PPC Vs Article Marketing: The Debate Rages

There are many ways to advertise online. However, the two “big guns” are to be PPC (pay per click) and article marketing. In fact, the battle for supremacy between these two methods has heated the Internet ether for some time now. PPC is “paid marketing” while article marketing is a form of natural search engine optimization – usually combined with other link-building activities. Is there a clear-cut winner here yet? Which one is better? Does one offer you better ROI than the other?

A quick glance through search results on the questions above will give you some rather conflicting information. It seems that some tout PPC as the single best way to go, while others side with article marketing and natural SEO as the most advantageous solution for everyone. To really get to the truth behind these disparities, you need to consider a few things, starting with the source of the information.

For instance, quite a bit of store is set by both the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) and ComScore. However, these two entities are not exactly what you would call objective – the sponsors of the various studies conducted by these companies influence the results to a tremendous degree. You can count on studies sponsored by PPC companies to be favorable to PPC, to the exclusion of all else.

To really get to the bottom of the situation, you need to consider several factors. Both article marketing and PPC work – there’s no question of that. However, determining which is best can be a bit difficult. Let’s dig a little deeper into the question.

In order to make an informed decision between article marketing and PPC, you need to understand the criteria on which such a decision should be made. There are three main factors here: click-through rates, cost-effectiveness and the conversion ratio offered by the marketing method.

When a consumer uses a search engine to query for information, products or services, they’re presented with ten search results immediately. There are fewer PPC listings than there are natural search results. This alone might be enough to keep that person from clicking on a PPC ad – if there are enough “real” results, then there’s no need to take a chance by clicking on an advertisement. However, for a website to rank high enough in search engine standings to be in the top 10 results for a specific keyword, the content of the site has to be relevant to the query. In addition, there has to be relevant internal HTML code, which takes knowledge and expertise to implement.

Natural search results are just that. They’re natural – there is no fee paid to be listed. PPC ads are the reverse. The company that has the highest bid will get top placement, whether their site is relevant to the consumer’s search or not. Article marketing ensures that the best (highest relevancy) website is provided for the customer.

The crux of this issue is that PPC ads may or may not be what consumers want to find. Increasingly, consumers are learning this, as well. It only takes a few instances for a searcher to stop clicking on PPC ads at all. Current research shows that customers are searching for natural results more frequently. You’ll even find that those who are heartily in favor of PPC admit that there is very little substance to them. They are short ads that use a few words to capture the searcher’s attention. Often, those words are misleading, dishonest or downright false. When a user clicks the ad, they’re taken to a sales page, which can immediately offend people, particularly those looking for real, viable information so they can make up their own minds.

Article marketing, on the other hand, is not a short-form method of marketing. In fact, it is an ideal way to present real information for consumers, so that they can make an informed decision regarding their needs. It’s not necessarily about selling, but about informing and teaching. Article marketing gives consumers a full article chock-full of data, details and vital points. PPC ads don’t say much of anything. While someone in a hurry might click on a PPC ad simply to save time (and often find they’re actually wasting time), those who really want to make a good decision will always go with natural search results over advertisements.

Things You Need To Know About Article Marketing

Article marketing is a unique way to gain new customers for a business. Many people think article marketing is hard for businesses to use, but it is pretty simple if you have the right information to help you. The tips in the following article will give you all the information needed about using article marketing.

Start a blog on your company website. This blog can and should contain useful information for people who would need your products or services. If the information you give is thought out and informative, they will come back to your site again and again to see what else you have written.

Keep your content up to date. If readers come across an older article and realize it is dated, they will leave immediately. You should try to keep your articles recent, which can simply be done by adding links to updated articles. Take advantage of the “Most Recent” or “Most Popular” features on your site. This way, even old content will generate money for you.

Know your fee rates. Companies who work with affiliates charge different rates, sometimes even depending on the type of marketing you plan to do for them. Check out these fees, and make sure to pay attention to any fees that may be hidden “start-up” fees in the contract. Don’t pay for something if you don’t know what it is.

With there being so many different people on-line, you want to make sure that your advertisements are being viewed by the correct target audience. If your company sells women’s purses, it would not be very beneficial or profitable to market your product on a men’s health site. Being aware of your target audience could mean the difference between steady sales and slow business.

Use of good grammar and a large variety of words can enhance ones articles that they produce for marketing. The use of grammar in the right manner can greatly improve the appeal of one’s articles. By monitoring what one writes they can improve the quality of an article greatly.

When you are writing the articles themselves you must forget about your article marketing strategy. Forget where the article will be submitted. Forget about the new readers you are hoping to attract. Forget about keywords. When you are writing, do nothing but write. You will have plenty of time after the article is done to tweak it and strategize. While you are writing focus on nothing but your new content.

A great tip to use if you’re writing a lot of content is to write it all first and walk away, instead of writing and editing as you go along. Write your content, let it hang around for a day or two without viewing it, and then go back with fresh eyes to carefully edit it. This way, you’re not likely to miss the obvious mistakes.

As stated before in the introduction to this article, article marketing is a unique way to gain new customers. Article marketing is not hard for any business to use as long as they have the right information. By using the tips from the article above, you can implement article marketing into your business model.

Article Marketing – What Should You Know About Article Marketing?

Article marketing is one of the best marketing methods of driving traffic to your website. But do you write articles to market your business? Do you know the secrets of writing successful articles? One thing I discovered is that most prominent and well established online marketers use articles to market their websites and to promote their products. This is the reason why I would like to share with you the hidden information about article marketing.

Of what benefit is article marketing to you as an online marketer? There are basically two benefits: sustainability and getting free targeted traffic. When you write your articles and submit them to ezine publishers, they continuously bring to your website a steady stream of visitors for many years to come and at no extra cost. You receive free targeted traffic because you don’t directly pay for it apart from the initial charge paid to article submission service providers for distributing your articles. The benefit of having targeted traffic is that you do not labor to persuade an already attracted customer and whose interest has been aroused through your article marketing techniques.

Success in article marketing requires you to submit quality articles. Quality articles are those that contain and provide to your readers good information. These are articles that are very well written, which add value to the internet fraternity. When you write quality articles, you stand high chances of building positive perceptions in the minds of your readers, which in turn helps you to build your own credibility. When you become credible enough, you obviously begin to make money through the increased sales of your products. The quality of your articles will determine your success in article marketing campaigns.

Additionally, success in article marketing also depends greatly on the quantity of the articles you submit for distribution. You do not have to write so many articles in a very short time, expecting to get quick returns. That’s not how it works. I have come across many marketers, who circulate the internet with over 400 articles in a span of only one year. It’s being overambitious. Two or three articles a week are good enough to work for you profitably. Remember that while quantity matters a lot, it should not be overemphasized at the expense of the quality of your articles. Quantity should not supersede quality if your aim is to successfully promote your business through article marketing.

It’s important to brand yourself well by having your own writing style. Most people who promote their website and products through article marketing do not write their own articles. In fact it’s difficult for most marketers to write their own articles. They instead prefer to source them from outside. But whichever the case, I would advise you to go through those articles and edit a few things to make them compatible with your style. The uniqueness of your style is part of your brand and can bring you good results in article marketing.

How authentic are your articles? If you really want to benefit from article marketing, then the content of each article you publish should be original. Search engines are most of the time scrawling the internet in search of new unique content. Even your readers will return to your website if you provide them with new original content. Remember that your articles’ originality and uniqueness are two important article marketing factors that can lead you to prosperity.

Keyword optimization is an important factor in article marketing. Keywords are words or a set of words that best describe what your visitors will look for. They are words, which your targeted audience type in at search engines like Google to receive the information they are looking for. If your article does not rank among the first 10 to 20 results when doing a keyword search, then your targeted audience won’t be able to read your articles. The onus is on you to learn how to optimize the keywords in the articles you write in order to get free traffic from the search engines and to succeed with your article marketing method as well.

Persistence is another key factor in article marketing. I have come across article marketers, who write so many articles at the start and go in recess only to wake up again after one year. That’s not good and does not help you to build your business. Success is not only achieved through quality and quantity, but it’s also achieved through persistence and continuity. Consistently write your articles, basing on your plan, to continue attracting your targeted audience to your website and to retain your existing customers.

Article Marketing and the Advantages

Article marketing is a type of advertising in which businesses write short articles related to their respective industry. This form of marketing has been used by professionals for nearly as long as mass print has been available. Article marketing truly is a zero investment method that can be mastered to bring you wealth beyond your imagination.

Some of the common benefits of article marketing are: increased web traffic, increased online promotion, link popularity, better search engine optimization, strong brand awareness, generate more leads, more sales, and more sales means more profit.

But most people who attempt article marketing are unable to Rinse-and-Repeat, primarily because they do not understand this form of marketing well enough in the first place. Is it possible that the people claiming the premature death of article marketing are the people who have failed with it?

The advantages that you will see from this form of marketing are not only in terms of the amount of links that are pointed at your site as the articles are distributed, but that with every article submission, you are getting your name and your company’s name in front of potential clients. One of my most effective techniques for this form of marketing is placing your targeted keyword phrase in the title, usually at the beginning. The benefits of this form of marketing are renowned, while the results are tabulated in dollars and good sense.

The main points to concentrate on in article writing is the structure of the article and grammar of the content. Even internet marketers who consider themselves successful and are already knowledgeable about this form of marketing are finding that they are learning new techniques to make their article marketing efforts even more profitable.

Writing articles, and promoting them for publication, is one of the most productive long-term promotional tactics available. Writing reviews, recommendations, or simply listing something as a resource to members of your list will easily result in another passive stream of income in your business.

Writing articles and article marketing are very popular online promotion tools. Writing an article is much easier when you break it down into parts. Writing the perfect article, however, won’t do you any good if you don’t know how to submit it effectively. Writing articles about new affiliate programs or brand new product releases is a great way to get listed fast within search engines because the competition is limited.

Before you go about writing the article, you’ll want to do some keyword research. Article marketing is the practice of posting keyword-focused articles on article sites that then syndicate your content.

If writing is not “your thing” or you don’t have the time to submit your articles to the many submission sites and directories available to you, then outsource this task because this form of marketing is too valuable and effective not to take advantage of it. Remember, the more articles you have, the more sites will pick them up and create a link to yours.

I also discovered that my competitors don’t complete the bio box (Resource Box) and call to action reviews to improve click through rates. If you want to really make your article sell then you’ve got to craft the perfect Resource Box. Here are the essential items that should be in your resource box. Your name is a must and you’d be amazed at how many people forget to include their name in the resource box. Your name and optional title should be the first things you put in your resource box.

Keep your resource box brief and to the point. Keep the size of your resource box so that it’s no larger than 15% of your total article size. Too often I see resource boxes that are 50% of the size of the total article and this is abusive.

The body of your article is where you “GIVE” and the resource box is where you get to “TAKE” for your gift of information. The resource box is the “currency of payment” you receive for giving away your article.

The bottom line is the benefits offered by this form of marketing are not what you usually get from other types of marketing methods. Usually the articles used for this form of marketing are not too long and the word count should be in the range of 300-700, best around 500.

Because your articles target a particular subject the prospective customers that result from this form of marketing are targeted customers.

The main hurdle most people face with this form of marketing is writing the articles. Let’s face it, not everyone can crank out 500-word articles on a daily or even weekly basis.

Article Marketing Strategies to Dominate Your Niche

If you have a limited amount of money to put into your network marketing business and you are looking for “1” strategy that can help you dominate your niche, then Article Marketing will serve you well. The strategies that I’m going to layout for you will allow you to use Article Marketing to Dominate Your Niche and will only require you to purchase “1” piece of software. This software is used by Elite Article Marketers and will allow you to compete with them when it comes to marketing your business opportunity. You can get a 90 Day Money Back Guarantee, but once you start using this software, you will not want to be without this valuable marketing resource.

Article Marketing Strategy Step 1: Get a Blog – If you don’t have your own blog I highly recommend that you starting your own WordPress Blog. Search engines like blogs because there is new content constantly being added and this will help you get higher search engine rankings. Your blog is going to be the central point for all your marketing efforts. When you write a new article you’re going to post it on your blog first and then make some minor changes and submit it to the article directories and link back to article on your blog. This will give you back-links from the article directories and also help your blog and the article get higher search engine rankings. Over time this will generate free traffic to your website.

Article Marketing Strategy Step 2: Ad Content to Your Blog – Now that you have your blog set up it’s now time to create the content articles to add to your blog. If you don’t have any ideas of what to write about, here are a few suggestions:

1. Interview a leader in your Network Marketing Company and post the interview
2. Write three to five success tips about how to be successful with you business opportunity
3. Write about new network marketing companies (you can do a search for NPROS and subscribe to their News Updates via email and get emailed about new network marketing companies and do a review of these new companies. Reviews of new companies get a lot of attention. My recommendation is to be positive and be honest in your review.
4. Write about leaders in other network marketing companies.
5. Write about Systems used by other network marketing companies.

You want to be focused in your articles and do not try to get ranked for too many keywords. An example would be this article that is focused on “Article Marketing Strategies to Dominate Your Niche”

Article Marketing Strategy Step 3: Submit Your Content to Article Directories – The software that I spoke about earlier is called Automatic Article Submitter and it is an awesome piece of software that allows you to automatically create and confirm your accounts to 100s of article directories; allows you to spin your article with a dictionary of 20K+ related words; conduct keyword analysis, and much more. If you were to do all of this yourself it would take you days or weeks just to set up your accounts with the article directories and you would still have to do all the other work that you can do with the push of a button with Automatic Article Submitter. Your article summary and author resource box will probably be the hardest things that you have to do inside the software and they are very easy to do if you have submitted an article to EzineArticles or one of the other article directories.

Article Marketing Strategy Step 4: Link to Your Blog from Article Directories – In your resource box inside your article in Automatic Article Submitter you have two chances to link back to your blog or another website or video you may make about your article. You do this by using anchor text which is the clickable text that takes you to a website or a YouTube video that you already have posted. This serves two purposes, one it gives you a link back to your blog from the article directory that it’s posted in and it gives you a link to a YouTube video (again this is only if you have a YouTube video that you made about the topic of your article, this is the link you want to encourage prospects to click on because it should have content that is different from the article and not the link going back to the article on your blog your blog). Once you have everything as you want it, now it’s time to create variations within your article using the submission software. You can create variations in your title, words, and whole sentences throughout your article. Once you have all the variations within your article, you are ready to submit it to the article directories. Make sure you become very familiar with the software so that you get the best use out of it.