To understand the importance of article marketing strategies in computer language, take a look at a mighty oak tree. Or rather, take a look at the roots of the tree. The older and stronger the tree is, the further spread out the roots will be. To stand firm and not get blown over in the marketing world, you have to employ strategies to spread the roots of your business far and wide.

Putting articles up in directories is always a great idea and helps your business gain exposure and for you to get branded as an expert in your niche. However, you don’t ever want to put all of your articles in one directory basket so to speak.

Because if something happens to that directory, say for whatever reason it shuts down, then all of your hard work would go right down the drain along with it. So what you want to do is to make sure you use sites that aren’t part of a directory.

Some of the sites out there, such as Squidoo, let you post as many articles on a particular topic as you’d like to post. You can employ article marketing strategies by posting to a lot of different lenses talking about your product and best of all, you can create a relationship between yourself and the reader. You can harness the power of social media and watch your conversion rate rise simply because of word of mouth.

Readers love to interact with Squidoo writers in their guestbooks. You can also put affiliate links in the lens as well as have the buttons so that readers can follow you on Facebook or you can set up a button so that they can share your information with others. Visitors who feel like your content was helpful or that they enjoyed it can tweet about it on their Twitter account.

Hub Pages is another place you can put articles on that directly impacts your business. These articles are listed on pages (called Hubs) and the more interesting and relevant the article, the higher the readers will help it get via rankings. Since Hub Pages rank high in Google, just by having your information on the pages, your business will benefit from the added traffic.

Google Knol is another way to effectively employ article marketing strategies. You can write articles – even numerous ones on the same topic – and post them in your account there.

Google Knol is a handy tool to use to get a greater web presence. Knol features the highest rated articles, new articles, the ones that are being talked about the most and they even feature the top authors on the home page. There’s a lot of power available to you for free that can greatly impact your business. All you have to do is harness that power.

Post from: Internet Marketing Blog

Article Marketing Strategies

Twitter rose from the lowly ranks of new microblogging social networking sites swiftly. Some say an entire Presidential campaign was won partially off the viral nature of this site – but regardless of whether or not you believe that, there’s no denying it can be a very powerful method of reaching a large audience.

The problem to date has been to determine just how to single out the right people to communicate with. With the implementation of robots to add friends or auto-follow people, you never knew if those who reciprocated your follow were even interested in your products or services that you market online.

In 2009, Internet marketers learned how to get traffic to their domains, blog, Squidoo lenses and forums simply by devising a potent Tweet and sending it out to the web-o-sphere.

They learned how to personalize their Twitter profile page, including product images, tag lines, and hyperlinks to important sites. Some lucky users were grandfathered with the ability to have an animated avatar (which catches many eyes) before Twitter nixed it to the masses.

Just before the end of the year, the site created a Beta test version of list options, that supposedly wasn’t available to everyone using the site. With lists, you’re able to take the people who you’re following and categorize them, allowing you to read the Tweets of one particular group at a time rather than wade through hundreds or thousands of Tweets that might just be a courtesy follow instead of a true interest.

Biz Stone, the founder of Twitter, is going to help marketers out by allowing you to open a business account for the year 2010. It will be a paid version of the site, but you’ll get perks such as analytic tools to help you focus your message more precisely.

You can’t blame Twitter. It must be horrible to have developed such a powerful social networking site that’s become a household name and still not be profitable. That’s the primary goal of Twitter in 2010 – to make acquisitions of developments that help them make revenue for the site. As marketers, we’ll be paying the bill for things we use, but hopefully well be reaping the rewards and our ROI (return on investment) will make it well worth it.

Another 2010 forecast is that your Tweets will soon be indexed in real time on both Google and Bing. As any marketer can tell you, this is wonderful for those who are marketing trend products and services and want to defeat their competition using effective keyword-laced Tweets that result in decent conversions.

Post from: Internet Marketing Blog

Twitter Traffic 2010

Keywords used to be used for one major purpose – to stuff a web page so full that Google and other search engines considered them the most relevant to a particular topic. We’ve come a long way, baby!

Keyword research is going to change dramatically in 2010 in a way that will help marketers capitalize on trends more than they have been. To date, most keyword research tools have been a bit lagging in results.

But now, developers are coming out with real time trend data for keywords. Google Trends, for example, is updated daily. And now you can access Hot Topics and get an hourly snapshot of what topics are most being investigated by the public.

You can periodically log into these free tools to see what topics or content is relevant or can be connected to your own niche site. Then create an AdWords campaign or blog about it or Tweet something to get that current flood of traffic diverted to your own website.

I predict that you’re going to find more free keyword tools that are almost as competitive as the paid versions. Developers will make their money elsewhere with the tool. For instance, Wordstream just launched two free keyword research tools (Keyword Niche Finder and Keyword Grouper) that search for, build and clean your lists for you.

In 2010, Google and other search engines will be looking for ways to counter keyword spam. They’re going to have future functions that weed out spammers and try to connect searchers to relevant content they really want.

Keywords will also be delivered via Google using the Real Time Search function, which will run side by side with the older results and will include information from social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. Somehow I have a feeling spammers will find a way to capitalize on that, too.

You’ll be using your keywords and phrases – dominating with long-tail phrases as usual – in more places online in 2010. Aside from using them on web pages, in AdWords campaigns, and on typical social networking sites like Squidoo, you’ll also consider using them more in video marketing (which many marketers fail to do) and on mobile advertising networks, which are on the rise.

Whatever methods you use, you’ll want to make sure you continually build your keyword list, clean it for duplicates and irrelevant phrases, and then put them to use for you instead of letting them sit on your hard drive.

Post from: Internet Marketing Blog

Keyword Research 2010

I have been expecting this for quite a while as squidoo has been consistently losing authority with google and it was only a matter of time.

Look at it from Seth Godins point of view. His brainchild ruled the world then along came hubpages. For a time they still ruled the roost but then hubpages decided to make spammer sacrifices to apease the angry God google and low and behold, they completely hammered Squidoo in google.

Just try to find high ranking sub pages in squidoo like tag pages they have been disappearing at a colossal rate.

I for one am overjoyed these changes are coming and lets face it they are overdue. Will this affect you? Probably….Possibly.

As i said I am overjoyed but it still measn I am going to have to start checking my 300+ lenses to make sure they are more “squidoo 2009″ friendly. Time to remove the overstuffed links to the same domain for one! That said they say you can have 9 outbound links so unless you have a colossus type lens you should be ok

The one issue I would have is when they talk about overly promotional lenses and yet they continue to find more and more ways to stuff as many ads as they can onto “OUR” lenses!

Anyway if for some reason you have not seen the email here it is.

1. No Spam. This one’s not new, but it’s worth saying again.

It’s simple: given our pedigree, our point of view and our dyed-in-the-wool, we-will-never-change-our-mind conviction on this issue, spam is not okay at Squidoo. For a few years now we have had a very strict and enforced stance against spam. That’s staying the same, and if anything, getting even more rigorous. If you actively spam people with your Squidoo lenses (by email, in blog comments, by stalking and harassing people on Twitter, by tricking people with the content in your lenses, and more) we’ll lock your entire account.
2. No more X-rated or Porn lenses

If you came to Squidoo to create X-rated or pornographic content, the time has come to say farewell. We’re not discontinuing these lenses because we’ve suddenly grown shy, or because we no longer believe in the freedom to publish what you want. We do. Practically though, supporting X-rated pages no longer makes sense, and it invites more spam and empty traffic and wasted overhead than anything. Find out more about why we’re making this very hard decision, and what it means for your X-rated lenses. (Don’t panic! You can export your content and take it with you).
3. No Junk Topics from our “SquidDon’t” List

Lenses on free movie downloads. Toenail fungus cures. LoseBellyFatNow promotions. Reverse Phone Lookup 4U. You know junk when you see it. And lots more examples.

Unforunately, topics like these are overwhelmingly conditioned and proven to attract spammers. If a topic has displayed enough trickery and spam and bad activity, we choose not to support it. If we find a lens on a SquidDon’t topic or something very similar to it, we’ll lock it. For good. Our best recommendation: Don’t bother with topics like these. There’s plenty of incredible stuff to write about and recommend online without having to go near the edges of what we’re got going here.
4. A new limit on overly promotional lenses

Making a lens to promote or recommend something is a terrific endeavor. It’s a big part of why a lot of our people are here. But: Less is more! Sales lenses far too often turn into junk lenses, as described by the relentless number of outbound links to the same exact domain. Being overly promotional rarely works. “Buy here buy here buy here!” never does.

So to help you focus your lenses, and sell even better–and to help surfers find our pages more useful overall–we’re introducing a limit to the number of outbound links to the same domain that you can have on a lens. If you have more than 9 links to the SAME domain on a single lens, your lens will get locked for review. Of course we’ll have domains that are whitelisted out of this (meaning, you can have as many outbound links to them as you like), as well as sites that are blacklisted (meaning, even a single link to that domain will get your lens locked).

Please read all the important details on how this works.
What now? First, take a deep breath.

We won’t be flipping the switch on these new policies until July 20, 2009 or later. So you’ve got more than a month to review your lenses to make sure they’re playing by the rules.

In the meantime, here are 4 things you can do to get ready for these changes.

http://www.squidoo.com/squidoo-policy-update#module37726512

Thanks, guys.

Thanks for reading this far. And thanks for caring about the quality, community and infinite possibility that is Squidoo.

Live long and prosper.

–The SquidTeam
Squidoo.com
***

P.S. Every Squidoo lensmaster is getting a note just like this. We rarely send huge updates like this because we know you’re busy. If you’d rather not get email from us ever again, you can login and delete your Squidoo account under ‘Account Status’. No hard feelings. No tears. Well, maybe a little.

I actually think this is only the beginning, call it a sacrificial lamb, before they sacrifice the entire sheep pop of Australia!

Post from: Internet Marketing Blog

Squidoo Deathray Is Coming, Be Afraid….. Be Very Afraid!