Following months of trying to convince his boss that he should invest in a company website, Clive finally gave up and decided to go it alone. The year was 1996 and the internet was still very young. That said, it was already possible to have a professional, online shop built which he was determined to do. He took out a few loans and remortgaged his house to come up with the £12.000 he needed to have the first fully functional online shop for promotional gifts designed and online before any other company in the UK. He did it. The world was going to be his oyster! Or was it?
Following the site’s launch, he began to attract a few customers and a lot of interest from the larger competitors who had millions to throw at such ventures. After just one year in business, he was contacted by a company director of what was at the time the biggest promotional gift supplier in the UK. They wanted him and his company and asked to meet with him to discuss the advantages of becoming part of their huge promotional gifts machine! Needless to say, Clive couldn’t believe his luck and met up with several corporate highflyers over the following few weeks. He could see why they wanted him but also realised that he was still a small-time promotional gift supplier who had only managed to turn over £130,000 in his first year.
The excitement was short lived. Like many big corporations at the time, they wanted people like Clive but they wanted to pay peanuts. His small business was really of no use to them nor did they need his website: they could purchase the best websites money could buy. But as an employee Clive could help propel them into the internet age. They wanted him for his drive but his ambition would be regulated by those at them top. The scenario seemed all too familiar to Clive. He would have to do as he was told again and his aspirations would be limited by those at the top with big wallets but relatively little understanding about what he was trying to do or of just how significantly the world was changing.
The funny thing is, many corporate bigwigs still don’t understand it fully in 2010! They have either grown very comfortable or perhaps they have always been a little too comfortable.
We will return to Clive later in this article.
We live in a new age of business with new rules and a lot more opportunities. Think about it, just a few years ago you still had to be ‘big’ to really make a difference in your industry. The people at the top, those with the money, were in charge. They were the ones who could afford to have new brochures printed every month and sent out to hundreds of thousands of potential customers. They were the ones who could afford the most sophisticated nicely designed websites. They had the power, the sales staff in fancy cars and the impressive offices. And ‘they’ are now the past if ‘they’ don’t wake up and understand the new business world in which many of their smaller competitors are already thriving.
You hold the keys to your own future. No longer should you allow those at ‘the top’ to rule you or your industry. You can write your own future and success story through blogs, article marketing and proper search engine optimization of your own company website or that of your employer. The future has never looked so good for those who used to take the orders and here you will find out how.
Article Marketing
Through article writing you can literally change your world or at least your industry. Whether you work for a company or you own your own business, your articles can help propel you to the top of your profession. It is not necessary to be the reincarnation of Hemingway. What is important is that you offer valuable information to those who seek it. Gain their respect and they will want to read more and your articles could even get republished on blogs and websites offering you even more publicity.
Article marketing is a complex topic which really deserves its own article or book. But we can at least look here at how article marketing can be used by you.
You start by writing articles about your products, services and/or industry. Your articles should be at least 400 words long and keyword rich. The articles are meant to be informative and not simple PR about how great your company is. Most article depositories offer a where you can tell the reader about you and your company. This is called the resource box. When properly utilized you can used the resource box section to get links back to your website and possibly even an order from someone who has read your article and wants to use your services.
The more articles you write the better. Let’s look again at Clive’s company.
Clive’s company may have been the first online shop for promotional gifts but in 2007 he found that he was just like the other hundreds of promotional gifts suppliers who offered similar products online in their own shops. His biggest competitors were still those who had large marketing budgets and could afford expensive online and offline advertising. He was finding it difficult to get new customers but he did have a loyal customer base which he had built up over the years.
He decided to hire four sales reps to try to give his business the boost in needed and deserved. One of the salesmen was Gary. Gary and the other sales reps would be responsible for finding their own leads. They were all offered a small salary, car and of course commission for meeting their targets.
Now Gary was a keen writer and new some basic html so he went to work. As far as Clive knew, Gary would be finding customers the traditional way: knocking on doors, sending the company catalog and brochures to prospects, doing e-shots and picking up the phone trying to convince people to use his new promotional gifts company.
Clive was wrong.
During Gary’s time at the office, he would do exactly that. But when he was at home, he was secretly writing articles, hundreds of them. He wrote articles about promotional pens. He wrote about promotional mugs, mouse mats, stress balls, clothing, you name it, Gary wrote about it. He wrote about all of the products his company wanted to be selling a lot more of. An excellent writer he was not, but he had information to pass on and he got his message across loud and clear.
Within a few months, Clive’s company website began to feature quite highly in the search engines for a lot of the products his company sold. It was actually rating higher than much bigger companies who like his Clive knew nothing about article marketing and the free publicity it offered.
While Clive and his competitors were all spending thousands on expensive printed brochures and fancy cars for their sales managers, Gary was spending no more than his own time and the results were phenomenal.
Clive did not realise it yet but he could no longer do without Gary. Gary’s hundreds of articles belonged to Gary and no one else. The resource boxes were all pointing at his own blog and the URL of his employer. Gary’s articles could be pointed at whatever websites he wanted them to. This gave him the job security few people have.
After two years of employment, Gary had written nearly 2000 articles. Business was booming but his own personal sales were low as were the sales of the three other salesmen working for the company. Clive did not feel he could let all of his sales staff go but decided he should at least get rid of the one whose sales were the lowest. It was Gary.
One afternoon Clive told Gary he would like to meet with him the following morning to discuss business. This could only mean one thing but Gary was prepared.
He coolly walked into the office the next morning and knocked on his boss’s door. ‘Gary, I’m sorry,’ his Clive started, ‘but I am sure you are aware your sales are not amazing. We are going to have to let you go.’
Gary smiled. ‘You are free to let me go if you like, Clive, but first let me show you something that you may find of interest.’ Gary turned on his laptop and keyed ‘promotional pens’ into Google. On the first page alone two of his articles appeared as well as an organic listing to the company website. He keyed in over twenty other keywords each time bringing results either from his articles or organic listing to the company website.
‘You can let me go, but all of this will go with me, Clive. You see, Clive, it is your other sales reps, those who cost you money driving from client to client who should be shown the door. You do not even have a properly optimised site yet you are still featuring quite highly in the search engines and this is all down to me. I suggest you reconsider and perhaps I might just consider staying on and doing something about your site’s search engine optimisation as well.’
Needless to say, Gary was amazed by what Gary had done and was asked to stay on with a nice big pay rise.
Gary’s story is no longer unique. Many people, people like you, have taken their future into their own hands. They are writing their own success stories and they are doing it better and faster than the large bureaucratic companies of old could every dream of doing.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Power is in the words that you use.
Just like article marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) is a subject that really needs to be handled in a thick book and not just one short article. That said, we will touch on it here.
Just like article marketing, it is necessary to ensure each of your landing pages have a few paragraphs of text which describe what is on the page and why it is important. A promotional gift supplier like Gary could write something like the following on their Parker Pens section.
Promotional Parker Pens
Promotional Parker Pens at discounted prices. At OXOXOXOXOX Limited we specialise in express printing and engraving promotional Parker Pens. Here you will find a massive selection of Parker Pens that can be printed with your logo. Our most popular Parker Pens are the Parker Vector Rollerball Pen and the Jotter. Both of these low cost promotional pens are ideal for trade shows, exhibitions and postal marketing campaigns. If you are looking for something a little more up market, you may like to check out our Parker metal gift pens such as the Sonnet and the Frontier Pens….
Do you get them picture? By ensuring that each section of your website has keyword rich descriptions, you can help ensure that Google, Bing and the other search engines find your content of interest. It is important, however, not to write to impress the search engines but to impress the people who arrive on your site looking for information. Keywords are great but if you use too many or you use some too often it will look silly and your website visitor will go elsewhere.
Again, SEO is a huge subject to take on but if you are writing articles anyway, you should be able to use a lot of the content from your articles in the descriptions on your website and this will help you to rate higher in the search engines.
So what are you waiting for? Start writing or get someone who can do it for you today. Remember Clive was the first person in his industry to have an online shop but a few years later most of his competitors had them. It will not be long before a lot of your competitors are writing article as well so beat them to it! You will be happy you did.
Writing article cost no more than your time. If you do not have time, you could look for ghost writers familiar with your industry to do in quite inexpensively for you. The important thing is that it gets done.
Dan Toombs is Managing Director of CompuGift Limited, the UK's leading online supplier of promotional gifts. Compu Gift also offers a ghost writing service for businesses within the promotional gifts industry.
By Dan Toombs
