Your article resource box will kill or lift your internet marketing

In my internet marketing articles I always spend the least time on the actual writing of the articles.

I will spend more time on the headline and the vast majority of the time I will usually spend on the resource box. I have tested a large amount of different resource boxes. At the end of this article I will show you my most effective resource box. The one that has been responsible for pulling in the highest amount of business for me.

The resource box is a key part of any internet marketing strategy that uses articles.

A brief word here on why headlines are so important, before we move on.

When you are surfing how do you make a decision on where to go next or on which article to click on? The headline of course. The simple truth is that even the best article in the world has a very slim chance of getting read if the headline is not attractive and enticing enough.

In internet marketing, after your reader has read the article, the most important thing is the resource box, because it suggests what he should do next. Many resource boxes ask people to visit web sites, but they do not give a reason why. Or a good enough reason. This is poor internet marketing.

“Visit our web site for more information,” is very weak.

Even the cocky attitude of simply writing the web site address and then hoping that your article was devastating enough to drive hoardes of traffic to your site, hardly works.

Visit our web site for free web site templates is better internet marketing and should be attractive to the target market such an article will be looking for.

The other thing your resource box should do is establish an image for your business. In internet marketing, you should know that people generally do not trust new businesses that they have just met online. So you need to say something in a few brief words that will instantly give you the right image in the eyes of your target market to give you a better chance of selling.

I started off my resource box writing that I had almost 20 years experience in marketing and creative writing. It was not effective internet marketing because I guessed that although the people reading my articles appreciated the tons of experience, they were more interested in how effective the whole thing was.

So when I changed the first line to read, “Christopher Kyalo has made money online by using articles as his only marketing weapon...” the response shot up almost instantly. I could almost read the minds of my readers saying to themselves, let’s see how he did it.

The second part of this article gives you my most effective and successful resource box ever. To date I have continued to test several, but I am yet to find a more effective one. I am still trying, that’s how internet marketing is supposed to be practised.

Part II
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Just to prove to you how important your resource box is in internet marketing, I will tell you a brief story of what happened to me.

After a while doing articles and posting them at various sites, I discovered a powerful internet marketing method of increasing the effectiveness of my articles. This is by setting up a blog and posting your articles there. Getting traffic going to a blog is relatively easy (read my internet marketing articles on this subject at my other blog; http://big-online-story.blogspot.com
for tips on how to do this.

There was plenty of evidence to prove that the move had multiplied the number of people reading my articles many times over. Still the response rate reduced drastically until it reached a stage where I could go for several weeks without getting any business as a result of my internet marketing articles.

By this time I already had my regular handful of clients who were putting the bacon on the table for me. But still it was a cause for great concern for me because I had learned the lesson over the years that a business that is not growing, is shrinking.

I soon found the culprit. It was my resource box.

I will now show you my most successful internet marketing resource box to date, as I promised. Here it is.

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Christopher Kyalo has made money online using free articles as his only marketing. Email him now at strongwallafrica at yahoo.com for a free powerful article on your business, no obligations. Or write for his free email course on how to use articles to drive lots of business and traffic to your site.
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100 per cent of my current regular clients came to me through this nugget of a resource box. I have tested dozens of other resource boxes, but to date non has come anywhere near this one in driving business my way.

Notice that the main aim is to get contact with the client. Some will write to get my web site or blog address because lots of folks are very hesitant to give out their email addresses these days. Still this gives me a chance to be in regular contact with the client without anybody ever accusing me of SPAMMING. A couple of people will write for the free service and I will have an excellent opportunity to prove myself.

Spend lots of time on your resource box, your internet marketing depends on it.

(You can read about how to use articles combined with your resource box to create very effective online marketing that will even help market any affiliate program without you having to spend any cash on ads. Find the article at this link:-

http://big-online-story.blogspot.com/2005/05/effective-affiliate-marketing-using.html

Some interesting content you will find at the blog; http://big-online-story.blogspot.com/

* A web traffic secret guaranteed to give you 16,807 visitors to your blog on a regular basis
* Write a single article and get loads of free traffic to your blog or web site
* How to make money from affiliate programs without spending a single dime on ads

Before you can effectively market your home business, you need to consider debt consolidation

Debt consolidation? Seems like a mighty strange title for an article in a blog about marketing a home business, does it not? But there is a simple explanation.

Over the years I have found that a sizeable percentage of the people attracted to my services of marketing with little or no ad budget, are mostly people with serious cash problems. Many of them are in debts and believe that if they can find an effective way to market their business and sell like crazy, they will pay off their debts and ease off the pressure that they are feeling. In other words they believe that marketing can be an effective debt management tool.

NO WAY. It can’t be done.

It is sometime very difficult for me to get the courage to tell them the truth in their faces, especially when I imagine how desperate they are. I was there myself so I fully understand.

There are several reasons why this thinking is not correct

1) Successful Marketing happens when somebody is relaxed

For you to be successful with your marketing, especially while using the methods in this blog, you will need to be totally relaxed. This is the only way you can be able to do the daily analysis of what you are doing and have the creative juices flowing to deal with the various inevitable obstacles until you have your cash machine up and running.

Believe me, I tried it myself, it cannot be done when you’re worrying where the rent will come from or if you will find your car still in the car park at the end of the day.

2) If you are in debt a debt management solution is the priority not marketing.
There was a time that billionaire publisher Rupert Murdoch was in a serious debt problem and for a moment it looked like his empire would come crumbling down. He got out of it by getting his loans rescheduled (very similar to debt consolidation). Still my point here is that Murdoch who is a marketing genius (love him or hate him) did not indulge in some marketing campaigns for some of his highest grossing newspapers or media houses. He dealt with his debt first. And so should you.

3) Debt is a bottomless pit which will swallow your marketing
Many people do not take debt management with the seriousness it deserves. The blunt truth is that debt is a bottomless pit that will easily swallow you and all your smart marketing. The solution to debt can never be marketing. It is debt management and debt consolidation is a good place to start.

Contrary to what many people think debt consolidation is not another loan.

Debt consolidation is a process in which debt is restructured into one low, manageable monthly payment. It also helps a person dramatically reduce what is owed and thus reduce the interest accruing.

Debt consolidation is trying to restore some breathing space to your life so that you can get something done.

Effective home business marketing using articles

Every day thousands of people join home business opportunities (many more than those that purchase diamond jewelry) and yet every day thousands more get discouraged and give up trying to make money from their Home businesses.

Still, thousands others make some serious money from their very successful home based businesses. I make good money from my home business by mainly using articles as the main part of my home business marketing strategy.

But what is more is that there are plenty of other guys out there doing the same, although some of them use more expensive methods than free articles.
So what is the difference between the frustrated and the successful home business owners?

The difference is that the top earning home businesses have a marketing system for generating a constant supply of leads or traffic to the web sites they represent. In contrast, the ones who do not make any money do not have any system. They often just sit back and wait for things to happen. Sorry folks the hype is just not true. You have to put in some effort! Even to make money from precious metals, you will have to keep a close eye on silver prices for sometime.

In this first article in a series, we will deal with 3 key factors one needs to address to launch a successful home business marketing strategy using articles that can work for virtually any home based business opportunity.

1) You must know what works and what doesn’t.
The problem with most home business programs is that you will not be able to know where your traffic is coming from. Online that is a disaster. It is like flying an aircraft blind. Sooner or later you will crush.

A good solution is to start a blog with an identical topic to your home business program. There is always something interesting related to every boring topic you can think of. We even have accutane lawsuits. Use a good site meter to carefully monitor the traffic you are receiving. You can then easily refer the people who visit your blog to your affiliate site. To make your blog even more interesting you can carry Google Adsense pay per click ads. This way you can have some income even as you build up your affiliate program. Use the articles that you are posting elsewhere on your blog.

While generating revenue from your blog, do not lose sight of your main objective which is to monitor what articles posted at which web sites are bringing in the most traffic. You can then use this information to constantly improve on the volume of traffic headed to your affiliate program site.

This is yet another reason why it is so important to select a home business opportunity based on a subject that you are personally interested in. Maybe closely linked to a hobby you really love. Only then will you have the enthusiasm to constantly come up with various new ideas to market your home business and have the passion required to regularly test and improve and also enjoy doing so.
See my other articles on how to write effective articles and where to post them.

2) Write consistently.
Some people will briefly post a few articles and then throw in the towel. What a waste. Not only do they lose the benefits of the viral effect all good articles enjoy on the net (of getting posted and reposted all over the place.) but they will also end up wasting a lot of their valuable time. Time is a very valuable resource, imagine spending so much of it on something and not then you abandon it and end up not having learned anything?

The other thing is that for traffic to rise and continue doing so, you will have to be very consistent with your posting.

3) Use keywords to increase traffic.
Ignore keywords at your own peril. Keywords are the currency of online content. You will only enjoy 5% of the effect or even less, if you do not pay attention to keywords.

Look for keywords that are rising in popularity but do not have too much competition yet. That way you will have a fighting chance of pulling in traffic from the search engines, which is the most effective affiliate marketing method so far. This can easily be done using search engines and testing various keywords to see what results you get.

The effectiveness of search engines is the reason why many successful affiliates buy pay-per-click ads as the core of their affiliate marketing strategy. However since you are doing your affiliate marketing with articles, you will need to work a lot harder to place your keyword-rich articles in as many web sites as possible. Done properly it can be just as effective.

For example 10 keyword-rich articles placed in 50 different sites and viewed by an average of just two people per day on average will give you 1000 hits per day. If 20 per cent of these people make it to your affiliate site every day that is 200 serious visitors a day. Enough to make most affiliate programs work well for you.
Please do not take these figures too seriously. It also depends on a lot many other factors which we will discuss in future articles.

Lazy home business owner’s way to get customers

No matter how big or small your home business is and no matter how high or low sales are right now, there is something you need, badly. And that is a selling system.
All firms are careful to have elaborate accounting, production and transport systems. And yet there is no system to handle the most important aspect of all – sales.

Nothing moves until a sale is made, remember?

Systems make work easier. A selling system guarantees any home business a steady flow of new and repeat customers. The introduction of a selling system has changed fortunes, literally overnight. Sample these brief case studies;

A struggling home business monthly magazine was on the verge of shutting down when they took on a consultant who introduced a simple system to sell advertising space (the main source of revenue for the business magazine.) Within 2 months, the magazine was turning a profit and within one year sales increased by over 500%.

In the mid eighties nobody believed it was possible to sell computers in cash-strapped Africa. People not only didn’t know how to use them but even if they did where would they find the cash? The result was that computer dealers sold very few computers, mostly to large companies, at obscenely high profit margins. A new home-based company entered the market with a simple selling system that involved packaging a low cost entry-point computer. They sold so well that they revolutionized the entire market forcing margins to come down dramatically.

A well-established home based energy firm specializing in solar was doing very well but wanted to do even better. They reluctantly hired a consultant, more out of curiosity because they did not believe what he was saying about selling systems. The consultant quickly discovered that the real “hot button” for solar consumers was being able to run a Television. He thus created a selling system that linked solar to the most popular soaps. Sales increased by over 50% in a single month.

A struggling home based newspaper business could hardly sell its’ minimal 1,000 copies print run. A selling system was set up to distribute the publication using flyers. Sales shot up to 120,000 copies within a very short time.

The examples are endless. As the world marketplace is continually shrunk by technology and as competition increases, businesses will find it more and more difficult to survive without an effective selling system that clearly lays out a procedure to attract leads and prospects and to then turn some of those leads into paying customers.


Christopher Kyalo is a writer/marketing expert. Write to strongwallafrica at yahoo.com NOW to receive a free report on how you can market your home business better.

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A simple system that turned a bankrupt home based magazine into a cash machine in weeks

The two principal shareholders of the small home based magazine stared back at me in disbelief as I calmly explained the simple rescue plan we would use to save the ailing business monthly. Exhaustion and desperation were written all over their faces and in a way I felt pity for them.

The pair had already lost a small fortune in just one year of operation. The only reason why they had not shut down the damned thing was that they were hoping for some miracle that would recover at least half their life savings.

But then theirs is the story of hundreds of thousands of would-be-entrepreneurs the world over who continue to launch thousands of new magazines every year without the very special skills that are required to run this complex and yet extremely potential business.

All they had left at this bankrupt magazine now was a small demoralized sales team ready to quit the moment they found jobs elsewhere. No reporters, no writers, no budget to get good writers on board.

I quickly called a meeting and tried to inspire the shabby remnant, assuring them that the magazine was now in good hands and that things would improve. Luckily they did not sense the cold fear creeping up my spine nor did they seem to realize that I had already broken into a cold sweat. In business there are no guarantees – you win some and you lose others. What right did I have to make all these promises? What if I failed in this assignment?

I proceeded to swiftly train the handful of sales people and changed them from advertising sales persons into “reporters”. They were to go out and gather information.

Gather information!? When you need revenue so badly?

Hold your horses and read on.

We developed a simple system consisting of the following steps,

1) “Reporter” calls up a potential client and books an appointment for an interview.

2) I accompany them to the interview and I do both a thorough and professional job of it.

3) After the interview, we make an editorial decision whether the material merited a feature article in the magazine or not. And if it did whether the story will end up being positive or negative. (Any publisher will tell you that bad news sells much better than good news.)

If it merited a positive story, we would go ahead and write the story and then later approach the same client to book an advertisement so as to get a double maximum impact in the same issue. Alternatively they would have their advertisement appear in a future issue.

4) If the story was negative we could not approach the source to place an ad in the magazine. We would instead go ahead and write our big story with a little additional research from other sources. The reporter would then approach a competitor to the business in question (who was not in the same mess) for an advertisement.

5) Other times an interview supplied us with a tip to pursue another company or organization for a lead story, which we would also do.

Using this simple system that maximized on the meager resources that were available, we literally killed two birds with one stone. The sales team were able to get very good quality leads for advertising sales and turned most of them into much needed solid sales. The big secret here is that they were able to use the writer’s interview session to build rapport with the client/news source.

Secondly, in the process we were able to do quality research work for all the stories we carried in the magazine which improved our readership and the confidence of advertisers as well on the quality of the monthly business publication.

This was of course combined with some careful house-keeping where we kept a very careful eye on costs by designing a system that would monitor costs on a daily basis. Within 8 weeks the magazine was making a profit and in one year, if you came calling, you would not believe it was the same previously dying magazine.

Of course it was all made simpler by the fact that we were dealing with a business magazine, because this type of magazine is in the unique situation where the newsmakers can also be the main advertisers.

Magazines can be very profitable. They can also be huge cash drains. It all depends on you doing the following;

Creating workable systems for generating revenue through selling advertising and other systems for generating revenue from subscription and single copy sales. The systems you create must be so simple that the staff training required will be minimal.

It’s as simple as that. And that’s exactly how I turned around an ailing home based business magazine.

Christopher Kyalo is a writer/marketing expert.
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