mail, you should have a link to a place where they “unsubscribe.”

What!? you may be asking? Marketing with e-mail? Isn’t that just, well, SPAM?

Not when you do it correctly; not when you do it professionally with e-mail marketing and design. For one thing, the correct and proper way to market via e-mail is to send your e-mail just to people who have requested it (more on that later).

E-mail marketing and design and the marketing campaign you’ll perform is less expensive than banner ads, pay-per-click and other SEO work.

 In addition, your e-mail will go just to people who have requested it - who have responded to a free-report you’ve offered on your site or an e-mail course, or some other freebie (such as a newsletter) you will send your visitors via e-mail. Once they’ve signed up, you have their e-mail address and your e-mail marketing and design campaign may begin.

As you e-mail additional marketing messages to your list members - as you execute your e-mail marketing and design campaign - there are a few things you’ll want to track:

1) Are all your e-mails getting to your readers, or are they bouncing back to you? This is called your “bounce rate,” and your messages may be coming back to you for any number of reasons: the address is no good, or the recipient’s mailbox is full.

2) Of the e-mails in your campaign that you know are arriving in the correct mail box, how many people are actually opening them? This “open rate” will help you decide which of your e-mail marketing and design messages are of more interest to your recipients than others. Which sales pitch is most successful; which offer is more intriguing? Your open rate will help you ascertain this and you can tweak your campaign accordingly.

3) Related to your open rate is your “click through rate.” That is, of the e-mails being read, how many result in people clicking on a link you have in your e-mail to your website? Again, studying which e-mails result in more people opening the message and then clicking through to your site will help you tweak your e-mail marketing and design for better results.

Remember, in e-mail marketing and design, as in any marketing campaign, you should embrace the data. Study which e-mails are opened and which result in the reader then clicking through to your site. Numbers are your friend; they will tell you what’s working for you and what is not.

Before I talk about why backlinks are important, let me explain what they are.

Backlinks are those links your site receives from other blogs or sites. For example this link to Marketing Technology from this blog is a backlink to the Marketing Technology site. This link to Google’s Adwords campaign information (pay-per-click services) is a backlink to that Google site.

As you noticed, these are links from this blog to those sites - one way links, if you will. There are no reciprocal links from those sites to this blog (well, at least from Google Adwords).

Backlinks are what you want because if a site sends a link to your site, that site is saying it believes you have something of value to give, that you have something important to say. That your site has value. Efficient link building services will help you create a site that earns backlinks from others.

Reciprocal linking, where I’ll link to your site if you link to mine, is fine. But search engines give gobs of love to backlinks. Again, if people are linking to your site or blog without you having links to their site, then Google and other search engines comes to believe that your site is more worthwhile than others.

But how do you get backlinks?

Well, frankly, good content will get you backlinks. Effecient link building services will provide well researched, thoughtful, informative content. Whether it be information on a certain topic, such as at a well-written personal finance blog, for example, or your site offers a service others have deemed trustworthy (such as Google’s Adwords campaign site, etc.), your site will be one that others feel is important enough that they will want to send their own readers there.

My point is, your site or blog gives good information, or it provides excellent service. Your visitors know you can be counted upon.

And solid content provided by efficient link building services brings you your visitors’ trust.

Another link strategy is to use anchor text linking. Anchor text are those words you choose to make a hyperlink to another site or a page within your own site. For example, as you look to begin a link-building campaign, you need to remember that backlinks are more important to your site than reciprocal links.

That link above is an example of an anchor text link. The text is “link-building campaign” and its hyperlink takes you to the page at Marketing Technology’s site that discusses link building. It’s best to hyperlink your anchor text with phrases that someone might search for with a search engine, and “link-building campaign” certainly applies.

If you’ve decided that your best bet for your SEO campaign management is to steer clear of pay-per-click advertising (which is probably best only if you have deep financial pockets), then organic search engine optimization is the campaign for you. 

In a nutshell, organic SEO campaign management is best when you have more time than money. A lot more time, because executing a proper organic SEO campaign can take several weeks or months until you’ll see results. 

In addition, if using organic SEO campaign management as your primary online marketing tool, you’ll find that you’re creating the “guts” of your site with SEO in mind because you should research the best keywords for your product/services and write the content of your site around those keywords. Having SEO content within your site will only strengthen your off-site SEO campaign management efforts, such as article marketing, resulting in even more visitors to your website.

What’s more, so long as you continue to research the best keywords for your target market and you update your website or write and submit new articles to free directories to reflect any changes you uncover, your website will continue to generate traffic - and it won’t cost you any more money.

Natural SEO campaign management via article distribution has another benefit - as you write articles and people find those articles when they search on the Internet and use your article in an electronic magazine (ezine) or site your article in their blog or even on their own website, you’ll generate what are called “backlinks.” to your site. Simply, backlinks are links “back” to your site from another site (this link, for example is a backlink to the Wikepedia.com definition of backlink).

If you have some money in your SEO campaign management budget, you may consider executing a short PPC campaign to get some traffic to your site quickly. You should keyword optimize your website before doing so, however, and you also should produce some organic SEO efforts so that as you taper off the PPC, your natural SEO work will begin to bring visitors to your website.

Setting up a pay per click (PPC) campaign for your business’ website is the way to go when:

a) you want visitors to your site fast 

b) and you establish a budget to run a good campaign

PPC works because, when done correctly, your ad will appear in the first one or two pages of a keyword search for your product or services. Internet searchers tend to limit their research to those first two pages of results and if you’re on those pages, you have a great chance of getting potential customers to your website.

You’ll also get this top position quickly - possibly as soon as you start your campaign with your pay per click company. Which means you could get visitors to your site that same day.

PPC can work especially well for a business in a niche market - perhaps a green cleaning service, seller of personal wedding handkerchiefs, an interior plantscaper - because you’ll be using highly targeted keywords and only those people who are looking specifically for what you offer will see your ad.

You can start and run a PPC campaign on your own, of course, yet because it’s important that you find the best targeted keywords for your ad’s campaign so that your ad will appear in the first couple of pages of search results, it’s probably best that you hire a qualified pay per click company. Otherwise you could deplete your PPC campaign budget without getting the results you desire. 

In fact, as you hire a pay per click company to manage your campaign, ask them to craft your campaign so that your ad appears between the third and eighth spots on a page. You’ll find that bidding on the first or second slots could grow exceptionally expensive quickly but that slots three to eight are much more affordable without negatively affecting your results.

As I’ve been writing about search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) marketing plans, you may be wondering, “Which is the best? What should I ask my search engine placement service to do?

The answer: It depends.

For example, while organic SEO (where you place optimized keywords in your website’s copy and/or write and distribute articles with keywords sprinkled throughout) costs nothing more than your time, it does take time to be effective - often up to three to six months if you submit features regularly to the free article distribution services.

But organic SEO will continue to work as a search engine placement service for you for months and years to come. The articles and content you write will bring visitors to your website continually. You did the work months or years ago, yet the search engines still will find your article or content when potential visitors perform a search.

PPC on the other hand, will get you visitors right away. If you have available funds for an online advertising budget - and the need for visitors right away, PPC may be the best bet for your search engine placement service.

But research your click “bids” carefully. Decide on your budget even more carefully. Monitor the clicks on your ad and the actual number of new clients or purchases that come as a result of those clicks ever more carefully. Go through with the proverbial fine-tooth comb the number of clicks versus the number of new customers. Are you getting your money’s worth? I mean, are you really getting a good return on your ROI? You very well could be, but follow the clicks and the budget.

Also, remember, once your PPC search engine placement service campaign is over, it’s over. Unless you have great optimized organic content within your site, your site will not come up high in search results.

So, to conclude, let’s compare the two different search engine placement service tools:

Organic SEO: free and long lasting, although it can take months to see results.

PPC: potentially instant results, but short-lived and could be very expensive.

Last week I wrote about pay-per-click (PPC) search engine marketing. This week I’m going to discuss SEO campaign management. 

SEO stands for search engine optimization and it’s a great way to put on an SEO campaign that won’t cost you a cent.

 That’s correct. Free.

 While it won’t cost you money, it will cost you your time because you will be writing search engine optimized articles and submitting them to free article directories. Write and submit five articles a week for three months to a handful of directories and you’ll find the hits to your website will grow exponentially. It’s called “article marketing” and it’s a great method of SEO campaign management.

Writing these articles is not hard. For example, let’s say you’re a personal injury lawyer in Baltimore. You’ve done some research and you discover that the keyword phrase “personal injury lawyer Maryland,” often is used by folks in your area searching for an attorney.

 What you will do is choose a topic about personal injury, perhaps “How to choose a Personal Injury Lawyer,” and you will write a 300-500 word article on that topic. In addition, you will need to sprinkle the search term mentioned above in that article. Try to use the exact phrase (although since “personal injury lawyer Maryland” reads awkwardly, it’s OK to use “personal injury lawyer in Maryland”) several times in your article.

Then submit your article to the article directories. (Do a search yourself for “article directory” to find some. Ezinearticles.com is the largest.) You’ll see that the free directories allow you to put together a “resource box.” In that box you’ll place a bit of information about yourself or your services as well as a link to a page within your website.

 How does this help you in your SEO campaign management? Several ways? Editors of online magazines often need free material to fill space. They use the articles at the directories for their publications. It’s free to use, but they must use your article exactly as written, including the resource box. In addition, articles in these directories get picked up by the search engines all the time. In fact, you should also search for directories in your profession that accept articles. Expertlaw.com, for example, accepts articles from attorneys.

Putting together an article marketing SEO campaign management program may not get you the website hits as quickly as a PPC campaign. But if time is no object, and money is, article marketing can be a great way to get visitors flocking to your website.

You’ve undoubtedly heard a little acronym bandied about - PPC, for “pay-per-click”. And you may be wondering if utilizing PPC management services to conduct a PPC campaign is the right thing to do for your business.

The answer? Perhaps.

First, a little explanation. The advertising tool known as pay-per-click is called that because each time someone clicks on one of the text ads on a search engine’s results page, the advertiser is charged for it. The person who clicks on the ad is sent to a page on your site of your choosing and the advertiser - you - pays for each click.

This can be very cost effective. Your ads are placed only on pages that come up in the search results depending on the keywords you choose. For example, if one of your keyword phrases is “beauty salon Baltimore,” your ad appears only when someone searches for that specific phrase. (Do you see the links on the right of that search page for “beauty salon Baltimore?” Those are PPC ads.) What’s more, if no one clicks on your ad, you’re not charged. PPC can give you a nice return on your investment because only those folks who are interested in your services will see your ad; you’re not wasting your PPC management services budget on people who have no interest in your offerings.

However, you should begin a PPC campaign only if you have a somewhat “endless” budget to pay for it. You’ll need to run your PPC campaign for several weeks, if not months. In addition, because once your daily PPC “budget” is spent, your ad no longer appears on the search results page.

As you think about starting a PPC campaign, consider where you’ll spend your budget. Google is the best-known seller of PPC (its PPC management service is called Google AdWords), but it’s also the most expensive. Yahoo! and MSN also offer campaigns. You can also look into PPC management services programs with other search engines.

There are other, less expensive, ways to market your website via search engine optimization. I’ll discuss a few of these in my next post.