Web Marketing Strategy Update

I seldom republish articles these days (although considering how short on time I’ve been recently it might be a good idea to re-think that!), but thanks to her making the effort to drop me a message via the NowSell.com contact form, I found this good piece by Kim Roach that shares some fresher, rarer tips on article marketing:

Confessions of an Article Marketer

I have a slight confession to make…

I am highly addicted to article marketing. You can try and entice me with a number of other internet marketing strategies, but article marketing will always be my favorite.

You probably know about the many benefits of article marketing. Syndicating your articles will increase your targeted traffic, turn you into an expert in the field of your choice, brand your name, and help build your opt-in list. However, article marketing boasts a number of other benefits left mostly undiscovered and I want to share them with you.

Get Your Article and Your Photo Into Google News

Want to get your article and even your picture into Google News? Well, your entrance stands only a few clicks away. The key is getting published on a website that is syndicated on Google News. American Chronicle is one of those web sites.

MarketingSherpa has released their 2nd Annual Search Marketing Benchmark report. 3,271 search marketers provided real-life results data for the survey, making it the biggest SEM study respondent base ever.

The new report includes:

• New stats on clicks, costs, conversions (and fraud)
• Which SEM tests work and which don’t
• Differences between agency-side vs in-house SEM results (Should you hire an agency or do it yourself?)
• How much marketers are budgeting for SEM for 2006 (breaks out b-to-b vs b-to-c)

Some excerpts:

Only 34% of 3,007 active search marketers that MarketingSherpa surveyed in July 2004 said their PPC ad results were “very good.” 13 months later, 43% of 3,271 surveyed MarketingSherpa readers said PPC ad results were “very effective” — a nine-point jump.

Search optimization (SEO) campaign satisfaction didn’t fare nearly as well. Last year 31% of surveyed marketers said SEO results were very good. This year 33% say SEO is very effective. It’s a gain, but only two points.

Even then, SEO came out far ahead of non-search tactics such as email marketing (25% “very effective” rate) and affiliate marketing (22% “very effective” rate).