- How Do You Know What Topics Strike A Nerve With Your Target Market?
A key aspect of article marketing is providing valuable educational content for your target market, but how do you know what sorts of information your target customers are looking for?
Of course we always write on the topic of our websites, but beyond that, where can we get specific ideas for articles?
The crazy thing is that we (the experts) oftentimes are so waist deep in our field that we overlook the most obvious questions and topics.
As business owners who are marketing focused, sometimes our brains are not completely customer-centric when we're deciding what to write about.
That is just human nature–in order to get a read on questions that are circling through our customers' brains, we need to venture beyond ourselves and our expertise and journey into the turf of our customers.
But where do you find that turf, and how can we get into the minds of our customers?
Please check out these 5 main areas where you can get a read on your target customers so that you can then produce content that will satisfy their needs:
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Author: Steve Shaw
Date Posted: December 1st, 2008
Tags: article distribution service, article marketing, free reprint article, writing
Categories: Creativity, Writing, Article Marketing, HowTo
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- What Harry Potter Taught Me About Writing An Article Series…
Every once in a while when you're doing article marketing you may feel extra inspired and get it into your head that you'd like to do an article series.
What's an article series?
An article series is a group of articles on a related specific theme. All the articles in the grouping compliment each other, but each article can also stand alone and make complete sense if viewed by itself.
If you're doing an article series, the natural inclination is to break it into parts, indicating Part 1, Part 2, etc in the title, but as I told you previously, breaking your articles into "parts" is a definite no-no 
.
Remember, when you're doing article marketing, it's not a given that a publisher will pick up every single one of your articles, so you have to make each article be able to stand on it's own.
Having your articles listed as Part 1, Part 2, etc, decreases the chances of your article getting picked up for publication, and it also may decrease the likelihood of someone reading one of your parts that they find separate from the others.
It's sort of like going to the movies–if you see a movie that says "Part 4", and you haven't even seen movies 1-3, chances are you'll want to watch the original movie before watching any of the sequels. This is just human nature–if there is an obvious sequence in place, we like to do things in order.
So if readers find your Part 7 article all by its lonesome self, and they haven't read parts 1-6, they may pass on Part 7 thinking that they will be coming into the middle of the movie and won't understand.
Also, what if an ezine editor liked your Part 7 and wanted to show just that articles to her subscribers?
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Author: Steve Shaw
Date Posted: August 27th, 2008
Tags: article marketing, free reprint article, submit article, submit articles
Categories: Creativity, Writing, Article Marketing, HowTo, Marketing Your Articles
Comments: 11 Comments
- Run Out Of Stuff To Say: How To Sabotage Your Article Marketing #9
This is Part 9 in the 10 part series How To Sabotage Your Article Marketing…And What To Do About It!
You may have been running strong with your first few articles, coming up with ideas for your articles pretty easily, but I think pretty much everyone at some point runs into a writing inspiration brick wall that has us saying:
"Um, I think I've written about everything I can possibly write about in my niche."
And this is when an author does one of the following:
a) Gives up
b) Starts writing off topic articles (and we know that that is a no-no!)
c) Finds a way to tap into a limitless supply of article ideas
Let's choose option "c", shall we?
Yes, our imaginations run thin every now and then, and no, it isn't easy to come up with article ideas sometimes, but I promise you–no matter what the topic of your website, you can always generate new and interesting ideas for articles IF you follow these guidelines…
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Author: Steve Shaw
Date Posted: August 22nd, 2008
Tags: article distribution service, article marketing, free reprint article, free reprint articles, HowTo, SEO, submit article, submit articles, unique article, writing
Categories: Creativity, Writing, Article Marketing, HowTo, Productivity for Writers
Comments: 13 Comments
- The Super-Duper, Ultimate, Explicitly Spelled-Out Guide for How to Submit Your First Article
This post is for all the new members on SubmitYOURArticle.com–I just wanted to say "Welcome!" and to also give you a little tutorial on how to submit your first article.
Now, it's not hard at all (don't worry!), and there are instructions inside the site for getting around, but I know that some folks (myself included!) just find it easier to understand things if they can read a tutorial about how things are done.
Let's go through this step-by-step:
Just so you know, by the time you are ready to submit your first article, you should have already logged in and entered your account details (name, website URL, and such) and entered your logins for the article directories listed at Account Manager => Article Directories. So, do those two things first before doing the steps below.
But after that, what's next?
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Author: Steve Shaw
Date Posted: June 6th, 2008
Tags: article submission service, free reprint article, submit article, submit your article
Categories: Writing, Article Marketing, HowTo, SubmitYourArticle.com Info
Comments: 1 Comment
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