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Do you offer a truly brilliant product or service? Do you wish you had more leads to sell it to? Do you need to drive more revenue so you have cash on hand to spend on implementing better and better ideas, or to bring on additional staff? If you are answering "yes" to these questions, YOU NEED A MORE EXCEPTIONAL ONLINE PRESENCE THROUGH ARTICLE MARKETING!

With so much business and research being done on the internet these days, you absolutely have to be found there, and found at least a hundred different ways. Anything less and you are missing out on TONS of business that you could be creating! Do you have any idea how much more revenue you could be generating if you took the time to craft a well written article marketing campaign?

I'm telling you it's millions! Let me show you how...

For the purpose of this article, we will already assume that your website does an exceptional job of describing the pain of your customers (what are they looking for?), presenting your credentials (to help the visitor see why you are qualified to solve their problems), and providing the solutions to your customer's everyday problems. We'll assume that it is filled with calls to action (provocative statements intended to poke the visitor into doing something) and opt-in opportunities (ways for you to collect visitor's contact info).

If your website does not yet include all of these elements address these issues first!

If it does, READ ON AND LET'S DISCUSS THE POWER OF ARTICLE MARKETING.

When people have a question, they go to Google, Yahoo or MSN and they type in a list of keywords or keyword phrases. The words they type determine the list that comes up on the search engines and it is there that magic can happen. YOUR WORDS CAN APPEAR! Are they up there now?

TIME OUT: Go to a search engine and type in the keywords someone might use if they were looking for someone to solve the problem that your business solves. Do you come up as the solution? Do you come up in the organic list? Do you come up multiple times?

If not, keep reading!

YOU NEED ARTICLES OUT THERE DOING YOUR WORK FOR YOU!

When someone is looking for a business like yours, does your voice ring out from the heavens, providing guidance, words of wisdom, and words of inspiration? Does Google bring them to your front door and invite them in to look around? Articles are like little sales people, and brilliantly, they are little sales people that you only have to hire one time to work for you FOREVER. Let me say that again, because you probably didn't hear me. Articles work for you FOREVER. F-O-R-E-V-E-R.

The reason I emphasize this is because of the power of article marketing. Every time you put together an article and send it out onto the internet, you are putting in place a sales person that will forever deliver your message. Do that again and again and you are putting out a SALES FORCE -each of which you pay only once!

WRITE ARTICLE, SUBMIT ARTICLE, REPEAT

WRITE ARTICLE, SUBMIT ARTICLE, REPEAT

WRITE ARTICLE, SUBMIT ARTICLE, REPEAT

Like the law of compounding interest with money - repeatedly putting out articles onto the internet will exponentially create value and generate more and more leads for your business. If you can commit to five articles per month, at the end of three months, you'll have FIFTEEN (15) sales people talking your talk and introducing searchers to your message and your SOLUTION to their problem. After six months, you've got thirty (30) of these sales people. At the end of one year, you'll have sixty (60). After two years, you'll have ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY, and...

After three years, YOU'LL HAVE NEARLY 200 SALES PEOPLE delivering different and exceptional messages about your business. And the most wonderful thing, is that they are all little replicas of you. So they are consistent. They deliver different messages, present different solutions, cover different topics, but they all express your unique methodology and the core values and spirit of YOUR business.

If you were to submit five articles per month, and generate $30,000 per month in revenue, after three years, and one hundred and eighty articles you have the potential of driving $360,000 of monthly revenue. Yes, I said MONTHLY revenue. That's more than 4 MILLION in annual revenue. Are you kidding me? So why aren't more people utilizing article marketing? The answer is - they are. But they are writing terrible articles!!!!! And they are killing their businesses, because each article they are sending out is doing BAD business for them, and doing it FOREVER!

SO WHAT MAKES THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BAD ARTICLE MARKETING AND GOOD ARTICLE MARKETING?

Here are five things your article marketing MUST do! (Are you taking notes?)

1. IT MUST HAVE A CATCHY TITLE OR NO ONE WILL READ IT!

We are a snippet society. We read everything in headlines from newspaper stories, to search headlines, to book titles. Titles grab us or they don't. Make sure that yours is clever, provides the solution to the reader's problem, and utilizes your keywords!

2. YOUR OPENING PARAGRAPH NEEDS TO HIGHLIGHT THE READER'S PAIN.

Look at the first paragraph of this article. Did it draw you in? Did it help you to determine that this article had value? Make the opening emotionally impacting by grabbing the reader's attention and identifying with their PAIN!

3. YOUR ARTICLE MARKETING MUST DELIVER VALUE.

It must offer them a solution to their problem. GIVE AWAY YOUR SECRETS! Don't be afraid to give your reader what they need for FREE. Chances are they are going to recognize that they would rather work with an expert than try to solve this problem on their own. Give someone a fish and they have dinner tonight. Teach them to fish and they can feed themselves forever. But open a grocery store down the street and chances are, they'll buy the fish from you. People only have so much time in their days and if they find a trustworthy source that can make their life easier or their business more profitable, they are going to take you up on it!

4. YOU MUST USE YOUR KEYWORDS WITHIN YOUR TEXT.

The search engines are going to identify each article by the words within it. So you have to be thinking about how people are going to find you. What words are they going to use in their searching? There are so many resources on the net that can help you determine the right keywords. Find one and use it. Then repeat those words throughout your article (just shy of being irritating about overusing them) and you'll find greater success!

5. LASTLY, YOUR ARTICLE MARKETING MUST PROVIDE A CALL TO ACTION.

Lead the reader to do something. Whether it be to download your eBook, call you directly, or click onto your website. Typically, you want to lead them to the next thing they can get for FREE. People like FREE. So lead them to your website, where they can download an eBook that solves this same problem but in more depth, or better yet, offer them a FREE strategy session if they contact you by email. Make it easy for them, like "Hey, I'll even have my assistant set up a time for me to talk to you directly for 20 minutes about ways you can build your business based on these principles. FREE."

Wishing you the best in business and the best in life.

Corey Blake the co-author of "EDGE! A Leadership Story" (Morgan James, 2008), is President of Writers of the Round Table, a strategic literary development company.

Visit us at http://www.writersoftheroundtable.com or email me right now: corey@writersoftheroundtable.com

Tell me you want 20 minutes of my time to discuss how we can help you set up an article creation program that DRIVES YOU REVENUE!