Technology Toolkit

Writing and distributing articles is the best way to direct traffic to your website. Many businesses both online and offline have turned to article marketing for a variety of reasons. They know that through marketing with articles they can prove their knowledge of the products or services they sell.

About 75 percent of consumers check online prices and store locations before they make a purchase. They read reviews and informational articles to get a better understanding of the products they shop for. You need to create a complete article marketing campaign that puts your articles in front of your target demographic.

The old saying “Information is Power” is truer now more than ever. The more information you can give about a product or service, the more likely you are to attract new customers. Businesses thrive on sales. Get your information in front of the people who need to see it and increase your website’s conversion rate.

Hire a Ghostwriter for Articles

Ghostwriters are talented writers who specialize in one thing: creating the highest quality articles possible. They understand the importance of thorough research and sticking to the niche. Ghostwriters make it their business to know what search engines look for and proper keyword placement. They will create the best informational articles possible for your complete article marketing campaign.

Entrepreneurs and webmasters often hire a professional ghostwriter for articles. They may even hire more than one ghostwriter to get a broader variety of articles. They choose the articles they feel best represent their business and submit them to article directories for publication.

Choose to market using articles and you will see a noticeable increase in traffic to your website within 2 weeks. Article directories will publish each informational article and include a resource box that links to your business website. No additional sales information is contained within the article body itself.

The Article Distribution Process

A complete article marketing campaign includes distribution to several article publishers. Don’t sell yourself or your product short by submitting your article to one or two publishers. Deep and wide publication to thousands of article directories is the ultimate goal.

Several article submission companies guarantee your article will be published to tens of thousands of websites. Sites that offer something so amazing are not without their price. Your marketing budget will determine the number of paid article submission companies you will hire.

Free article submission sites are also in abundance. Some paid sites offer a free version of their paid service; always keep an eye out for that if your budget is small. Keep in mind that it is your article and you have the right to publish it on any article directory. The options are virtually limitless!

The Grand Finale of Article Marketing

No article marketing campaign is complete without distribution. You could hire a ghostwriter to write the most informative article ever written, but it does no good if no one ever sees it. Make sure your article, website and business get the attention they deserve. Choose article distribution services that will help you achieve the most coverage for your website.

In short, article distribution helps direct consumers to the right website. Over the years, consumers have educated themselves on how to make intelligent purchases. They look for information from a variety of venues before heading out to buy something. Market using articles and create a complete article marketing campaign to direct more traffic to your website. You won’t regret it.

I’d bet money you aren’t. Nobody is, if they’re honest. Think about it:Higher conversions mean more money…and everybody wants to make more money, right? More money to spend on yourself and your family. More money to travel to exotic climes. More money to help you live the life you want. Whatever. Let’s just agree…earning more money is a good thing. After all, that’s probably why most of us got into online business to begin with. That and the freedom to be our own boss, working when and where we want. That’s the online business dream right?

The global economy is facing huge recession. If you thought you could rely on low-converting webpages to make your living, you’re wrong. Sorry if that offends you…but it’s true. If you think making money online is tough now, it’s about to get a whole lot tougher. And that’s not even the scary part. The scary part is thinking about how tough it’s going to be to find a job while the world’s in this mess. Listen, it would be embarrassing enough to have to quit your IM business just because your low conversions don’t bring in enough cash.

Can you imagine how much more embarrassing it’s going to be when you quit your business, then struggle to find a job? Of course, if you listen to all the “gurus”, they’ll tell you that it’s easy to sell your products or service online After all, even if it doesn’t sell like crazy from day 1, you can run some simple split tests and send the profits rocketing. And in a way, that’s true.

You can make huge leaps in profit with split testing. But unless you’re an expert with your own custom-written software (more on that in a minute), split testing can take months. Months of tracking, months of making notes and months of working on different experiments and variations. Funny how the gurus don’t mention that huh? But it gets worse…split testing problems are a walk in the park compared to what you’re about to discover. You see, there’s a huge, basic reason that stops your pages and ads from converting. And it’s something that affects everyone who’s spent more than about 5 minutes online in their life.

Scientists have proven the existence of Ad Blindness (also known as banner blindness) beyond a doubt – it means your web visitors are so used to ignoring advertising that they are mostly ignoring your ads and banners – even right now, as you read this. In independent Ad Blindness studies, subjects were asked to search webpages for certain words. And in most cases they failed totally. Why? Because even though the text they were looking for was written in huge letters on banners and footer ads on the page, they were so used to skipping ads that they totally missed the text they were looking for.even though it was right in front of their nose!

It may sound crazy, but I’d bet my next commission check that you have Ad Blindness too. Ever noticed how when you flick through a magazine or paper you’ll just skip over the ads without even thinking about it? How about when you watch TV ever surf the other channels when the commercials are on?

Sound familiar? That’s Ad Blindness, and we’ve all got it. Interesting huh? Imagine how that’s affecting your website right now – even as you read this, your site visitors are glossing over your ads and missing your calls to action. And every single one of them is costing you money.

Your expensive banner may look awesome, but it’s hard to get the click when your visitor hasn’t even noticed it! Let me tell you, this revelation about Ad Blindness came as quite a shock to me. But it certainly explained why so many of my banners and ads just weren’t working. It was about then that I decided we internet marketers needed to find a way to combat this. We needed to find a new form of advertising for the web…so one day I just sat at my computer and visited hundreds of different sites. I wanted to see what it was that really caught my eye…what pages really had the power to cut through my own Ad Blindness. And then it hit me like a bolt of lightning. I realised that we needed an evolution of internet advertising.

It dawned on me that the ideal internet eyecatcher would be something that combined the glossy looks of an expensive banner with the attention-grabbing movement of a popup. But without being annoying or obtrusive.

Joe Rancier began his home business the way many people do; with a good idea and a small, designated work space in his office. Joe had an idea to use Autocad, an architectural program, to design custom glassware for both art and practical purposes. Joe, an amateur glassblower himself, planned to contract out custom glass designs to a small network of highly talented glass workers. The workers would carry out Joe’s designs, take their profit cut, and then ship the finished product back to Joe where he could in turn deliver it to the client.

Jewel Cut Glass Design was incorporated in February of 2002. Business was slow at first. Joe and his wife Marnie worked the phones for sometimes ten hours a day, trying to find prospective clients for his business. They approached everybody from local houseware boutiques to pre-existing business contacts, and even national department store chains. The first two years were brutally slow. But after a time, a few small retailers liked Joe’s glassware designs and believed in him enough to order a few sugar bowl and decanter designs. The third year saw Jewel Cut take in $9300 in accounts receivable. The resulting profits weren’t nearly enough for the couple to quit their full time jobs, but from this modest success Joe and Marnie became convinced that they could succeed.

Jewel Cut Glass Design’s big break came when they attracted the interest of Chimera Interiors, a large Pennsylvania based houseware chain. Chimera wanted to contract Jewel Cut for two different lines of glassware gift sets as well as a small table top design. The entire contract was valued at almost four hundred thousand dollars. Joe and Marie gleefully jumped at the opportunity and began production of the pieces even before the contract was signed. One evening, the husband and wife team were out celebrating their business breakthrough when the call came in. The news was bad. The legal department at Chimera Interiors deemed the work order could not be honored due to the face that Joe and Marnie did not have a merchant number. In order to contract business with Jewel Cut Glass, the company needed to have a merchant number and be able to accept electronic payments. Joe and Marnie could not honor this requirement and lost the contract. It was a horrible blow not only to their business, but to their morale as well.

Joe researched the issue and learned that many large companies have similar requirements. Joe quickly signed up with Electronic Payment Services, a credit card processing outfit that enabled Joe’s business to be paid with one convenient swipe of a credit card. The following year Joe rekindled his relationship with Chimera Interiors and won a small contract . That same year Jewel Cut also secured a deal with Mordecai Holdings; a Canadian houseware company. Mordecai had the same rule as Chimera; they could only work with vendors that had a merchant number. But now, Jewel Cut was prepared. Jewel Cut’s accounts receivable went from $9300 in 2005, to $120,000 in 2007. That’s a profit growth of over 1200 percent.

Joe and Marnie not only viewed their switch to electronic payment processing as a big success, but they also recommended that all their small suppliers convert to credit card processing as well. Six months later, all of Jewel Cuts contributing artisans had converted to electronic payment processing. The result was a smoother workflow that left an electronic paper trail for easy accounting and record keeping, as well as less time and energy spent going to and from a bank, worrying about writing and cashing checks.

Credit card processing was the critical element that enabled Joe and Marnie Rancier’s Jewel Cut Glass Design to get well on the road to becoming a multi million dollar company.

Get The Skills You Need To Design Anything You Want!

Adobe Photoshop is such a complex application with far

too many features. However once you master it essentially nothing is impossible. Reality can be turned on it’s head,

night can turn into day, skin into marble and your pet can sport a cute outfit and YES a matador can have a bull’s head.

It’s all in your imagination and enthusiasm!

My experience with this amazing program started about

10 years ago. At that time I was using Adobe Photoshop 3.0

(I know, long time gone!) and I just could not stop, constantly trying new effects, filters, textures, brushes, colors and many more in my Photoshop Lab (a.k.a. my apartment). Day turn into night and I was still in front of my computer experimenting with various pictures. With the time passing

I have been learning more and more.

I was curious and excited, willing to put in as much time as necessary to find out everything I could about the vast array of features that Adobe Photoshop has to offer. So I tried and then reworked, revised and then tried some more… and this is how my new passion was born!

My new passion soon become my work. I just started working at one of the New York ad agencies and I truly loved it. Each day it was a thrill and a challenge for me. I remember how excited I was when I have found something new in this amazing program. The truth is that regardless of the level of your experience with Adobe Photoshop, mastering it could be somewhat overwhelming. However the good news is that you don’t have to be a Photoshop expert to create sophisticated effects and HELP is on the way!

Here is what will you learn:

• How to make cool looking graphics or touch up photos quickly and easily

• Remove red eyes from digital photographs, to add drop shadows, gradients and colors

• How to paint like Monet using the Photoshop paintbrush tool

• How to merge two (or more) photos together seamlessly

• How to make graphics and logos – from scratch

• Crop and resize pictures but without compromising quality, and many more…

Finally there is a way that you can master Basic Adobe Photoshop in just 2 hours. Imagine what it would be to have totally unique step-by-step video training system, designed to make any newbie user completely confident with Photoshop in record time. To feel confident (not overwhelmed) doing the most commonly used tasks, having the shortcuts to simple stuff that you will most likely going to use, to manage most of the important Photoshop tools

with ease!)

If you like this article and would like to find out more about How To Master Adobe Photoshop click on a link below. You will find there the best FREE Photoshop tutorials, tips and effects that I could find. Some of these Photoshop effects I have been using for a while, while others they are being discovered by searching and spending countless hours on the internet. Periodically I’ll list there some of my favorites and the ones I find to be most informative. Enjoy!

In May of 1993, Jennifer Mercer was fresh out of graduate business school at Florida State University. She was confronted with a problem. What business to start up ? Jennifer was short on funds and the economy at the time didn’t lend itself to start-ups. After several months of exhaustive job searching, Jennifer learned that her grandfather Lawrence was retiring from a small office supply business in Lake City Florida. Lawrence wanted to sell his business but was unable, given the economic conditions. After speaking with Jennifer, Lawrence offered to cede the day to day business affairs over to her. If after a year Jennifer proved successful, the she could then take over the entire business. Jennifer accepted the offer and moved to Lake City.

Jennifer began managing her grandfather’s business and quickly discovered it was in a state of disarray. One of the more formidable problems was a large inventory of rubber stamps that Lawrence had been unable to sell. If Jennifer could figure out how to sell the inventory it would give the business a huge boost and free up space for other products. Jennifer inventoried all of the rubber stamps and discovered there were four different types: Pre Inked stamps, dater stamps, Fax stamps and clothing stamps.

Jennifer did some research and came up with a few ideas. First: sell the Fax stamps. Jennifer traveled to the State Universities and visited their administrative offices. She had reasoned that there was a constant demand for faxed school records and transcripts. Jennifer met with school administrators and suggested that pre-Inked stamps could be used to indicate “Offical Transcript Copy” and the fax stamps could mark official acknowledgment that a given copy had been faxed. Once Jennifer was able to customize the stamp messages to official school letterhead and insignia, she was able to sell twenty pre-inked stamps and eleven faxed stamps. The beauty of seeing this niche, was that Jennifer could travel to several other schools and similarly sell all of her inventory of fax and pre-inked custom stamps.

On a lark, Jennifer also worked with her grandfather to produce wood handled stamps that bore multiple university insignias. She advertised these with a customization offer so that each university could choose their own individual message to be added to each stamp. This idea executed beautifully and resulted in a third of her stamp inventory being sold. Jennifer was officially on a rubber stamp roll. She went to nightclubs in the same university towns and sold customized pre-inked stamps with phosphorescent, glow in the dark ink. The stamps were ideal to mark club patrons who were old enough to drink alcohol.

Perhaps the biggest coup d’etat came when Jennifer devised a solution to selling her dater stamps. It took two cups of coffee on a Sunday morning to realize that supermarkets need the dater stamps to indicate expiration dates on food. In fact, this was mandated by law. After two weeks of traveling and meeting with various supermarket managers, she sold the dater stamps like hot cakes, and got rid of her remaining ink pad inventory as well.

The last remaining type of stamp were the Trodat clothing stamps. These stamps had the specialized purpose of stamping fabric; usually clothes and uniforms. Jennifer came up with the idea of selling these stamps to different linen companies that supplied restaurants. This solution seemed a bit odd at first glance. Jennifer had worked in a restaurant in her undergrad years and remembered how much linen they used; both in the form of tablecloths and kitchen uniforms. The linen companies needed to have a way to discreetly mark their linen to indicate their ownership, thereby reducing losses. The plan worked and Trodat stamps sold well.

Lawrence was elated with his granddaughter’s success and handed full control of the business over to her. Lawrence was also surprised to discover that, no sooner than selling all the rubber stamps, Jennifer went and ordered a whole new inventory to sell along with biodegradable ink .