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Your one-stop site for Article Marketing for your Web business.

Road Map to Web Success with Article Marketing

Creating a successful Web site involves four major steps: Selecting your Market; Creating your Site; Monetizing your Site; and Marketing your Site. Each of these steps is described in detail in its own section of this page, with special emphasis on how FreeLanceSubmit.com can help.

• Selecting your Market
• We can help!
• Creating your Site
• We can help!
• Monetizing your Site
• Marketing your Site (loop back to Creating)
• We can help! And this is our main service.

Selecting your Market

In selecting your market, you must choose what market you can address with your knowledge and interests, and determining whether that market presents opportunities for you to succeed.

The Right Market for You

We recommend that you begin with what you know and love, and explore how you can bring value to that market with your special experience, insight, knowledge, and passion. Look at your hobbies, and think about how to share them with others. Look at your profession, and think about how you can provide the goods and services you know best in a way that addresses a need in the market that is not being addressed adequately already.

Neither we nor anyone else can tell you what market is right for you. You must explore this for yourself.

The Opportunities in Your Market

There are tools and techniques that can help you determine whether the market you have chosen is being addressed adequately, and to identify those subsets of the market that are not being addressed adequately. That is where you can succeed: A market segment that you know about and that is not already saturated.

These tools and techniques can help you to decide whether the value you bring to the market with your unique skills and experience will be able to thrive in the rough and tumble Web marketplace, or whether you need to choose a different specialty or subset of the market.

Many of these tools and techniques are described in detail, and in a very helpful and positive manner, in Rosalind Gardner's Super Affiliate Handbook, in the chapter, "Finding Your Niche."

Part of the process of selecting your market is to do a little research on keywords. This is described in the Super Affiliate Handbook. You need a special tool to do this research efficiently, and one excellent tool for this is WordTracker.

We Can Help!

If you think you need some assistance with your keyword research, FreeLanceSubmit.com can help you do this part of your research. On our Request Form, choose the "Keyword Research" service. Be sure not to select any other services, as you're not really ready for them until you study the results of our research.

Creating your Site

Creating your Web site consists of selecting your domain name, selecting your hosting service, writing your site's content, and publishing your Web site.

Selecting your Domain Name

The old rules still apply, but they are becoming harder to follow as the Web grows. Used to be you wanted a domain name ("Web site name") that was short and easy to remember. Most of the short ones are taken, so you'll have to do your best at making it easy to remember.

Another increasingly important factor is to choose a domain name that is "keyword rich." Try to make your domain name such that it includes one or more of the keywords that people will use when searching for your site.

You can use the same tools and techniques of keyword research here. Just as keyword research helps you to select your market, it also helps to identify the keywords that might work as part of your domain name. Of course, there is no guarantee that the domain name you come up with will be available, so you may have to try several permutations and several combinations of keywords.

And again, try to keep it memorable.

Here's a side story from our founder's experience. When Chuck Bonner set out to create his Web site about hiking, the special subset of the hiker population he wanted to address was those who are more interested in studying nature than in conquering mountain peaks. However, not knowing anything about keyword research at the time, he chose a domain name that included only one of the relevant keywords, "hiking." As soon as he began to master keyword research and Article Marketing, he went back and corrected his error, registering as many relevant keyword-rich domain names as he could. Of course, by that time, "HikingWithChuck.com" was already becoming established as a brand name, so he didn't change it, but he did make all of his new domain names serve as "aliases" to the original domain. Check it out: Enter every permutation you can think of for the words "nature," "observe," and "study" together with the word "hiking," and see how many of them bring you to HikingWithChuck.com.

Just as described under "Selecting your Market" above, you can do the keyword research to select your domain name using WordTracker.

We Can Help!

Or FreeLanceSubmit.com can do this research for you if you like. On our Request Form, choose the "Keyword Research" service. Be sure not to select any other services, as you're not really ready for them until you study the results of our research.

Note that we will not suggest a domain name for you, nor test whether it is available. There is just too much opportunity for abuse. Once you receive the list of high-value keywords from us, you can put them together yourself to see which combinations work as memorable domain names, then identify which ones are available.

And even if you only plan to use one, we advise you to register as many available and relevant domain names as you can find, just in case. It doesn't cost much, and it may provide you with powerful alternative marketing opportunities later on. At the very least, it can protect you against competitors using keyword-rich domain names to target the same market and steal your customers!

Selecting your Hosting Service

There are a number of hosting services available, offering a bewildering array of features and services. FreeLanceSubmit.com can offer you a few suggestions, but the detailed considerations that go into choosing a hosting service are generally beyond the scope of our services. Here are two hosting services you might consider:

• Site Build It! (SBI!) SBI! is so complete that we find it difficult to recommend anything else. Far beyond Web hosting and authoring tools, SBI! and the included tools and services of SiteSell are all you need to build and succeed in a Web business.
• BlueHost.com is an excellent choice for those who insist on doing it themselves. Besides a very low-cost hosting service, BlueHost includes a comprehensive set of site-building and management tools. They are easy enough for the beginner to use, and they include enough features to satisfy an experienced Webmaster.

Writing your Site's Content

This is arguably the single most important step in Web success. Create your message!

What we're talking about here is the creation of your content, not the act of rendering that content as Web-compatible HTML code. At this point, you're just putting your expertise into words and pictures. Don't worry about what format it is in. Use any text editing tools you feel comfortable with.

So what is it you want to say? Say it! Make sure you say it well, that your information is well organized and expressed with proper grammar and spelling, but just say what you want to say.

If you are selling products and services of your own, of course, you will have to provide the most effective sales and marketing language to get your visitors to buy from you. However, if your business plan is simply to make money from affiliate links and third-party advertisements, you don't really need to do any selling. Just provide valuable content, don't think about the affiliate links or ads just yet. That will come when we get to Monetizing your Site.

FreeLanceSubmit.com has nothing to add to your efforts in creating your content. It is your content, and you are pretty much on your own. However, when it comes time to market your site, refer back to your own content. This may be an excellent source of articles to use in Article Marketing, as we will discuss below. And you should use the results of keyword research, whether you do it on your own or we do it for you in our Keyword Research service, to make sure your content uses the best keywords in the best possible way.

Publishing your Web Site

Once you have your content, or at least a good start at it, you are ready to put it out on the Web for the world to see.

This may seem out of sequence. Don't you want to create your advertisements and affiliate links so your Web site can start making money? Actually, you usually have to have a Web site first.

Many advertising programs (including Google AdSense) and affiliate programs will want a chance to examine your Web site before they allow you to put their links on it. They want to make sure you have a real, content-rich Web site and not just an "ad farm."

So, publish your Web site first, then monetize it, as discussed in the next section.

How do you go about putting your content onto your Web host? It depends on many factors, including what tools and avenues are provided by your hosting service. This is beyond the scope of services offered by FreeLanceSubmit.com. Refer to the information provided by your hosting service.

Monetizing your Site

Now it's time to prepare your Web site to generate revenue, a process usually described as "monetizing" the site (turning it into a money-maker).

This is where you apply to Google AdSense or other advertising providers, your chosen affiliate programs, etc. They will provide you with HTML code that you paste into the HTML code of your Web site.

The HTML code that they provide will do three things.

1. It will display whatever it is they want the ads or links to look like.
2. It will respond to a visitor's click on the link to bring the visitor to the advertiser's Web site.
3. It will, in response to those clicks, send your identifying information to their server so they know to credit you with that click and any subsequent sales.

Many affiliate programs will require that the content of your Web site must make at least some mention of the products being promoted. So you may need to make slight adjustments to your original content at this point. For example, your original content might have said, "You're going to need a widget." Now with an affiliate link, you can change it to, "You're going to need a widget, and we recommend the Acme Widget XS, which you can buy right here, ..."

Again, the process of putting that advertiser's or affiliate program's links into your Web site is beyond the scope of services that FreeLanceSubmit.com offers.

Marketing your Site

Finally, we come to the point where FreeLanceSubmit.com can help in a major way. You have your Web site, you have filled it with your informational content, and you have your money-making links on it. It's time for the world to beat a path to your virtual door.

Only the world won't know where your virtual door is unless you tell them.

There are many ways you could go about letting people know where your Web site is and what it offers. You should use as many legitimate and valuable means as you can.

That bears repeating and emphasis on a few implied points:

• Use as many means as you can to let people know about your site. Don't rely on any one tool or technique.
• Make sure you use only legitimate means. Even one "sleazy" technique can mark your Web site as "sleazy," and legitimate marketing channels, such as the major search engines, will penalize your site in order to avoid directing users to "sleazy" sites.
• Make sure you use only valuable means. Don't waste your time using marketing techniques that don't generate results.

Among the legitimate and valuable ways you can promote your site, you should include:

• Submit it to the major search engines and to any market-specific specialized search engines you know of that are relevant to your target audience.
• Create and maintain a "site map" in a format that the search engines can use.
• Exchange links with other sites addressing your target audience.
• Consider using paid advertising.
• Article Marketing!

We Can Help!

There it is at last!

Article Marketing is what FreeLanceSubmit.com is all about, and we are ready to help you with every little detail of this process.

But what is Article Marketing? What do you need to do? How does it work? The answers to these questions are on the next page.

But before we get there, let's close out this Road Map to Web Success by noting that it is an iterative process. Once you promote your Web site to the world, go back to "Creating Your Site," and repeat:

• No, you don't need to create a new domain name, but be prepared to add one from time to time if you find that the one you started with is not working for you. Maybe you can create a new domain name with better keywords and/or better market appeal, and add that to your marketing efforts.
• No, you don't need to select a new hosting service, but don't automatically renew when your service contract expires. Think about what kind of service they have been providing, and whether you think another hosting service might work better for you. Give due consideration to whether you want to go through the pain of learning how to work with another hosting service and the new set of tools they provide, but don't let yourself feel trapped.
• Yes, you do want to create your site's content again:
• Update your content.
• Correct any errors you may have discovered in your content.
• Clarify anything that your visitors may have asked about.
• Reword your content and make maximum practicable use of keywords that you have identified as relevant and effective.
• And above all, expand your Web site's content. Add new content continually. (And a good source of new content might be the articles that FreeLanceSubmit.com has written for you. We use our marketing articles as additional content to our Web site all the time!)
• And, of course, as you create new and updated content, you want to publish it on your Web site.
• Yes, you do want to revisit monetizing your site.
• Consider adding new affiliate programs and/or advertising carriers.
• Consider dropping one or more existing affiliate programs and/or advertising carriers if they are not working well for you.
• Adjust the positioning and style of your ads and affiliate links within your site to see if you can optimize the performance of these links.
• Yes, you do want to continue marketing your Web site.
• Adjust the keywords within each page to try to get better positioning in the search engines.
• Make sure your "site map" is up to date and reflects the current content of your site.
• Continue growing your link exchange network with other related Web sites, and perhaps you should consider removing links that are sending traffic away from your site and not generating much reciprocal traffic.
• Monitor and adjust your paid advertising campaign constantly, if you are using one.
• And keep on publishing articles for Article Marketing, either on your own or using our services.

Next Steps

Now you're ready to learn about how and why Article Marketing works on our How Article Marketing Works page.

If you haven't already, you might want to review Your Objectives to understand how your plans fit into this road map.

Or if you're already familiar with Article Marketing, read the How FreeLanceSubmit.com can Help page to learn how we get you started in Article Marketing.