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How can content help promote your site? One of the best ways to attract visitors to your site is by providing related sites with quality editorial relating to your subject area. Not only will this give you a chance to promote your service or small business, but it can also indirectly aid your search engine promotion efforts via link popularity.

For example, our website provides web design services for small businesses and individuals. There are a wealth of topics related to web design – probably hundreds, so there is no shortage of material to write articles on. The same is true for many other business areas whether your site is related to finance, travel or web design. Sure, article writing is easier when you are providing a service rather than say a product, but if you write clearly and concisely, other sites are more than willing to exchange content for links.

The best way to research sites which may be interested in quality editorial is to search on Google for ‘submit article’ + your subject area. For example, ‘submit article web design’. Make sure you visit any sites which regularly publish quality articles on your subject areas and find out their publishing terms. Chances are you will already be familiar with the key portals or news sites related to your area of expertise – email them to see if you can contribute editorial. The more established the publishing site the better.

Article submission and link popularity

You may well gain new visitors on the back of your article submission, but you’re also likely to have the article linked to that site for some time which could help with your own site’s page rank. This is an added bonus of article submission.

Once the article page on the publisher’s site is indexed by the major search engines (Google being of paramount importance), the link from the article back to your own site will be factored in to your site’s link popularity algorithm. The higher the Google Pagerank of the publisher’s site, the more important this backlink will be considered for your own site’s importance. So, look out for well laid out and indexed publisher sites for your content.

Remember at all times that there is a well-established trade-off between the author and the publisher. In exchange for a well written and researched article, any publisher should be more than willing to publish a link and summary back to the author’s site – it’s a fair exchange.

In order to get your article(s) published – there are several universal rules you should take into account:

Tips for writing articles for publication

1) Aim to write between 700 and 800 words – this seems to be the typical length required by most publishers. Check first though – some sites prefer more or less words per article.

2) Try to add a new angle to the subjects already submitted to the site.

3) Make sure the article is checked for spelling and the grammar (use MS Word).

4) Break the article up into meaningful sections, using headers for each section.

5) Don’t try to promote your services too much – this will put readers and editors off. They want qulity editorial, not a sales pitch.

6) Ask the editor(s) if there are any subjects they’d particularly like you to write about – keep in their good books.

7) Make sure you retain all rights to your article. Some sites may want ownership of your work, but most don’t. Make sure also that you can distribute any article to several publishers (don’t spread yourself too thin though).

In return for the content, you should be able to submit a link at the end, either in an ‘about the author’ section, or just at the end of the article. Use this opportunity to add a decent link back to your site.

Summary

The key to promoting your website using articles is in the win-win situation between the author and the publisher. Both sides need to benefit. The article must be well researched, relevant and readable. In return, you should get some traffic from the link in the article, and once Google & co. index the article, you’ll have a new backlink to your own site which will aid your link popularity. The more articles and sites you publish to, the more links you’ll get back, and your site’s reputation will be enhanced by the editorial you have written.

From time to time we post articles from guest bloggers – Here is one such article :

Over the past 3 or 4 years we have seen a major reversal in the power of the individual consumer and consequently a dilution of the influence of brand controlled messaging.

The traditional corporate video is typically a PR exercise in portraying the brand as seen by the company, or as the company want the brand to be viewed externally.

These are typically boring as hell to watch and have little emotional impact on the viewer.

I believe that this form of corporate video is now dead and that brands need to tell their true corporate stories.

Take a look at this traditional corporate video from 2005:

This video is informative and impressive in a corporate way, it may stimulate something in the mind, but for the heart there is nothing. How does it make you feel? Are you more interested in the company and likely to fly with them now? What do you remember from the video? Did you have any emotional stirrings in your gut?

Here is another one from the aviation industry but that was uploaded to Youtube in 2010:

OK, so it is for a small local airport so not likely to be a blockbuster or one that has incredible relevance to a large audience but at least there is a more human element to it compared with the Malaysia Airlines video from 5 years earlier.

Finally, I want to show you a corporate video that I think is doing it the right way. It is a warts and all story showing how a few people’s passion and dedication got them through years of obscurity to become a successful business.

How did you feel at the end of that? Feel like dusting down your old board and taking to the streets?

We have now moved to a phase in ecommerce where information is readily shared between businesses and their customers, customers to businesses as well as between customers and potential customers. This means that marketing and company communications have to be more open and more human.

The days of corporate broadcasting with little interruption are over; what brands say in the public space is open to support, reinforcement, criticism and complaints. If brands do not speak honestly then it will be exposed and will result in an embarrassing mess (e.g. Netflix) whereas if brands take the risk of being open and sharing all with their customers and potential customers then possibilities of true success through loyalty can become a reality.

Social media has been a challenging concept for many brands as they have had to make a decision to put trust in their staff to communicate responsibly in real time with their customers. With social mediums like Twitter, Youtube and Facebook there is no time to get approval on every tweet or every comment you make. It has to be fast and it has to be real and human.

People use social media for fun and for efficiency; if you are not adding to their experience then you will lose their attention. This is also true for video content. The Sector 9 video above is fun and engaging to watch, not just because the product is fun but also because it is a human story.

More and more businesses are using video as a medium to communicate the work that they are doing and many are achieving great results; well known examples are the “Will it Blend” series of videos (http://www.willitblend.com/) promoting the Blendtec product and also the fabulous Wine Library TV (http://tv.winelibrary.com/) series by Gary Vaynerchuk. He doesn’t hold back and worry about the branding too much, he has enough confidence in himself to just be natural and this has helped him to build a massive business through a small family wine shop; his personality is the brand.

Corporate video no longer has a set format, it can be whatever best fits your brand. The corporate story style video as shown in the Sector 9 example does not have to be expensive or incredibly time consuming to produce.

You can use existing images and video footage and then just write your story as if you were telling it to a family member or friend.

Once you have the bare bones of the story and the media that will help you to tell the tale well then it is a matter of planning it out and piecing it together.

It is rare that people set up a business with the sole aim of making money, there is normally a compelling story to tell and this is what you need to communicate. How does your business help people improve their lives?

Guest Blogger Profile

This post was written by Neil Davidson, CEO of Mywebpresenters who are a video production company specializing in corporate video for the web. They are also the pioneers of the web presenters (http://www.mywebpresenters.com/) technology. If you would like to have a conversation about how to tell your corporate story then please email Neil at neil.davidson@mywebpresenters.com.

Being “social” is a big thing on the web and these days you need to be posting things on your wall and tweeting regularly, or the whole world will stop and life as we know it will end.

One of the supposed big things for this year (2011) is social networking.  The main driving force behind this is that the more ‘friends’ your site has the more popular you are and the higher you’ll appear in the search engines.

If you build up a list of friends and get posting away the idea is that perhaps they will be interested in what you are doing and will either buy something from you or will tell a colleague or friend all about you and what you do and then they may use your services or buy something from you.

This seems to work well with physical items, but things like websites for example are quite hard to sell in this manner as it’s a fairly specific requirement.

However this post is just a quick reminder for you that if you are website owner you need to keep on with your social networking activities as they will eventually may dividends…..And of course if you are not a website owner and want one, then you know who to call (erm, us of course).

In case you don’t know how to add a Facebook like button to your website, it’s quite easy and there is some simple code below that you can copy and paste onto your web page.

<script src=”http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1″></script>
<fb:like></fb:like>

Enjoy