Today's Articles

If you're wanting free ways to generate leads for your new complementary therapy business, particularly if it has an online shopping cart, the best way is Article Marketing because it's free and the traffic keeps coming, day after day, from one piece of work. So if you are looking for product launch ideas read on.

Article Marketing isn't an instant way to get started online, but it's a low-cost, risk-free tactic anyone can adopt. First let's compare it with some different ways to get online traffic. Let's take the example of promoting a new shopping cart.

The usual way of getting prospects to your new site, taught by other on-line marketing courses, is to contact other website owners asking for a link exchange. This can work, but it's a slow process and you need to take care who you target. For example, if I sell dog collars by mail order I may be happy to do a link swap with someone who runs dog training classes, but not someone who is promoting dog collars.

Another method is posting on forums in your subject area, with your website in your signature. Also effective, but time-consuming.

In theory a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign is easy to set up and you could see prospects the same day. In practice unless you're experienced at these campaigns, you can spend ages testing for the best settings and exhaust your budget without making a single sale. I did! And being cynical , I often wondered how many clicks were by my competitors, to waste my money!

Alternative online launch ideas include FFA (Free For All) sites and traffic exchanges where you view other people's sites, in return for them viewing yours. This strikes me as a waste of time. I want to sell, not buy, so why sit aimlessly, clicking on other people's websites so that they can sit bored stiff clicking on my web-page? They probably never even look at my site. With tabbed browsers the temptation is just to open the next tab to click on the one, never reading the adverts.

These strategies are time-consuming and ineffective for a serious product launch.

Offline marketing methods include networking to swap cards at business clubs. Time-consuming, costly and again in general, others are attending to sell, not to buy.

In contrast, article marketing targets people who have indicated that they are interested in the subject your website targets. Choose the correct keywords and visitors will be actively looking to buy, not sell.

The idea of article marketing is that you publish an article and submit it, with your website URL, to article directories from which publishers can download content for blogs etc so long as they publish your website details with your article. Then when interested parties read your article, they can click through to your website.

The article you have produced in an hour or so stays (theoretically) online forever and you have the potential to receive focused traffic from it in perpetuity.

For instance, I submitted an article in October 2005 and 4 years later it is still generating traffic, with no extra work, and had received 28,897 lifetime views, with 5,961 clicks through to my website. How much would that have cost in PPC? Another advantage is that the best article directories send you a report showing the keywords on which your article is being found.

In my opinion article marketing has so many advantages over alternative methods that I cannot think of any reason why it would not be one of your marketing strategies.

Much of my success with article marketing was learned through trial and error. With a little free, or low cost, training I would have seen rewards much earlier.