Exact Impact of Article Marketing on Your Sales

Does article marketing work? And if it does what kind of impact should you expect? What kind of sales will you end up making?

These are the most common questions I receive from anxious new clients.

As the world continues to slowly but surely enter into serious recession, people have naturally become much more attached to the contents of their wallets. And so folks unfamiliar with the usefulness of article marketing want to be sure that it actually works. And it is not enough to just say it works. I believe it is more useful to go beyond that and demonstrate exactly how it works.

Let us keep this very simple. Forget all those complex and confusing pieces of advice flying at you from all directions on the net. Let's just get back to the basics. The truth in business is that if you do not have your numbers correct, you'll go nowhere.

Whatever it is that you are selling online, there is a simple truism. You will need to get your offer in front of enough people to be able to make a single sale. Once you know your conversion rate (that is how many people you need to put the message in front of to make a single sale) it is simple enough to calculate how many people need to see your message for you to achieve the kind of sales and profits you want to make with that particular online product or service. For instance if out of every 10 people who visit your landing page, one ends up making a purchase, then it means your conversion rate is 10%. And so to be able to make 10 sales you need 100 prospects.

That's how simple it should be. A business venture starts with the setting of goals. What do you want to achieve? How much money do you want to generate? What kind of profit do you want? When you answer these questions, all the rest of your article marketing business plans will fall into place.

In a world continually flooded by advertisements which most people have learnt to ignore or look down on cynically, articles are bound to give you much better results than advertisements. Especially if the articles you are using to sell, have valuable information for your target market.

So let's go back to our calculations. If you do a single useful article with plenty of useful content and tips for your target market and post it to a few high traffic article directories with a link pointing back to your sales landing page you will get quality traffic on your sales page. The more targeted your traffic is, the higher the conversion rate. This is one very good reason why general articles are useless in article marketing. What you must do is target a very small niche of your market in each article you generate in your article marketing campaign.

Let's say you did 25 quality articles and posted them at 3 top article directories (like I usually do), you will find that after a very short while a search in Google using your article title will show you that your most useful articles will have gone viral being re-posted a few more times all over the web. Sadly not every article will have a link pointing back to your site, but the good news is that most will.

25 articles will result in about 250 articles out there with links pointing back to your landing page. My disclaimer is that it really depends very much with which industry we are talking about and how competitive the situation is sometimes this figure will be slightly lower and on other occasions higher. In most cases each of these articles will get at least one person reading them and out of the 250 individuals about 50 will click through to your site each week and from there it is up to you and the selling ability of your website (i.e. how good your landing page is and how attractive your offer is) to determine how many of the 50 you will be able to convert into actual paying customers.

Amazingly you can actually increase the conversion rate dramatically by capturing the email addresses of this entire valuable traffic landing on your site. This is usually done by offering a valuable free report which people will have to sign up for. Using an auto responder you can send regular relevant messages to these prospects. There is no way you will go wrong with this strategy and I guarantee that you will be able to eventually convert a huge percentage of these people into your customers. You just need to be patient and realize that folks will buy only when they are ready to buy.

That is exactly how you get to maximize on the effect of article marketing.

By Christopher Kyalo

Reading, Writing, and Children's Personalized E Stories

Throughout the different phases of my life, I have constantly being amazed at the positive influence of reading and writing with our children. As a former educator, the advantages of exposure to reading at home became obvious to me. Everyone can easily appreciate the strong learning foundation created by reading to preschoolers.

Word recognition, comprehension abilities, and listening skills are all fostered through the parent-child reading experience. Educators who have studied the topic agree that a link is evident between academic success and exposure to reading at a young age. I observed the greatest benefits of preschool reading, however, through my experiences as a parent of four children and grandparent of one. The greatest benefits of preschool reading is in the experience itself. If you are a parent, you understand that sentiment. If you are not a parent, reflect for a moment on your own childhood memories of reading with your parents. I do not have to say another word to convince you of the importance of reading to preschoolers.

During the preschool years, children may ask to read the same book again and again. My son liked it for a particularly funny phrase which it contained -"And there in the woods a piggy wig stood with a ring in the end of his nose - with a ring in the end of his nose!" My three year old daughter was so proud when she could reverse the reading situation and read a book to me! At 3, she really didn't recognize each word. She memorized it from so frequently reading the story. I give a lot of credit, however, to those reading experiences and the subsequent self-esteem which it fostered in her.

Sometimes our reading experiences with our children do not even have to involve books. You can "read" a child a story from the script in your mind.

Do we not all have vivid imaginations?
How many participate in on-line forums?

My middle son preferred the stories from the imagination without the printed text. He preferred for me to invent my own stories. No, that did not provide him with word recognition skills. Yet it still provided the valuable reading "experience."

My youngest son developed a passion for writing and wrote an entire play while in high school. Reading and writing are intertwined as one entity. One skill fosters the other! The love of one supports the love of the other!

Most children enjoy books when they are given the opportunity to explore. Previously, I was a Discovery Toys representative. I organized play groups for children. Children would gravitate towards the books. At times, a flashy cover or interesting feature would attract them to a book. Yet it was the joy of reading which would ultimately keep their interest.

As a grandparent I continued to create stories for my grandchild. I decided to send him stories via email - complete with graphics and animation. The enjoyment was mutual! This was the inspiration for an exciting business venture.

Instead of providing stories just to my family, I could broaden my enjoyment and create stories for others. There is no shortage of access to children's stories so I decided on a new twist to children's e stories - unique children's personalized e stories! Personalized stories are thought to be a self-esteem enhancer.

Some personalized stories in the marketplace just contain the child's name.(or their friends' names). Yet the children still learn to recognize their names. They gain self-esteem from reading a story about themselves. Personalized stories can be the impetus to encourage a child to keep a journal or write a story about themselves or their family or friends.

With my personalized e stories I decided to try to tweak the children's interest in reading. I provide an unique story (some themes) for each child. Each story contains 8 - 12 elements of the child's life ranging from the simple - favorite color - to the more complex - special wish or dream. Each story is as individual as each child.

Any extra incentive which can encourage children to enjoy reading has to have a positive outcome. Instilling a love of reading in a child is giving them a gift which will last a lifetime. We pass down our recipes from generation to generation. Let's not forget to do likewise with our books and their joys!

Stories, read or written, don't have to cost a cent. They can be accessed from library sources. So regardless whether or not you purchase stories or books, remember the reading experience and Please Read With Your Child!