Expanding Your Customer Base – Anytime You Want

I got a handful of clients who still haven’t heard the good news yet. They technically do not need me. That’s right. That is a bold proclamation to make but it’s very true.

Anytime they want to get a few more clicks coming to their web site all they need to do is write more articles. Course, they cannot go out and plagiarize from other sites and blogs and call this material their own. They will have to sit down at some point and figure out what it is that they want from their businesses and from their customers. The interesting thing is that a lot of business owners are not willing to do that.

Worse, many business owners are looking to dump that onto someone else. In worst cases they are willing to put this monumental task on the guy who “designed” their web site. This means the same person who subjectively moved pretty pictures and colors around to please you will also be the same person who will take a stab at getting you the right written image. This is a very risky position to put yourself in especially if this person you picked is not a writer by trade. Winging it can often bring the worst results.

Taking Responsibility

I am the kind of person who likes to take the bull by the horns and write my own material. I also do this for the courses I create and the lessons that I teach. I will write everything within my company from press releases to web copy and sales letters. This is where a lot of business owners are having a lot of problem with on the Internet. Words are your best weapon and your best ally to get you to where you want to go. You must be willing to write your own content for your site so you can help boost your rankings. Nothing does that better than writing articles and submitting them to proper distribution sources. This will allow you to have a real voice on the web and a real presence.

Your articles can get picked up and distributed across the web after they have been initially submitted to an article distribution network. That means other sites and blog owners can take your article and republish it which is a great way to get your name spread all over the web.

How successful is this? Keep in mind that I only wrote roughly 20 articles or so in the last 2 months. I consider this a lazy effort. From this amount of work submitted I have seen this number blossom into nearly 5,000 incoming links from other sites. That has been absolutely mind blowing. Consider for a moment that I did this just as an experiment. I had no real intention of getting any kind of response like this from the Internet but that is exactly what happened. I was overwhelmed.

I just came back from a seminar where I heard about this online marketer who doesn’t want to hear about the latest innovations on the web. For him all he needs is to write more articles. When his sales are down he writes. When he needs more prospects he writes. That’s all he does. Write.

This is a very powerful thing when you think about it. Just a few years back I was going to buy some expensive courses in publicity and figure out how to do all of this stuff myself. I must admit I was overwhelmed with the costs associated with the fees of hiring good PR people. The courses on how to do it yourself were expensive to boot. I could see there would be no easy way out of this. Then something happened with this whole Web 2.0. explosion. Articles were being published and syndicated at a record rate and the web was being filled with searchable content.

Does Article Writing Replace Good Ol’ Fashion PR?

Don’t get me wrong I still think you need a fair mix of all the ingredients to be successful. I am still considering buying some coaching material from Paul Hartunian, the master of publicity, after I just seen him speak from the Dan Kennedy Super Conference in Nashville, TN. I like the whole idea of being able to create content for areas of your business where you want to be most understood. It’s a powerful position to put yourself in.

A lot of brick and mortar companies and businesses have a challenging time keeping up with all this innovation. They get overwhelmed and in many cases do not carry through with getting articles written and submitted about themselves. This can hurt you in the long run.

1. Your competition will figure out how to do it and beat you to it…..

2. Google will end up ranking your competitors online. This means when someone does a search for your services most likely your competitors will pop up in your place!

3. You hand over that position of authority over to someone else.

This is your chance to get out there and show the world what you got. This is also a great thing to do for a search engine optimization standpoint as it will boost your Google rankings. Your company will pop up near the top of the Google search engine results with the more articles you submit. It’s a good idea to get these out there and get yourself visible.

A good rule of thumb I always use is to write about things I am most asked about. People call me on the phone looking to squeeze information out of me about my company. I am notoriously known for hating to talk on the phone for any length of time. So I try to answer questions that I am most commonly asked. Then I post these on my web sites and blogs and submit them into article submission sites.

Ultimately this positions me as an authority on the subjects I write about. This also makes me look pretty good in the eyes of Google and other search engines. Remember that as an online marketer you have to be more than just pictures and prices. People jump online to get information so it’s a good idea to give it them!