Article direct marketing is a ‘new age’ invention. These articles written about the product are essential in bringing in the traffic to your website. Creating the articles involves a lot of research into the organization and the product or services. The articles are written such that they attract the readers with entertaining or informative content.

Article direct marketing needs your content to be out there where it can be seen. You can place your content in a lot of places but you have to choose carefully as to where you want it.

1. Putting your content on special directories is a great idea. Well known directories are a fabulous endorsement of your brand and being in the directory listing itself will boost traffic. Choose directories based on your organizations needs. Ensure that the directory visitors are part of your target client base.

2. Use blogs to put up articles on the internet. Blogspace is free and hence is a cheap alternative too. Blogs tend to be read by a lot of people and are a very interactive place too. Blogs will help you interact in a more casual manner with your clients.

3. Create a neat and attractive website for your article content. Ensure that your website is well linked such that many websites will direct visitors to your site. Your own web space will also improve the credibility of your brand.

Direct article marketing is a useful feature to the company. This method gives the company to express its opinion on issues thus showing its ability to understand the customers and their needs!

Fabian Tan is a well-known Internet Marketing expert and the author of the popular 45-page Report: “Murder Your Job: How To Build Cash Sucking Autopilot Businesses In 30 Days Or Less!”

I must admit to being amazed at the amount of people who sign up with more than one direct sales company. I personally do not believe it’s a good business choice. I’ll explain why.

What product do you market and to whom? I have found this question to come up often for those who represent more than one company. You meet Lisa at your child’s swim lesson. You and Lisa begin talking. She mentions wishing she had more time to spend outside of the home. You quickly tell her you sell Pampered Chef and explain how you are out of the home two nights a week holding parties. Lisa tells you that home parties were not what she had in mind when she mentioned being out of the home more. Do you now quickly add, “Oh wait a minute, I also sell Watkins, but I only sell it online?”

Another example, you win a free ad on a website. Do you promote Shaklee and their health and wellness products, or do you promote Usborne Books and their lineup of products? Do you want to promote yourself as the “book and vitamin lady/man”? What if you decide to promote Shaklee and then you later meet a member of that particular website/community who tells you that she just ordered books from the person who promotes their book business?

I’m an article writer. When I write about direct sales, all of my bios have a link back to my direct sales site. If you represent more than one company, which link do you use in your article bios?

The next challenge I have seen is duplication. Network marketing is about duplication. Companies provide every distributor with the same system, the same formula, the same training. Team leaders provide their entire downline with the same system, the same formula, the same training. I can’t say it enough, network marketing is about duplication. It is near impossible to tell your group that even though you represent two or three or maybe four different companies that they should only represent one.

The final challenge I see is building sales. You are only one person. If you can find fifty customers in one month, those fifty people are not going to spend money on each of your businesses. Instead they’ll split their money amongst the various companies you represent. This could hurt you in commissions, as you may never hit the highest commission payout in any one company.

If you want to join a company to get a discount on your own personal products, that’s great. However it is my recommendation that you only represent one company as a business.

Every website looks for visitors – more and more of it. Now, if you think that web marketers fight hard for more visitors only to improve their sales volume, you are making a great mistake. I agree that, for most of the commercial websites, the ultimate motto is earning more. But smart marketers do not overtly display this intention. And that’s where they are successful.

Why?

Let’s start from scratch for a better and smoother understanding of this praxis.

You need people to know about your products so that they can buy them and you can make profit. Is that all? Normally, in this situation, one visitor equals to one sale. And thus the effort you spend to get the one visitor equals to one sale too. If you need more sales, you need to spend more. I agree that, the existing consumer may talk about the greatness of your product in his or her own network. And thus you may expect more sales. Smart marketers normally spread the awareness virus in the target audience and wait for the word of mouth marketing do the job for them.

What do you normally do to get more targeted visitors? Either you directly spend on advertisement or you start getting links to improve search engine ranking of your website. Now, for every targeted links (with proper anchor text) you need to contact a webmaster. Thus, you get one link for each contact (however, in normal situation, even hundred cold calls may result into one targeted link). If you need more links, you need to contact more webmasters. Here smart marketers, do things differently. They work on core product development and go viral with their content. They inform more and more people about their website or service and than wait for them to link to his or her website.

However, you may argue that, these natural links are not good enough to improve your search engine ranking. To some extant, I agree with your point. At the same time, you also need lots of natural links to keep things natural. You need those links to keep things natural.

Thus smart marketers do not always directly work for more sales. On the contrary, they work hard to spread the information or the idea in the target market. And thus they not only improve direct sales, they also improve their search engine ranking to get more targeted and free visitors.

To add to this, they do not also need to spend huge amount to buy every target consumer.

So, what does smart marketers do to spread the idea virus?

1. Smart marketers mainly depend on core product development. They also spin some stories around that product so that target market can easily associate the product with their need.

2. They work hard on buzz marketing. They involve the authoritative bloggers and the business hubs to spread the buzz about their products around.

3. They work hard to get more visitors from targeted social networks.

To put it simply, they try to engage the target market rather than selling anything to them directly.

Getting results from a direct mail campaign can be pot luck but if it is done in the right way can be a real success. The key to developing successful direct mail campaigns is to test and one way of doing this is to use what is know as the three piece mailing.

When your direct mail out arrives with its recipient it may arrive at the same time that they require the products or services that you provide and they will get in touch with you straight away. However, in most cases this won’t happen straight away but you may have sparked an interest so you need to mail them repeatedly to encourage them to contact you.

A good way of testing if there is an interest there is to have a three piece mailing with each mailshot being slightly different to the last. If you send the same mail out every time it will probably just be disregarded so you can test the different mailings to see which brings in the best response.

As you are a plumber and the cold weather is on its way you could send a mailing to publicise the pipe insulation service you offer. The following is an idea of how your three piece mailing could work:-

1) Autumn is nearly over and the cold weather is on its way, avoid burst pipes this winter and have your pipes insulated.

2) Weather forecast predicts a cold snap just round the corner, get your pipes well insulated before it is too late!

3) “I knew I should have got that sorted” what your better half will say if you have a burst pipe this winter, call us now.

If you send a mail out such as this it will get people interested and even though the recipient may not require your services they will be likely to tell other people they know who may then give you a call.

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