Finding Your Marketing Comfort Zone

So, you’ve got something to say that you think others will find valuable. You’ve created an information based product and coaching services to enhance and optimize its value. And people are knocking down your doors to buy!
Unfortunately, while the first part may be true, without a lot of effort the second rarely is. The key to getting people to buy what you have to offer is marketing, and if you have been working on attracting people to your products and services already, you know there is no lack of vehicles available on the internet to do just that. But that’s part of the problem. There are so many ways available to let people know about what you have to offer it is difficult to know what the best one is. More to the point, there is little out there to help you discover which one is the best one for you.
Most successful internet based marketers that I know of have found their success through a hit-and-miss process that has cost them a lot of time and money. They are successful in large part because they learned from early failures and they did not let those failures dissuade them from continuing to pursue their vision. But depending on what source you read, the percentage rate of internet based businesses that fail is in the mid- to upper-90s. Clearly, many people are unsuccessful in their marketing efforts, due in large part, I believe, to the fact that they have not found their marketing ‘comfort zone’
Marketing is a complex business, but one thing I know is that it takes determination and perseverance. If you are not comfortable with the things you do to market yourself, your products, and your services, you are not going to stick with them through the inevitable failures and adjustments required to see the rewards of success. Awareness of your marketing comfort zone– what fits you and what you have to offer– is a critical component of marketing success. How you perceive the world– your Perceptual Style (PS) – has everything to do with what type of marketing will be most comfortable (and therefore most productive) for you. People do the things they are comfortable with and the things they enjoy, and when the going gets tough it is these things they return to. Integrate your marketing activities with who you are and you will discover your marketing comfort zone.
Understanding your marketing comfort zone will allow you to understand which marketing activities are best suited to you, which approaches take best advantage of your skills and talents, and what types of media present you and what you offer in the best light. In addition, when you market from your marketing comfort zone, you send a message that is consistent with who you are, and it is also integrated with your Perceptual Style. Such a message is received favorably by both clients and prospects. Discovering your marketing comfort zone requires some effort on your part to learn about and understand your PS and to study how the skills and talents it supports fit with different ways of promoting yourself in the internet marketplace. But the rewards are worth the effort.
Gary Jordan, Ph.D., has over 27 years of experience in clinical psychology, behavioral assessment, individual development, and coaching. He earned his doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology – Berkeley. He is co-creator of Perceptual Style Theory, a revolutionary psychological assessment system that teaches people how to unleash their deepest potentials for success. He’s a partner at Vega Behavioral Consulting, Ltd., a consulting firm that specializes in helping people discover their true skills and talents, visit www.ACIforCoaches.com or www.ACIforEntrepreneurs.com.
Article Courtesy of BB Articles Directory

The Article Marketing Handbook – Will it Help Article Marketers?

This review is my personal opinion of 'The Article Marketing Handbook' I'll tell you:

1) What it's about
2} Did I learn anything?
3} Is it worth the asking price?

I’ve read a lot of articles, ebooks and forum posts about article marketing and have found that the information and advice offered can be conflicting and confusing to new article marketers. As an article marketer I have studied the results from my own campaigns and come to my own conclusions. As an article directory owner I can see from studying the site stats month after month which articles are working for the authors. I can also see from Google searches which articles have been found on my site and republished on blogs or websites.

With the double insight of article marketer and directory owner it can be frustrating to see articles being submitted that you know will not be effective for the authors. On the other hand you learn to recognise articles that are going to do well for the authors and your directory.

With this in mind I was curious to read ‘The Article Marketing Handbook’ written by Allen Graves – an experienced article directory owner and article marketer. I’ve come across Allen in forums and have to admit that we don’t always agree, but it is plain to see that Allen cares about article marketing. Because Allen has been involved with article marketing longer than I have I hoped that I would learn something from his handbook. I also felt that as he had the same opportunity of double insight as I have albeit for longer that ‘The Article Marketing Handbook’ should be as good as if not better than anything that I have previously read. My expectations were high so lets see if the handbook lived up to them.

The Content

At first I was impatient to get to the ‘meat’ of the ebook and wasn’t happy with the long introduction and theorising in the first couple of chapters, but then I saw that Allen was expressing why it is important to get your article marketing campaign right. It isn’t just information - it’s plain common sense that every article marketer should consider before embarking on a marketing campaign and worth reading.

Allen then guides you through selecting your niche, ways of discovering what information your readers are searching for and spending money on and how to find the best keywords. All useful information and if used correctly should help you to write more effective articles.

You learn why you should use pen names and how to select them. How to write titles that grab a reader’s attention while appealing to search engines. How to best summarise your articles and how to format the article body to capture the reader’s attention and keep them reading. Some tips are also included on how to write your author resource box to gain higher click throughs to your website.

Did I learn Anything?

Yes I did. I was particularly interested in a chapter explaining how to find the best places to submit your articles to and why. Also how to get more click throughs by promoting your articles after your submissions have been accepted. Both ideas are so obvious that I wondered why I hadn’t thought of them.

There are several more article marketing tricks that I have noticed used by authors who submit to my directories and hadn’t really thought about. To find out if they work I checked my site stats and sure enough those articles were getting more than the average hits. That could be a coincidence or those tricks could be working for the authors and my directories.

What I Think

There is a whole lot more information but now I’m going to tell you what I think about ‘The Article Marketing Handbook’. The ebook is well written and in a no BS style that I personally like. For anybody familiar with article or Internet marketing it’s easy to understand, but those new to the field may struggle without more basic information about for instance the importance of keywords and phrases. But, that and other basic information can be readily found with an Internet search.

Is It Worth The $47 Asking Price?

For most ebooks I would say absolutely not. That is because there are thousands of ebooks available on the Internet free or at incredibly low prices and that muddies the water on perceived value. The Article Marketing Handbook is different in that it provides a lot of information and advice that I haven’t seen before in any article, forum or ebook. Information and advice that I know from experience is correct even if I hadn’t thought about some of it before reading the handbook.

The Article Marketing Handbook is by far the best guide I have read on the subject of article marketing, so I wasn’t disappointed. As Allen will be providing updates as the market changes I would consider the one off $47 payment to be a good investment for ongoing success in the article marketing field.


The author Patricia Jones writes for several websites including The Creative Writer and Make Money From Writing

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Writing Reviews For Article Marketing

There are several review sites on the Internet and for two years I regularly submitted reviews to two of them. Reviews are a writer’s opinion of a product or service and writing and submitting them are in some ways similar but also different to writing for article marketing. In this article I’m going to make comparisons and show how I think that reviews can be used in article marketing.

Detail and Information

For me writing reviews was good grounding for article marketing. I had previously written articles for home business magazines but when I started to write reviews I soon found that I needed to add more detail and information to do well in the review site ratings and earnings, sometimes it could get a bit silly when over critical members would want to know every little detail about packaging when the site owners did not.

The more detail and information we add to an article the better. Some article marketers split their information into several articles instead of writing one information packed article. That may work better for getting quick back links but if I tried to do that I would feel as if I was selling myself and readers short. There is always the option of using part 1, 2, 3 etc in the article titles but if a site visitor looking for information found part 3 first would they bother to look for parts 1 and 2 when they can just click back to the search engine and find a full article on the subject that they are interested in?

As we are always hopeful that a publisher may use our articles as website or ezine content I suspect that if an article comes in several parts it would have to be really good to stand a chance of being chosen.

Warts And All

There is a difference between reviews written for sites like Ciao and Dooyoo and reviews written for article marketing. On the review sites you review a product warts and all. The reviews need to be honest because it is useful feedback for manufacturers and because the review sites are communities your credibility is at stake amongst other members. The rewards are not very high even for top writers, but I guess that would depend on which area of the world that you live in.

Most of the reviews that I’ve seen in article or Internet marketing are full of praise and no warts. You know that the authors are trying to sell a product or get readers to join the latest millionaire making affiliate programme. You also know that many of the reviews will be dishonest because the authors are trying to gain product or affiliate sales.

In article marketing the rewards are backlinks to your sites and hopefully syndication of your articles to get more backlinks. The money that can be earned through article marketing is greater and especially if an article goes viral, but as with review sites you don’t earn anything if you don’t get it right.

Getting Content Right

Getting the content right for reviews and article marketing is much the same. Quality, information, legibility, correct grammar and punctuation, advice, detail, layout and for me simplifying technical explanations to a level that most can understand. That last one was my idea! If a reviewer is writing about a particular model of mp3 player and that review is found in a search for information about mp3 players by somebody interested in buying one; and the reader can’t understand the technical jargon then they are going to look elsewhere for advice.

The same applies to article marketing. If your article about mp3 players is linking back to your site or blog that incidentally has adverts for mp3 players you want the reader to go all the way down to the bottom and click on your link, not click away because you have lost their understanding part way through. As a publisher looking for website content I would be more likely to go for an article that is easy to understand rather than one giving the same information but full of technical jargon. That is unless you are aiming your article towards techie sites and that’s a whole different ball game.

When you write product reviews for the review sites you don’t need to think about key words and phrases as in article marketing, though if the review sites pay per visitor click it’s not a bad idea to use them. In article marketing we learn to use key words and phrases in our article titles and article body, but when we use too many it can make an article harder to understand and read. If a publisher is looking for good content that will capture visitor’s interest and keep them on their site longer they will be happy with key words and phrases used in context with an article but not if they are too many and placed where they don’t fit.

Knowing Your Subject

When you review a product you are expected be familiar with and have used the product enough to be able to give a fair assessment of it. For instance a review about a washing machine that you have been using regularly for several months is far more credible and useful as feedback and for prospective buyer information than a review about a washing machine that you have only just bought and used twice.

The same should apply to article marketing and in many cases it happens, but there are also lots of contrived articles. The best writers can carry it off and make it seem as if they use a product or service but many writers can’t fake it. It is pretty obvious that they have gleaned their information from sales spiel and the lack of user experience in an article lowers it’s worth for readers looking for information and publishers looking for content.

My biggest bugbear is travel articles. I love reading about different places from a visitor’s point of view. Contrived travel articles are generally boring and next to useless for readers who want to know what a place is really like and are looking for tips before they book their holiday. If I couldn’t produce more information than can be found on a travel brochure I wouldn’t write about a place.

Do Reviews Work In Article Marketing

I think that there is a place for reviews in article marketing and if they are well written and show user experience they are good for publishers to use as content. Reviews can be written about almost any product or service giving a wide range of subjects to write about – as long as that product or service isn’t your own!

The author Patricia Jones writes for several websites including Mega Music Site, Articles Abroad which offers travel information and The Creative Writer