By Cody Moya
You're selling snowboots, and you're doing reasonably well. Suddenly you notice that the hits to your website are dropping off, and your sales are following. It's winter; they should be moving really well! What's happening?
Chances are good that a competitor is siphoning off your customer pool. If your website isn't search-engine optimized or if your content is stale, your customers may be going somewhere else. Here's what happens: your website is established, providing a nice catalog selection of snowboots and accessories. Paul's Snowboots springs up out of nowhere, and determines that the way to get a good customer base is to make his website better than yours.
So Paul studies you. He figures out what keywords pull up your site, and he uses those on his site. He figures out who's linking to you, and he requests reciprocal links from these vendors. And he discovers that you're not offering anything to your customers but a nice place to buy snowboots at a fair price.
Paul starts writing articles, one every month on different aspects of snowboots. He posts articles on his website. He submits them to article exchange databases, finding more URLs to link to his site. He creates a regular newsletter, and once he's captured a customer's attention with the newsletter, he can continually remind them that he's there and waiting whenever they're ready to buy snowboots.
There's a finite customer pool for snowboots; inevitably, you're going to feel the pinch.
So how do you stop it?
Writing Articles To Capture and Keep Customers
Today's average web consumer is terribly spoiled. He or she is used to getting a little something free. If your customers have been coming to your site for months or years and gotten nothing extra except a nice thank you note and a good price, then they may be ready for a change.
And the best freebie you can give them is an informative article. That's what Paul knows that you don't know.
So Paul has been writing articles: how to ensure your snowboots are waterproof, why you should buy a size larger than you think, what you can do to keep them smelling fresh inside, everything he can think of. And customers have been flocking to him, reading his articles, using his advice – and buying his boots.
The only way to fight back is to provide your own great article content, and even a newsletter.
But you don't know how to write.
Finding Articles to Keep the Customers
That's okay, believe it or not. It'll cost you a little extra money, not much, to buy private label rights to web-optimized content from a professional writer. You can guide the writing of the articles, or you can purchase them pre-written; whichever way you go, your main task is going to be ensuring the articles add value to your customer's trip to your website.
You can find articles to purchase from article brokers, or you can hire writers directly to write for your website. Either way, be certain you can put your own byline on the article; this makes it your own, no matter who wrote it to begin with.
But don't stop there. Go ahead and start a newsletter, and ask your customers to sign up for more great information. And post some of your free articles to an article exchange site; you can get people linking to your website for no more work than sharing a single article.
And if you really want to one-up Paul, hire someone to write an ebook for your site. You gain guru status, your customers who have downloaded the book have a permanent reminder that you're there, and Paul doesn't know what hit him.
And Another Thing
Articles are useful for income generation in another way. If you have an emailed newsletter with a decent sized audience, you can sell advertising space on it to other vendors or to the companies that provide you with your brands of snowboots. A one-line ad from Lands End, another short ad from a startup making custom socks, and an ad from a site that sells Eskimo-style parkas. If you start selling advertising on your own newsletter, you can make back enough to pay for the newsletter at minimum, and you may even start to make a profit.
Cody Moya writes about Article Marketing in his free 50 parts course on Internet Marketing. You can sign up for his Free Internet Marketing Course and get additional information at his website: http://www.marketing.us
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Cody_Moya
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