Aaron Hoos

One of my favorite methods of marketing (for my business and for many of my clients’ businesses) is article marketing. Here’s a checklist to make them more effective for your business.

Articles give you backlinks, they help you to rank for keywords, and you appear more often in search results. I also like article marketing because good articles can effectively draw people into your sales funnel. Creating good articles requires good planning. It’s not as easy as sitting down to jam out words.

Here’s an article marketing checklist to help you create great articles over and over. Just make sure you’re covering all the points listed below for each article, and they’ll keep sending you quality traffic.

• Research requirements and restrictions of the article site – Each article site has its own publishing parameters — requirements and restrictions that its article-providers must adhere to. For example, some sites will only allow a certain number of in-article links to your site. Other sites have minimum and maximum word counts. Take note of what the requirements and restrictions are. Don’t forget to also take note of the publishing timelines. Some sites will publish your articles right away, others will keep you waiting for weeks.
• Describe the purpose of the article – At the top of the document where you’ll write the article, write down the purpose of your article. For example: “Generate more Leads” or “To generate lots of backlinks” or “To publish something I can later point for my portfolio”. Even though you’re writing it here, it won’t show up in your article. But it’s nice to have it in your face the whole time you’re writing.
• Describe your audience – You may already know your audience (of course), but writing out a sentence or two about them is truly helpful here. More importantly, write something related to how they will come to this article. Where will they have found it? What will they typically be looking for when they read the article? What questions will they have? What doubts will they have? What hot buttons will they respond to?
• Describe the role of the article in your sales funnel – Every piece of marketing you do plays into your sales funnel. Briefly describe what stage this article will be for, what step it is accomplishing in the stage, and what action you want your sales funnel contact to do as a result of the article.
• Create an outline – Jot down the basic 2-5 points you want to cover. (Since most articles are about 400 to 650 words, you probably won’t be able to cover more than 5 points, and you probably shouldn’t try to cover fewer than 2 points). This is the skeleton of your article and you’ll build in it shortly. But first, you should put it aside and spend time on a few other things before you write…
• List keywords to be embedded in article – List the keywords you want to use. If I have a specific group of keywords or number of keywords I want to use in each section of my article, I’ll put them right into my outline.
• List keywords to accompany article – Some sites give you a place to list several keywords to accompany your article.
• Create article meta-data – This is a catch-all term for things like tags, categories, topics, and any other fields the site might provide.
• Write the author Bio (in text and html) – Write your bio. Keep it short (and be sure to adhere to the article publishing site parameters). Write both the text and html version of your bio.
• Add sub-points – Earlier, you wrote out the skeleton of your article and then put it aside to do some other steps. Now, pick it up again and add sub-points to each point in your outline. These subpoints should cover the basic “movement” of the point from start to finish. Think of them as just a couple of words that summarize a paragraph.
• Rearrange (if necessary) – In my experience, there is a very strong likelihood that you’ll need to rearrange some of your points or subpoints here. But skip this step if everything feels like it’s in the right place.
• Write the article!!! – It’s FINALLY time to write your article! Write a paragraph around each sub-point. (That’s just a good rule of thumb, although you might find that you need to write a couple of paragraphs for one sub-point while one paragraph will suffice for a couple of sub-points).
• Plus the article – To “plus” something means to make it better. This is the fun part! Take a break then come back to the article and look for a place to really wow your audience. Add something special. Create new insight. Draw deeper conclusions. Move your audience to a frothy state.
• Fact-check – Review your work to make sure that all of the ideas are your own or are appropriately attributed. If you state a fact, double-check it to make sure you’re correct.
• Review for flow – Look over your article for the basic flow of ideas. Is it smooth? Does each idea move clearly into the next idea?
• Review for the sales funnel, audience, and purpose – Earlier, you listed how this article functions in your sales funnel, who your audience is, and what the purpose of this article is. Now it’s time to re-read your article to make sure that you still cover these things.
• Add introduction and conclusion – Now that you’ve created a great article that does exactly what it is supposed to do, you can add an introduction and conclusion. Make sure they are similar (for a sense of completeness), make sure the introduction draws your reader in, and make sure the conclusion offers a clear next-step for them to take.
• Edit – Edit, edit, edit. Your content doesn’t have to be letter perfect every time (mine certainly isn’t) but the less control you have over editing it later, the more you should edit it now. Edit for grammar, spelling, and style.
• Write an article synopsis (if necessary) – Finally, add an article synopsis if the article publishing site calls for it. (Some do, some don’t).

You’re looking at this list and thinking that it is a huge checklist!

It is. However, you’ll find that going through each of these steps when you write an article might slow down your article writing slightly, but you’ll produce very high-quality content that will add people to your sales funnel for a long time to come.

In the past decade (plus a little bit), the internet has created a universe of opportunity for new and old businesses to become marketing machines. This has been good… but it has also been bad.

In pre-internet days, businesses would think up some marketing ideas, have them created by professionals, and rely on more traditional methodologies to get the word out: Flyers were mailed; coupons were handed out; advertisements were published. These efforts were expensive, time consuming, and usually required the skills of an outside expert (to design and/or to publish).

Now, anyone can start a business and any business owner can drive traffic to their site using a variety of web-based marketing activities (like blogging or article-writing) and techniques (like SEO). They can do it themselves quickly and affordably.

This is advantageous — because it blows the doors wide open for anyone to become an entrepreneur — it has also had some nasty repercussions:

PROBLEM 1: MAKING IT UP ON VOLUME
Do-it-yourself marketing has led to entrepreneurs trading quality for quantity and spamming search engines and inboxes and Twitter streams with volumes of content. Even businesses that market legitimately (that is, they don’t spam. Rather, they create quality content that adds value for the reader) need to achieve a certain quantity of marketing to get the job done.

PROBLEM 2: MARKETING THAT DOESN’T KEEP UP WITH THE EVOLUTION OF BUSINESS
On top of volume is another reality that people don’t realize: Businesses change and markets change but content posted online can outlive those changes. So if you create a series of articles and point those articles to a page on your site, then take that page down, those articles no longer provide the benefit they once offered. (I’m definitely guilty of this one!)

PROBLEM 3: NEW OPPORTUNITIES ARRIVING DAILY
There’s a third factor in this new reality of “DIY marketing”. New marketing techniques crop up almost daily. When I started writing (nearly two decades ago) the internet wasn’t on my radar. It wasn’t on very many people’s radar at all! Then, over the years, the web arrived and along came new ideas about how to market your business: Websites then ebooks then blogs then articles… Heck, just a few years ago, no one had heard of Twitter. Now it is THE darling of social media. It seems like a new way of marketing your business is arriving daily.

THE RESULT?
You can probably imagine what happens when you combine these three things together: A “requirement” of quantity + an ever-changing business environment + a constant flood of new marketing opportunities = An over-abundance of marketing is published and it is helpful for a brief season, but then it ceases to be helpful.

What is needed is sales funnel strategy to solve the problem: Businesses need to take one more step before they start flooding the web with marketing. (Or, if they have already started, they need to pause and revisit their strategy). In doing so, businesses will find that they will spend less on marketing but quickly achieve a more profitable result.

Sales funnel strategy will reduce the need for a volume of work and will actually make a lesser quantity of marketing content more effective. Sales funnel strategy will remain effective for longer than marketing that wasn’t applied to any sort of strategy, helping businesses stay competitive even though they are evolving. And, Sales funnel strategy will help businesses discern which marketing opportunities are right for them and which ones are unnecessary wastes of time.

TRENDING: SALES FUNNEL STRATEGY
Because of the economy being what it is (and what it was just a year or two ago), I think businesses are looking to cut back on expenses but increase the effectiveness of, well, everything they do. On top of that, I suspect that entrepreneurs are getting tired of having to race from one marketing technique to another just because everyone else is doing it. Entrepreneurs want to get back to basics and work on the parts of their business that can generate results.

So sales funnels and sales funnel strategy will increase in importance in the year(s) to come as businesses pull back from the frenetic pace that once was a DIY requirement.

No matter how good your business is, you’re bound to get some bad press at some point. It’s a part of business but wouldn’t be so bad… if it didn’t appear on the first page of a Google search result! Somehow, bad news or reviews seem magnetized to the very top of search results, and they remain stuck there as an obstacle to a fast-flowing sales funnel!

I’ve worked with several businesses and individuals who have bad press from their past lurking in Google search results, and we’ve rolled up our sleeves and dug in, trying to take back ownership of their reputation by taking back ownership of their top Google results. Here is the advice that I give them:

You essentially have 2 options:

• You can talk louder and more often than the bad news or reviews
• You can change the story completely

Both will take time and investment (sorry). I have seen both work and can’t say which one is better, although I suspect that the “better” one has to do with how quickly you need the content removed from search results about you and how flexible your prospects and customers are.

REPUTATION MANAGEMENT OPTION ONE: TALK LOUDER AND MORE OFTEN
If you have some annoying news or reviews that aren’t budging from your Google search results, you will need to get more aggressive by talking louder and more often.

Identify the keyword that is the problem. Is it your name or your business’ name? Be certain that it’s the keywords that people are actually Googling to get to you. (If your name is Bob Smith but you have earned bunch of bad reviews about “Robert Smith” that don’t even show up when someone searches for you, then forget about trying to manage it… it’s not disrupting your sales funnel unless your contacts find it in some other way). But if it’s your name (or business name) that is causing the problem, and bad news is showing up on that word when people Google you, here’s how to talk louder and more often:

Own the word: Make sure you own the domain name of that keyword. If you can think of a few different websites, consider buying related domain names. For example, I might own AaronHoos.com, AaronHoos-publishing.com, AaronHoos-writing.com, AaronHoos-speaking.com, AaronHoos-consulting.com, etc., or AaronHoos.net, AaronHoos.org, AaronHoos.info, etc. You can’t just copy and paste the content from one site to another and you should endeavor to keep each site fresh. At the very least, start with one site that is exclusively your name or your business’ name, if at all possible.

Start a blog: Start a blog with that name in the URL. Blogger and Posterous are my favorites but there are several others. If you can manage content across all of them, then start a blog at several of them. (Make it easy on yourself by assigning a function to each blog. Maybe one blog is just a quick blog about books you’re reading and every blog post features another book. Maybe another blog is for casual posts about what’s going on in your life, and it’s tied to Flickr and Last.fm and Foursquare. Maybe another blog is your professional blog. Maybe another blog is where you post your favorite videos. Again, make sure your name is in the URLs: aaronhoos.blogspot.com and aaronhoos.posterous.com, for example.

Get social: Open a Twitter account. Use your name as the Twitter ID. Create a personal Facebook page and a business Facebook page. Change the URLs to your name. Create a LinkedIn profile and business profile (if applicable) and change the URLs to your name. Create a Foursquare page. Find other social media relevant to your niche and do the same. Get active on those sites… and own your name at each site AND make sure your privacy settings allow for being crawled by search engines and published to the web.

Post content at offsite content channels: Find 5 or more article publishing or distribution sites and get actively writing and publishing articles there. Use a combination of article distribution sites (ArticlesBase.com, Isnare.com, EzineArticles.com, etc.) and article publishing sites (Squidoo.com, HubPages.com, Suite101.com, Technorati.com, etc.)

Post news: Find an online news site that caters to your niche market and report the news in your industry or niche category.

Make your own news: Write a report – just something smallish like a 5-page PDF – and then write a series of press releases. Publish them at press release sites (and consider spending the $300+/- for a press release at PRWeb.com). Host the PDF on your site (where search engines can crawl it) but submit it to PDF search engines and ebook sites. (Scribd.com is my favorite).

Create profiles: There are several sites that allow you to create and/or manage a professional profile about yourself. They have various functions but include some of the following: GoogleProfiles, Twellow, PeoplePond, DandyID, just to name a few.

Post your resume: Create an online resume at resume sites. Depending on your industry, there might be industry-relevant sites that allow you to create a portfolio page. For a broad range of services, Guru and Elance are good examples.

And remember, the key here is to always use your name or business name (whatever the critical keyword is whose reputation you’re trying to “clean up” in Google) prominently – in the URL, the page title, subtitles, and content.

Once you’ve done all (or a majority) of these, you need to manage them: Cross link them, push RSS feeds from one to another, refresh your content, and add new content. Obviously it’s too much for anyone to do in a day or even a week, but it is manageable if you plan to write a blog every day, an article every week, a series of website refreshes every two weeks, and an update your profiles every month. Not everything has to change all the time but a good cross section of it should be refreshed regularly so that there is always something new being posted somewhere. In my opinion, there is no such thing as too much. If you can produce content – a lot of content – and that content is high quality and consistent, you will eventually claw back your reputation.

REPUTATION MANAGEMENT OPTION TWO: CHANGE THE STORY
If the above list of opportunities is too much time or effort, or if you have to move quickly and aren’t afraid of shedding a few of your prospects or clients along the way, simply change the story. Find a new, related keyword that you can use and start marketing with that one aggressively.

If you are Bob Smith and there is some bad press out there, start marketing yourself as Rob Smith, for example. If you don’t have a name you can shorten (like Aaron), switch to your initials or even a pen name or professional name. Lots of people use pen names or professional names, and not just for reputation management. If you are “Fast Web Designs,” change your name to something else and aim for another related keyword… “Quick Website Builders”.

SUMMARY AND ADDITIONAL RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT TIPS
The internet gives entrepreneurs an advantage and a disadvantage: The advantage is rapid deployment of marketing to quickly build and fill sales funnels with contacts. The disadvantage is rapid spread of news and reviews (which tends to more likely to be bad than good). Like any other asset, your online reputation needs to be monitored and managed carefully. And if you ever find bad news and reviews creeping onto the search results for your business, you can talk louder and more often or you can change the story.