Q. I understand we are allowed to put pictures in the articles. Pictures of the product that we are reviewing. Can you please tell me how to include pictures in an article?
A. You’ll need to host the photo somewhere on your site or a hosting location. There are two ways you may include an image. First, we have a blank on the article submission form where you can put the full http address of the image, and we will include it at the upper left of the article beside the title.
Or if you want it inside the body of the article, you may reference it using HTML codes. Something like
A recent study by Vitis PR discovered that “IdeaMarketers.com, PR Zoom and Business Services UK were the best websites for building links, as they provided some free SEO benefit by providing links and allowing users to tailor the anchor text.” Click here for the report.
How would you like to receive highly targeted traffic to your web site?
As you know, IdeaMarketers.com is all about assisting you in the promotion of your message — by allowing you to post your articles, press releases, info products, audios and videos to our high traffic site. Now we’ve added another economical option for promoting your events, resources, sales pages, etc. to targeted audiences.
We call them “Idea Ads.” You load your title, link, and description into a category of your choice. Then your ad appears on every article/press release in that category. This means your ad/link could appear on hundreds, even thousands of targeted pages.
Best of all it’s incredibly affordable because it uses our same set-your-own-pricing model (aka our bidding system).
Find out how to receive this highly targeted traffic to your web site by placing your ad directly in front of your audience at http://www.ideamarketers.com/ideaad.cfm
As far as I know there aren’t too many content directories online that will let you embed your videos into your articles, but not only do we allow it at IdeaMarketers.com, but we encourage it. It’s always a good idea to give people multiple ways to consume your information. Some people would rather read what you have to say, but others would prefer to watch a video or listen to an audio.
For example, I’d rather watch a video or listen to an audio most of the time. I can do that while I work on something else that is mindless, but that needs to be done. In this video I’ll show you just how simple it is to add video to your articles on IdeaMarketers.com.
This question was submitted to me by a writer. “I tested article marketing for four months, from Sept – Dec 2010. I posted 24 unique articles (keyword optimized and obeying all the rules) in nine top article directories, including your own. Result: some 50,000 listings in Google. Looks good! But to date they’ve drawn just 107 click-throughs to my subscription site leading to one conversion to sale – worth $70 per annum. A dismal ROI!”
“Question: if I continue at all, I’m faced with two options. I can take Steve Shaw’s advice at SubmitYourArticle.com and dribble out just two articles per week. Each will be massively spun, of course, to yield more potential variations than there are atoms in the brain of Bill Gates. At four levels of syntax, each will take two days to spin, even using spinner software.
“Or I can go the Sean Mize route and post 20+ different articles per day, spun quickly and somewhat less ‘unique’ – and hope that Google won’t ignore too many of them. I don’t care about coming top of the search engines. I want click-throughs, quickly. ‘What doth it avail a man if Google loves him – but he maketh no money?’ Which route should I go?”
Answer: It sounds to me that the problem here is conversion — or lack thereof. Before you go either route, you need to get a compelling call to action in your articles that makes it a “must click” for the person to go to your site. Poorly created spinner articles (in any quantity) are never going to help you do that. Well-crafted articles that engage the reader and make them want to go to your site for more are what you need. Work on increasing your conversion rate from article to visit to signup to purchase, and then go from there.
Q. How can an article stuffed with keywords attract readers?
A. In short, it can’t! In the past keyword stuffing an article would get that article picked up by search engines for the phrase being stuffed into it, but sites like Google and others are getting smarter all the time. Still putting your keyword phrase into your title, summary and article is a smart thing to do — in moderation. But over-stuffing makes readers leave skid marks. They take one look at the garbage and click off the page. It does you absolutely no good.
Always put your reader first. Manipulation tactics may work for a while, but they never last long as search engines tweak their algorithms to side-step them. Writing for the reader is always best practice.
Q. I’ve written and submitted over a hundred articles, but am seeing no increase in traffic. Help!
A. First, make sure you haven’t made a typo in your web address. Click on your links in your article and make sure they work and lead to your site. Make sure your hyperlink syntax is correct in any links you embed within your article or within your resource box. Here’s a typical hyperlink syntax:
Make sure the double quotes in the code are standard straight quotes and not smart quotes imported from Microsoft Word or some other wordprocessing program.
Second, have a compelling call to action that makes people want to visit your site. For example, if your article is about “How to Fix a Leaky Faucet” you could link people over to a free ebook on “How to Save Money on Home Repairs.” Then link the person directly over to the exact URL on your site about this free ebook. Don’t make visitors hunt for the information on your site.
Too many people have no call to action with their article. They put something like, “John Doe is a writer/consultant. To learn more about him go to his web site.” Honestly, most people don’t care about learning more about you. They want something to be in it for them! Give them an incentive to follow through and go to your site, and that incentive should be directly related to the article. This may mean having multiple incentives and matching your articles to those incentives.
We operate a G-rated site at IdeaMarketers and enforce it strictly. We do not accept gambling, porn-related, adult-related, or offensive content. If we wouldn’t want our kindergartner reading it, then we will pull it.
We also insist that information entered be an actual article or press release and not an advertisement. Many people try to abuse our system by putting short keyword stuffed ads into our system as articles. This results in us removing the entire writer account and all the items posted within it. So don’t bother doing that!
While we are strict about content, we are more lenient than other content directories about how many links you can put to your site within an article or you bio. We do not set a limit, but hope that you would use this option judiciously. Too many links doesn’t help you anyway.
We also allow you to embed object code within your articles. So if you’d like to include a video or an audio embed code in your article, we are open to that. It just needs to be G-rated content.
For full list of our terms and conditions, go here.
We don’t have an approval process. All articles post instantly. If you post an article and it doesn’t appear, your web browser may be set to block our site from setting session variables. In other words, your web browser won’t let us remember who you are long enough for you to add articles. If you got kicked back to the login screen after you entered an article, then one of three things happened:
You took too long entering your article and your session timed out. NEVER type your article directly into the box provided, type it in another program (i.e. Word, NotePad, etc) and then copy and paste it into the form. This will keep internet glitches from causing you to lose your article. Plus, if you take too long entering your information into the form, the connection could time out and log you out of our system.
A common reason for being sent back to the login screen and your article not being added is that most likely your Web browser security settings are set too high and are not allowing our site to create a session variable. Make sure you’re using either IE or Firefox to access the site. Go to Tools, Internet Options, Security, Trusted Sites (Or Exceptions) and add http://www.ideamarketers.com to your list of trusted sites. Uncheck anything that requires SSL or https://.
Avoid using Chrome. It still has some glitches and won’t always work with our advanced programming.
Another possibility is that if you posted articles that violated our terms/conditions they would have been removed. Our terms and conditions are at http://www.ideamarketers.com/library/terms.cfm
Q. How much does it cost to submit press releases to IdeaMarketers?
A. It’s free to submit press release to IdeaMarketers. If you want prominent promotion on the home page, we have a set-your-own-pricing model for that. The more you pay, the higher you come up on the home page. Details and a link to getting a writer account and submitting your press releases are here.
