Software I’m using to help me create articles.

When I first started Internet marketing I looked at the variety of methods I could use to get my name out there and drive traffic to my sites.

The problem with Internet marketing is that, for the inexperienced, traffic isn’t easy to come by, and without traffic we can never hope to build a business.

Despite what some would have us believe, generating traffic is not easy for the inexperienced just entering Internet marketing.

There are many methods of generating traffic to our sites, and common sense says they should all work, – although some better than others -

But, they will all rely on TWO things –

PERSEVERANCE and CONSISTENCY!

We can learn to write better, we can improve our effectiveness when it comes to our “Google Adwords” campaigns, but in the early days PERSEVERENCE and CONSISTENCY are what count.

No method will work straight off the bat, which means we all have to put in the time to develop our skills!

One of my preferred methods of driving traffic to my sites is article writing. I write an article and then submit it to various article directories. Once they approve it, they will publish it online for others to read. Although few of these directories will allow hyperlinks to be placed within the body of the copy, we can usually link back to our site from the resource box below the article.

When I write articles I always use several tools to help me.

None of the tools I use will write the article for me, but they can make the process a lot faster and more efficient.

I use “Instant Article Wizard” to help me with basic article research and recently I’ve started using “Mass Article Creator” and “Mass Article Submitter”

One of my favorite software authors Jon Leger created “Instant Article Wizard”. I use “IAW” for all of my research and then my basic article writing. “IAW” works by taking a group of keywords that I provide and then sources subtopics around those keywords, from there it’s relatively easy to create a coherent and knowledgeable article about virtually any subject even if I know little about it initially.

All the text I select from the mountains of information “IAW” provides, I then copy across to my word processor where I make the final edits to my articles. “IAW” saves me a great deal of time and frustration when gathering subject material for my articles whether I then go on to use them on my blog or publish them in article directories. The one thing I must emphasize is that “IAW” will do most of the work for me, but when it comes to the finished article, I still spend time tweaking it, I wouldn’t consider publishing it “as is” because the software isn’t really designed to give me the highest quality I expect, but that is my own personal preference. Others use the software, apparently with great success whilst doing a lot less editing (horses for courses I guess).

A couple of years ago a succession of programs came onto the market claiming to produce any number of articles out of the one I’d written.
In effect I’d create a single article, feed it into an article spinner and the program would spit out 10,20 even 30 articles.

I bought several of these article “spinner” programs but they never lived up to my expectations. They all suffered from the same weaknesses in that they were all blunt instruments, and any documents they put together needed a lot of editing otherwise they read as though they were put together by a computer program (which to some extent they were).

For the last few weeks I’ve been trying a new program called “Mass Article Control” which again is a “spinner” type program but with this one I have a lot more control over the output and it also “learns” as I use the software. “MAC” has a built in thesaurus that improves and gets ever larger with my usage. “MAC” allows me use specific keywords that are explicit to the particular niche I’m writing the article for. “MAC” allows me to edit and replace single keywords or even entire keyword phrases.

I can put my original article into “MAC” and then (depending on the length of the article) I can reformat it into maybe 30 or more different articles all needing the minimum of editing at the end of the process. Again, I always read and final edit by hand, although many others don’t – but that’s just me!

This is saving me loads of time and increasing the number of articles I can submit. The software is also growing with me and my business because of the dynamic thesaurus it incorporates.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once famously said “Build a better mouse trap, and the world will beat a path to your door”.

Even in pre-Internet days that wasn’t true, it was only ever half the story. People need to know that we are where we are, and that we have what they want, otherwise we’ll never even contact those potentially adoring customers and clients.

Alas, many people adopted Emerson’s mindset in the early years of the Web when they thought that simply building a website would automatically give them an online presence whose very existence would increase their bottom line.

It came as a rude awakening to realize that all the money spent on designing, developing and hosting a website was for nothing without the required traffic.

A website is nothing more than a piece of “Virtual” real estate that exists only in the ethereal world of the web, and unlike it’s physical counterpart on the High Street, customers cannot simply wander past with cash or credit cards ready to buy from us.

In fact, we can have the best widget in the world, the one thing that will banish poverty, cure every disease known to mankind and shower us with the wealth we so richly deserve for developing this masterpiece, but if our customers can’t find us, we, in effect don’t exist.

The Web is a vast network that’s growing larger by the day. Even as I write this, tens of thousands of people worldwide are only now gaining access to the Internet for the first time.

If we don’t make serious efforts to attract people to our websites then our efforts to date are sadly going to be wasted.

Many inexperienced marketers are still trying to carve out a niche for themselves in cyberspace and yet are still unaware of the importance of directing traffic to their websites.

Traffic is the ‘lifeblood’ of every website and as an Internet business owner we need every visitor we can get.

There’s nothing mysterious about traffic, it’s nothing more than the stream of visitors to and from our websites. We can use a variety of methods to first inform and then attract these visitors to our sites and we’ll be focusing on some of these methods here.

All traffic is wonderful but “targeted traffic” is King and this is what we’ll be going into in depth.

Visit again soon and we’ll expand our knowledge and strengthen our skills in this fascinating area together.  Keith