All to often I am talking with small business owners and entrepreneurs that know they need to start leveraging the power of email marketing, but find it to be a daunting task. Many times they already have a large database of contacts in their favorite CRM database and don’t want the hassle of having to import their contacts into a separate database just for the email marketing campaigns.

Well a great solution that I have used and find to be a very powerful and useful tool for managing my email marketing campaigns is Swiftpage. The really unique thing about Swiftpage is that it works with many of the more popular CRM tools allowing you the ability to manage your email marketing right from the comfort of your favorite contact manager. For those of you using Mircrosoft Outlook or ACT you will find it a snap to use.

In short, SwiftPage is a revolutionary email marketing service that allows anyone from a small business owner to an fortune 500 sales, marketing team to work more effectively.

SwiftPage integrates right into ACT! by Sage, Sage CRM, SalesLogix, or Microsoft Outlook so you do not need to import or export your list to the SwiftPage system each time. Send from 1 to 100,000 emails without using your ISP or tying up your own network through SwiftPage’s powerful and reliable servers.

With Swiftpage Email Marketing solutions you can view immediate results with graphical and detailed Open-Click reporting. They also include reports for unopened, opted-out, unsent, duplicate emails.

If you want to get real creative, create a SwiftPage Call List by bringing your open, click and score data back into each contact’s history within ACT! or SalesLogix. Based on a recipient’s level of interest, the most active person is at the top of the list allowing sales to click down through the list, access all of the contact data as necessary allowing increased efficiency and closing rate.

Swiftpage also provides an integrated survey feature with enhanced branding that allows users to create and edit surveys that match your marketing material, include custom HTML backgrounds and your choice of fonts and colors. SalesLogix users can bring survey data into the SalesLogix database for individual contacts and view the survey answers as a whole.

Worried about staying compliant with all of the SPAM regulations that exist. No worries: Swiftpage takes care of the heavy lifting so that you stay compliant with the CAN-SPAM laws and automatic suppression of email addresses that have opted-out (account wide).

What’s the point of spending a lot of time with your email marketing if you can’t brand yourself and/or your company. With the Swiftpage Email Templates being pre-populated into each account you can find a template that is right for you. Already have your own HTML emails, import your own HTML emails then make use of the Mail Merge fields to personalize, share your templates with other users in the account.

For those that have a sales/marketing team that may be using Swiftpage the account reporting compares open and click data across marketing and sales (all users) to give an overall view of a campaign ROI.

Revolutionize Your Marketing Efforts with Swiftpage. Swiftpage’s email marketing solutions give you and your team the tools to create, send and track email blasts to your contacts directly from your CRM database.

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Owning your own business, marketing that business and most importantly attaining that holy grail of success can be a very intimidating road to travel. If you have owned your own business for any length of time and actually worked that business you understand exactly what I mean by that statement. Those fears, challenges and the anxieties that accompany you on that journey are all part of a process called learning.

For me, there have been a number of those hurdles that pushed me outside of my comfort zone, but in looking back I am very thankful that I pushed through that phase to be in a position to reap the benefits. Article Marketing was one of those areas that while very intimidating when I started out, now almost seems to be second nature. With that said, I am not claiming to be a great writer by anyone’s imagination, but I do find it much easier to put my thoughts and words to print.

Call me an optimist, but I am a firm believer that anyone with the determination can become a writer. As with anything in life, there will always be people with varying levels of expertise, so I am not claiming that everyone has the ability to become a famous writer. Personally, I have no desire to achieve that kind of fame through my writings, but my goals are to put words to my areas of expertise in an attempt to help others. In the process I also create a lot of traffic to my website, add a critical component to my overall marketing, grow my network marketing business and I would like to think that I am able to help others along the way.

Some of the challenges that I faced when starting out with my article marketing where:

-          What do I write about?

-          How do I structure my articles?

-          Now that I’m done, where do I put them?

-          Soon afterwards I started wondering how to speed up the process.

If you have started a network marketing business, an online business or as a conventional business of some type you already know all of the questions that people are asking. Now, you may be wondering how I can make that statement. That is easy because at some point in time you were probably asking the same questions. Think about the challenges that you have faced in building your network marketing business. Everyone at some point in time that finds themselves in your shoes have asked those very questions.

When writing, you must put your thoughts to words that speak directly to the hearts and minds of your target audience. If you are writing for promotional purposes, you need to answer the questions that your prospects are asking, at least to the point that they have the desire to purchase your products and/or services. When you understand the needs of your target market, begin to address those needs and help to lift that burden from their shoulders you will begin to see real growth in your business.

While I have answered a few of the above questions in previous articles (Article Marketing for Success, Article Marketing for Success – Part 2), one of my biggest challenges was going faster. While I started finding the process of writing my articles to be going better and better, the act of having to publish those articles was tiresome.  Being a bit of a speed freak, this area of my life was no different. I wanted to go faster.

Before I get to the going faster part, remember if you are on the wrong road going faster, that simply means that you have found yourself lost faster than others may have. Make sure that when you are going faster, you are on the right road, going in the right direction with a clear understanding of the ultimate destination. For me I wanted to publish my articles on sites that would get the most exposure, drive the most traffic to my sites and ultimately get picked up by other article directories without my having to publish them myself. While I have covered that in the past I felt that it was important to at least mention that fact.

By far one of the best tools that I have put in my tool box was a neat little application that has thousands of article directories listed and allows me to publish my articles to as many of them as I would like. Please do NOT think that you need to publish your articles to thousands of article directories. Most importantly that would be a huge waste of your time and secondly you would not get nearly enough benefits from all of the work that you put in. You should always measure the return on the work that you put into any given task. If the return is not sufficient to warrant the work you must either become more proficient at the task or drop it in favor of something more beneficial.

After looking at a number of different tools for the purpose of easing the task of publishing my articles I found that one tool in particular work better than anything else that I had found. Again I use that tool to publish to a select few articles directories that bring me the most bang for my time, but the time savings was important to me. I quickly tired of going to directory after directory to publish my articles. Given the ability to open one application and automate that process such that everything was in one place was a huge relief. Now I am able to write an article and have that article published on a multitude of sites in less time that I used to be able to write an article. That is the kind of progress that I strive for and I am sure you would enjoy yourself.

Remember, that while it may be a little intimidating when you first implement article marketing into your marketing plan, stick with it because it is by far one of the best ways to generate traffic, and sales in your business. Once you have decided what to write, the best place to publish that article and you want to speed up the process of publishing I would highly recommend using Article Submitter Pro.

Now that we have covered the basics of creating your articles, you may be asking: Now What?

The reason I am very confident of the above statement is that I remember asking that very question. What I discovered is that there are a number of different approaches that you can take and as you can imagine there are pros and cons to each of these.

You can pay to have your articles published to 100s even 1000s of article directories, you can publish you articles to any number of article directories you wish, but most importantly you need to get your articles on the Internet where they can be found.

While publishing them to 100s or even 1000s may sound like a great idea, in truth you will get the maximum benefit by finding the top ranked article directories and publishing your articles to those directories. There are a couple of things that you will want to look at when looking for the top ranked article directories as a new home for your articles.

The two most important factors to consider are:

1)      The amount of traffic an article directory receives

2)      The page rank assigned to an article directory by that all important search engine Google

Great, now how do we determine these things? Well as luck would have it I will list the top twenty sites below based on both traffic and Google page ranking. As with everything on the Internet things change and in many cases change very rapidly. Needless to say 6 months from now this list may look very different for any number of reasons. With that in mind the website Alexa is a great place to check from time to time to see how your favorite article directories are ranking.

While we know about these two all important factors I will include a few more details that you may be interested in. Website traffic is obvious when looking at your article directories. Publishing your articles to a website that has no or limited visitors will get you minimal to no results. On the opposite end of that scale sites with the largest amounts of traffic will get you the maximum benefit. Pretty straight-forward, right?

As for the Google page ranking, you want websites that have high Google page rankings linked back to your site to help boost your placement in the search engine. Typically, I try to get as many sites that have a page ranking of 5 or better to link back to my website, but there are a lot of great quality sites with page ranks of 3 or 4.

Alexa               Google
Rank    URL                              Rating              Page Rank
1.         ezinearticles.com        224                6
2.         ArticlesBase.com        1,100            5
3.         buzzle.com                  2,218               6
4.         pubs.acs.org/hotartcl  7,538        7
5.         searchwarp.com         7,579            4
6.         goarticles.com            16,491           6
7.         articlealley.com          17,021         5
8.         articledashboard.com 21,055       6
9.         articlesnatch.com       23,860         2
10.       ideamarketers.com     24,158        3
11.       webpronews.com        26,955         6
12.       amazines.com             30,044          3
13.       isnare.com                  30,549           4
14.       upublish.info               32,125           4
15.       articlegarden.com       32,529        4
16.       365articles.com          34,692         0
17.       articlemaniac.com      36,539         4
18.       articlesfactory.com     37,000       5
19.       article-buzz.com         37,057         3
20.       articlecodex.com        37,223         3

Now that you know how to get your articles written and where to publish them add article marketing to your overall marketing plan and start publishing those articles several times per week. Ideally you will want to publish at least five articles per week, but if you find this to be a bit daunting start with one or two per week. Once you find that it is not nearly has challenging as you may have first thought you will be publishing 5 or more articles per week in no time.

If you don’t know you will soon discover that article marketing is one of the most effective strategies for driving traffic to your website and growing your business. While a very true statement, you must also know that article marketing does not produce results over night. Unlike other strategies that you can see results in a matter of hours or days, article marketing takes more time to generate results. And by more time, I mean weeks of time to begin seeing results and months of time to really begin to see the full benefits.

The above reasons combined with the dreaded thought of having to write an article keep many people from ever adopting one of the most effective and prosperous methods of marketing that they could use. Additionally, if you happen to be building your business on a budget, this is another great strategy. The good news is that writing articles and getting them on the web to begin working for you to build your business is not nearly as difficult as you may believe.

Before we dive right in to the details of building your article, you will also want to note that since this is a long term solution to your marketing needs, the more articles the better. This does not mean that you have to write them all today, but you need to create a constant stream of articles.

Ready? Then let’s get started helping you build your business. First and foremost there are ideas for articles everywhere that you look. You must simply open your mind to the possibilities that you may get an idea for a new article from the most unlikely places. Here are a few of the areas that I get ideas from on a daily basis:

-          Talking with other business associates about challenges that they are having in building their businesses.

-          Reading books, articles, blogs, etc, etc as part of your daily reading and personal development.

-          Listening to podcasts, webinars or other audio training materials.

-          Everywhere, unless you live under a rock you are exposed to new ideas daily.

The good news is that as you start this process it may seem a little overwhelming, but it is much easier than you would expect. The better news is that as you begin to make a habit of this you will soon learn to recognize ideas for new articles at such a pace that there is no way you could possible write articles for all of your ideas. That brings me to my next point.

Write them down! I don’t care how great your memory may be. Take the time to write down your new ideas. If you happen to be in a location where you don’t have anything to write on, most phones these days allow you to create messages. While that is great for a temporary solution, get yourself a notebook of some kind or create a file on your computer to keep a list of ideas that you eventually want to write an article about.

While you can literally write about anything under the sun, you will want to write articles that are rich in content, keywords and are applicable to your goals. Regardless of your business (Network Marketing, Internet based business, Traditional Business w/ website, etc) you and your business can profit from you learning this very valuable, effective and profitable skill.

Now that you have your ideas what is next. If you have a lot of experience and/or knowledge in the area related to your topic of discussion, you are in great shape. If you are like most people you may need to do a little research to fill in some of the details that you want to cover in your article. While you don’t have to be a complete expert in a particular subject, I do highly recommend that you complete the required research to be factual and very accurate in your writings. The last thing that you want to do is get yourself branded as being a person that writes erroneous articles filled with inaccuracies.

While I hate to bring up the subject, as I was the worst at reports, writing any article is not a far stretch from what you may have done when writing any term paper or book report in school.  Simply do your research to get the facts and details that you need and then begin your article putting things into your own words and from your perspective.

With your ideas, the content needed to fill out any details in your article it is now time to start working on putting this all together. The basics still apply. You will want to have the following parts to your article:

-          Introduction – a very short simple description of what you plan to cover in your article. Typically a paragraph or two at most.

-          Body – the largest part of your article, the body contains all of the details required to provide a complete, comprehensive article. In many cases you can use numbered lists, bullet points, etc, to simplify your article.

-          Conclusion – a recap of the main ideas and any important details required to help your reader get the most out of your article.

Remember you are not trying to write a book, so you will only need between 500 and 1000 words to provide a great article. More than this and you may lose your readers interest.

From Network Marketing to Traditional Businesses you can benefit from Article Marketing. Look for ideas everywhere because they are all around you. The key things that you need to keep in mind are:

-          Look for ideas everywhere

-          Write them down…keep a list

-          Do your research, but put your own spin on it. Let your personality come through in your writing

-          Pick a target number of articles to write each week and stick to your goals

-          Remember, the introduction, the body and then bring it to a close.

Good luck and happy writing. You have a lot to offer and articles are a great way to establish yourself as an expert, leader and someone that can help others in your industry.

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