One of most critical strategies to increase your article marketing for your own business, as well as your clients’ businesses is to expand your search engine visibility. Through trial and error, I have found the following techniques to be very beneficial.

Write articles

It’s not hard to write articles. You don’t have to be a certified writer or publisher. As long as you follow good down-to-earth grammar, punctuation, and spelling guidelines, you CAN write your own articles and not have to pay someone else to write them for you.

Have Your Articles Distributed Far and Wide

Choose a good content distribution service where you can submit your articles and let them do all the leg work for you in getting your articles out to the hungry publishers and content site owners. Once such site that I use is Content Crooner. They have over 2,000 sites that they distribute articles to.

Socialize

The advantages of belonging to social networking sites are multiple. Using social media can increase your visibility in search engines. Setting up profiles, commenting, adding friends - this can all contribute to raising your status as an expert in the search engines. By adding links to your comments and profile pages, you will eventually begin to see increased traffic to your website or blog. The increased traffic will, in turn, raise your page rank scores.

Contribute

Contribute what, you might ask. Contribute by commenting on other people’s blogs, commenting in forums, sharing articles on your website, and making helpful comments on other articles you read, if the site owner allows comments. By making positive, helpful comments, you are going to be recognized as an expert in your particular niche.  By doing so, people are going to want to learn more about you. They’re going to search you out in Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and other search engines.

Blog

You don’t have to have a blog that a developer creates for you that costs you a lot of money. You can create your own blog on websites such as wordpress.com or blogspot.com. When writing on your blog, you are using a journalistic mind frame - write from the heart while utilizing research material and/or personal experience to keep your reader’s interest up.

Promote

Here’s where a quality content distribution service like Content Crooner comes into play. You will want to take advantage of special features that the service might offer. For example, perhaps you can take advantage of special sharing options that a service might have or special partnerships in order to obtain prominent position on one or several top article marketing directories.

A virtual assistant needs to do multiple article marketing strategies in order to increase search engine visibility — not only for in order to become successful for your own company, but also for your clients. Now is the time to learn the techniques I’ve mentioned above and increase your value and your potential for success. Don’t wait; do it now!

About the author:

Pam Lokker is a skillful writer and proficient virtual assistant. Borlok Virtual Assistants is the place to get global expert VA services with quality and on-time delivery.

Stop! Click Here! to read more about Content Crooner.

There are quite a few article distribution sites out there that will allow you to submit your articles, and they will send your articles out wide and far. What are some questions you should ask yourself prior to signing up and entrusting your valuable written content to them?

Who will your articles be sent to?

One of the first things you want to know is what type of a publisher list they have. Do they have many, many publishers that they will send your articles out to, or just a few? Do their publishers have good Alexa or Google pagerank? It would be wise to check out some of the sites to ensure your articles will be sent to reputable, well-known companies.

What type of membership plans do they have?

Prior to becoming a member of an article distribution company, do a little homework and see what type of memberships or subscription plans they have. Do they have free memberships? If so, what type of benefits does a free membership entail you? Be sure to read the terms of agreement to see how they will bill you if you have to pay for a subscription. Many of them will use a specific payment processor, and the billing will be on recurring billing. Be sure you understand the terms of agreement; then print it and keep it.

What kind of distribution plan do they have?

Are your articles going to be distributed for a long time, or short spurts? Does the company you decide on allow your articles to be sent to new publishers as they sign on, or are they going to be sent to a static, non-changing list? The ideal solution would be to have your content go out to new publishers and content site owners as they sign up.

Will your articles be reviewed prior to being sent out?

Should you be fortunate enough to find a website that has live human review of articles once you submit them, I highly recommend utilizing this valuable feature. A major disadvantage of trying to manually submit articles to a wide variety of article submission places is trying to keep all of their requirements and guidelines straight in your head. A company that has reviewers spot check your articles for you will know all the guidelines and be able to give you professional feedback on how to improve your articles so they speed through the review process.

Can you schedule your articles to be sent out at a specific time?

Wouldn’t it be a blessing if you could write and submit your articles ahead of time and then be able to schedule their distribution for a certain day? There are content distribution places out there that will allow you to do this. Check this option out; it’s well worth being able to advance schedule.

Whatever website you decide to go with, make sure you do your homework in checking out the company with BBB and other consumer sites that will rate companies based on their service level, integrity, and other measures prior to making that all important leap, especially if you are going to get a paid subscription.

Is there a content distribution marketing company that I use that I would recommend? Yes, I personally use Content Crooner, and am very happy with them. They have excellent customer service, economical paid subscriptions, an extensive distribution list of publishers, and a knowledgeable review staff. Don’t just take my word for it, however. Do your own research and feel comfortable with your decision.

It’s possible not all virtual assistants out there had an opportunity to get their hands on my previous post on why a virtual assistant should take up article marketing, so let me do a brief recap here:

* Article writing can establish an author as a subject matter expert.
* Writing articles is economical; you don’t have to dole out a lot of cash
* Article site directories are eager to get their sites loaded up with new, fresh content.
* You can include links that will direct your readers back to your own website.
* You have a wealth of information that you can use over and over again.
* You can actually win some new clients from their reading your content.

So now that we know what the benefits are for article marketing, what is a good way to have our articles be shown on the Internet? In other words, how do we vamp up our article marketing? Let’s take a look at some different methods you can use.

Methods for Getting Articles Distributed

Manual Submission

In my mind, there are three ways that you could vamp up your article marketing and increase your Internet exposure. The first way we’ll look at is by manual entering — that is taking your article and manually entering it into an article submission site like EzineArticles, or GoArticles, just to name a couple. These both rate high in Google pagerank and have free membership plans.

You can also submit your articles manually to online magazine publishers that give users the user-friendly ability to build interactive “wikizines”, or web magazines. One such site is Zimbio.

Article Marketing Software

Another method is to use article marketing software. Some people have a lot of success using article marketing software. There is even software out there that will combine article spinning with article submission. Personally, I’m not even interested in using article spinning software at all. When you use the software, you are just regurgitating the same content over and over and over in slightly different ways using a variety of synonyms that can drastically alter the meaning of the written word. So my advice is to stay away from article spinners.

Article Marketing Distribution Company

The third way that a virtual assistant can vamp up their article marketing is by using a company like Content Crooner, a first-rate article distribution company. Content Crooner has a comprehensive list of publishers and content site owners that they will distribute your articles to. What this means is that you have the ease of submitting your article to Content Crooner and they take care of all the legwork of distributing your content wide and far.

What are some benefits of using Content Crooner in addition to an expansive publisher list? Take a look at some of the features as to why I choose them for all my article marketing campaigns.

• Unlimited article distribution
• Distribution that takes place 24/7, 365 days a year
• Experienced reviewers that will check your article over for you to ensure your articles will be readily accepted by publishers
• The ability to schedule when you want your articles to go out
• Multiple pricing plans to fit your needs with a 30-day money-back guarantee

No matter which method you opt for, you should understand that as a virtual assistant, you really should take advantage of article marketing. Just by learning the ins and outs of article marketing for yourself, look at the increased opportunities you would have if a client came to you and asked if you offered article marketing as one of your services. Now is the time to get into this ever-growing field. Don’t hesitate; increase your Internet exposure now and get out there and start article marketing!

A virtual assistant is frequently asked to write or rewrite all kinds of material - anything from a letter on up to a book. Using the right tools can ensure that your material is content rich; one of those tools is a thesaurus. Learn firsthand what a thesaurus is and what it’s used for.

If you are a virtual assistant, undoubtedly you will eventually have a client that wishes you to rewrite something he or she may have penned or typed. It’s not always an easy task to find just the right words to capture the essence of what is being said in an interesting and accurate manner. Now is the time to make your articles rich in content by using a thesaurus.

What is it you might ask? A thesaurus is just the tool you need; it’s a book that has a classified
list of synonyms. You remember what a synonym is from your days in English class at school, right? According to the Encarta English Dictionary (provided in Microsoft Word 2007), a synonym is a word that means the same, or almost the same, as another word in the same language, either in all of its uses or in a specific context. Examples of synonyms in this sense are “environment” and “surroundings” and the verbs “tear” and “rip.”

So why is a thesaurus useful in making your content rich when you write or rewrite articles? For one thing, if you replace words with synonyms, your content might just grab and keep the reader’s interest that much longer. You’ve all heard that you only have thirty seconds to stimulate a reader’s natural curiosity so they dive deeper into your article.

What are some good thesaurus’s out there that I can use online? I will discuss three here. Don’t take my word as gospel, however; do a search in your favorite search engine under “thesaurus.” I want you to have the freedom to make up your own mind as to which one will work the best for you.

Unless I’m working on a laptop, the very first thesaurus that I use all the time is WordWeb. WordWeb is a free English thesaurus and dictionary software download for Windows. Why do I like it? Just check out some of the things it can help you with:

* Definitions and synonyms
* Proper nouns
* Related words
* Pronunciations
* 150 000 root words
* 120 000 synonym sets
* Looks up words in almost any program

What makes Word Web so useful is that you have the ability to use a combination of the Ctrl + Alt + the W keys on your computer keyboard to have the program open on your desktop. This saves immeasurable time and is even faster than the next program I am going to talk about.

Remember I mentioned that I work on a laptop? One of the disadvantages of doing so is that a laptop will not have as much memory as a desktop so I do not tend to download a lot of software. What I have discovered is that Microsoft Office Word 2007 has a built-in thesaurus. How do you kick it into gear? To give you a simple explanation, say I want to change the word gear in my previous sentence to something else. I would right click on the word gear and scroll down to Look Up, left click with your mouse on the words Look Up and voilà! It will automatically default to All Reference Books, but that is easy to change. Just click on the down arrow next to All Reference Books and change it to Thesaurus: English (You can also choose French or Spanish).

A virtual assistant has to be thrifty in their use of time, as well as being the best of the best. Oftentimes, there will be resources available to us that we don’t even know that can save us an immense amount of work. One of those resources is a good thesaurus. A good thesaurus can not only save us time, it can provide us with synonyms that will help us write and rewrite articles, blogs, press releases, eBooks, etc., that are award-winning. Not only that, a thesaurus can help us make our material rich in content.