Market Vitality

If you're looking at low cost ways to generate leads for your new complementary therapy business, particularly if it has an online shopping cart, the best way is Article Marketing because it's free and the traffic keeps coming, over and over again, from each piece of work. So if you are looking for product launch ideas read on.

Article Marketing isn't an instant way to get started online, but it's a low-cost, no risk method anyone can adopt. First let's compare it with some other ways to get online visitors. Let's take the example of promoting a new shopping cart.

A traditional way of drawing traffic to your new website, taught by some on-line marketing courses, is to get in touch with other website owners asking for a link exchange. This can work, but it's a slow process and you need to be careful who you target. For example, if I sell dog collars by post I may be happy to do a link exchange with someone who runs dog training classes, but not someone who is promoting dog collars.

Another method is posting on forums in your market-place, with your URL in your signature. Also effective, but time-consuming.

In theory a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign is easy to set up and you could see prospects very quickly. In practice unless you're experienced at these campaigns, you can spend ages testing for the optimum settings and exhaust your budget without making a single sale. I did! And being of a suspicious nature , I often wondered how many clicks were by my competitors, to waste my budget!

Alternative online methods include FFA (Free For All) sites and traffic exchanges where you view other people's sites, in return for them viewing yours. This strikes me as a waste of time. I want to sell, not buy, so why sit heedless, clicking on other people's websites so that they can sit bored clicking on my site? They probably never even look at my site. With tabbed browsers the temptation is just to open the next tab to click on the one, never reading the adverts.

These methods are time-consuming and ineffective for a serious product launch.

Offline marketing methods include networking to exchange cards at business clubs. Time-consuming, costly and again in general, people are there to sell, not to buy.

In contrast, article marketing targets people who have shown that they are interested in the product your website targets. Choose good keywords and visitors will be actively intending to buy, not sell.

The idea of article marketing is that you write an article and submit it, with your website URL, to article directories from which publishers can copy content for newsletters etc so long as they include your website details with your article. Then as interested parties read your article, they can click through to your website.

The article you have produced in an hour or so stays (theoretically) online forever and you have the potential to receive targeted traffic from it in perpetuity.

For example, I submitted an article in October 2005 and 4 years later it is still generating traffic, with no extra work, and had received 28,897 lifetime views, with 5,961 clicks through to my website. How much would that have cost using PPC? Another advantage is that the best article directories email you statistics showing the keywords on which your article is being found.

My belief is that article marketing has so many advantages over alternative methods that I cannot think of any reason why it would not be one of your marketing strategies.

Much of my success with article marketing was learned through trial and error. With a little free, or low cost, training I would have realized the potential much earlier.