Charlie Cook's MArketing for Success Insider's Club

ezine

How Do You Know When Your Marketing Articles Are Any Good?

By Charlie Cook   |   March 27th, 2007

Articles are a great way to generate credibility and leads and new business. How do you know if yours are any good?

If you write small business marketing articles it’s easy to get them in ezine article directories but what you really want is for publications to pick them up and use them in their ezines – with proper attribution of course. Or you want magazines to do the same, again with your contact information included.

What you want to avoid is having other sites steal your content, post it and claim it as their own. I’ve had sites steal my small business marketing articles causing the following problem. When another site posts your content without a link back, the search engines see it as duplicate content and may not list the article when you add it to your own site.

It’s a good idea to regularly search the web to see who is posting your articles and where. You may want to send out some to be shown on other sites, provided they link back to your site. While sharing articles is a good idea, keep most of your content on your site and check periodically to make sure that it’s not getting ripped off and damaging your own search engine ranking.

How do you know if your article strategy is working?

a. If others are stealing your small business marketing articles its an indication you’re a good writer. I found one site with an article ripped off from Tom Hopkins the marketing guru and with one of mine, both attributed to the site owner not there rightful authors.

b. If your articles are helping your search engine ranking and generating leads, you know your marketing ideas are hitting home.

Want to know the best way to use your articles to grow your business? Discover the Secrets to Opening Doors With Your Articles >>
- Charlie Cook
Small Business Marketing That Works

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How Do I Find Ezines That Want My Articles?

By Charlie Cook   |   November 28th, 2005

“I have bought a few of your books — my stumbling block is that I work in a highly specialized industry — pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing. I would like to create articles for e-zines..how do I find these highly specialized e-zines for the marketing managers and CEOs of these companies?”
Kelley

In ‘Opening Doors with Your Articles’ you’ll find a list of over 40 web sites looking for content you can use to distribute your articles. You’ll also learn how to ensure your articles get picked up, used and generate leads. Discover how get tons of free publicity for your business with this link >

You can also google: “articles health care” to build your own list of online and offline publications.
- Charlie Cook, The Small Business Marketing Guru

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Want To Add A Thousand or More Subscribers Each Month to Your List?

By Charlie Cook   |   May 27th, 2005

Have an email list of prospects you’d like to grow? One of the best ways to grow your list is to offer something for free that your prospects want and need. You proabably already know that. The problem is you don’t have the time or inclination to create the perfect giveaway. What do you do?

You could ask me to write an eBook you can use as one client is at a cost of over $6,000. Or you could offer my existing marketing guide for free.

My free marketing plan guide, “7 Steps to Attract More Clients and Grow Your Business” is what small business owners, marketers and service professionals are looking for. It prompts an average of 50 people a day to add their names to my mailing list and I’d like to help you use it to do the same or better for your business, for free!

If you provide a product or service targeted to small business owners, service professionals or marketing and sales professionals, your web site gets over a thousand visitors a day and your Alexa rank is 80,000 or less, I’ll create a co-branded version of this popular free marketing strategies ebook with a custom cover and insert that includes your products and services. I’ll show you how to promote it on your site and get 10-20% of your site visitors to give you their email address so you can market to them again and again.

Why would I agree to let you offer this guide on your site?

When you offer my free marketing guide on your site, your prospects get a great marketing tool, you get their email address and I get to add their names to my free marketing ezine mailing list. I’ll provide you with the code to include on your site and then send you the email address of each person that requests the free marketing guide. Depending on your site traffic this should generate 50-100 or more opt-in prospects each day.

Interested in using this proven tool on your site to capitalize on your traffic and build your subscriber list?

Contact me using this form with your questions and your web site URL so I can check your page rank and get a rough idea of your site traffic.

When you help your prospects improve their marketing for free, everybody wins. Please only contact me if your site gets over 1000 visitors a day and your target market is small to mid-sized business owners and marketing and sales professionals.- Charlie Cook

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What’s My Biggest Ezine Headache and How To Avoid It?

By Charlie Cook   |   May 17th, 2005

Once or twice a year I send out a marketing ezine that doesn’t arrive the way it should. Here’s how I make this mistake and how you can avoid it.

When you use text from an MS Word document and paste it into an email, hyphens, quotes, apostrophes and characters other than numerical or alphabetical ones look fine, but watch out. When you send the email to someone, these hyphens, quotes, apostrophes all get turned into /s or ?marks or other unusual and unintended characters. Even though you wrote the best newsletter in the world, it looks silly when it arrives.

Try it. Send yourself an email with hyphens, quotes, apostrophes and see what it looks like when you get it. The email you thought was letter perfect will arrive a mess.

The same thing happens when you send an HTML newsletter, hyphens, quotes, apostrophes turn into odd characters. Even if you preview your HTML newsletter in a browser window you won’t catch this problem. The unintended transformation happens when the ezine is sent.

Avoiding this techno goof is easy. I just paste my completed ezine into a text only editor and then go through it and replace each hyphen, quote and apostrophe with the text editor’s version. Then when I paste the finished version into my ezine broadcast system or use it to create an HTML email so my readers get the what I want them to get, a professional looking marketing newsletter. – Charlie Cook

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How Is The Free Marketing Ezine “More Business” Valued At Over $300 a year?

By Charlie Cook   |   May 12th, 2005

How is the free marketing ezine worth over $300 a year?

Currently the 87 million dollar a year publishing company Thomson Gale is now selling seven of my articles, the same ones you get weekly for free, for $5.95 each on Amazon.com.

If each of my weekly marketing articles is worth $5.95 then your annual subscription to my free marketing ezine, “More Business” is worth over three hundred dollars, not to mention the value of the free marketing guide “7 Steps to Attract More Clients and Grow Your Business”. Actually the ezine and free marketing guide are worth tens of thousands of dollars or more a year to those of you who apply the ideas.

Without my permission and without the knowledge of the original publication that printed these articles, Thomson Gale is now distributing articles for which I own the copyright on Amazon.com. Here’s a link to the screen shots in a pdf file. Or you can just search for Charlie Cook on Amazon.com (look at the bottom of the listings for my articles).

No, you don’t need to write me a check for $300 to keep your subscription active. At least for now “More Business” is sent to you every week for free to help you grow your business. Of course if you want to get serious about taking your business to the next level you’ll want to read my best selling marketing tools , including “More Sales with Less Selling “, all of which are a steal at their current prices.

And please don’t pay Thomson Gale to buy my copyrighted articles, which they’ve promised to remove from Amazon in a couple of weeks. – Charlie Cook

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Why Do You Put the Period in S.ales in Your Marketing Newsletter?

By Charlie Cook   |   March 15th, 2005

“Why do you put the period in S.ales or the zero in pr0fits in your ezines?” – Greg Timpany

The spam filters block email newsletters that include words such as:
- sales
- profits
- here
- wife
- questions
- check
- investments
and many more and probably never thought would be included.

For additional information on the topic read:
- Spam Filters Out of Control
- Avoiding Getting Your Newsletter Caught in Spam Filters (includes a more complete list of words that can get your ezine blocked by spam filters).
- Charlie Cook

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Spam Filters Are Out of Control

By Charlie Cook   |   February 28th, 2005

Each week before I send out my ezine I check it to see which words can get it diverted by a spam filter. This week I found the following words were ones if left in correctly spelled would cause it to be blocked. They included:

- check
- money
- now
- performance
- phone
- sales
- win

Use this link to view a more comprehensive list of words that can get your emails blocked by spam filters. – Charlie Cook

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How Do I Build My Mailing List?

By Charlie Cook   |   December 4th, 2004

“I need direct marketing ideas, a list of RN , LVN, CNA, with addresses so I can send flyers, postcards and market to these individuals and not all and every one because its more costly, I’m sure there is such a list, I just don’t know where to get it.

I am a Nurse myself and I always get mail from hospital or home health agencies with job offers so where did they get my name and address? and how do they know I’m a Nurse?” – Liz

A – I’m sure your town has a couple of printers who specialize in direct marketing mailings or can help you find someone to create a mailing list for you. Start with your yellow pages. I use Betterlists.com here in Stamford, CT. They have access to databases that can provide current listings of nurses, doctors or almost anything. If you can’t find a list provider in your town you can always use google.com. Just type in “mailing lists, nurses” and use the results to find a provider. – Charlie Cook

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Isn’t Ezine Announcer Less Expensive than Your Ultimate List?

By Charlie Cook   |   December 4th, 2004

“I’m interested in buying your Ulitmate Article Distribution List but Ezine Announcer looks like it does the same thing for less.” – Suzanne Falter-Barns

A – Often you get what you pay for. My ezine announcement list is constantly updated and checked and costs roughly half as much per lead if you used Bacon’s service to create your own list.

You might be interested in the following letter sent to me. I haven’t verified this personally but it suggests checking this resource out carefully before opting for the less expensive ezine announcement solution.” – Charlie cook

“I do use EzineAnnouncer but I don’t recommend it to anyone else anymore. I seem to be the only person who can use it and there is NO technical support. I know people who couldn’t even get it set up after purchasing and had to ask for a refund.

Last summer Jason updated the database but not the software. The software has not help section, no user manual and the new database is all screwed up. He just shoved thousands of new listings in without setting up the software to send to those sites so most of what he added does not work. It took me three entire weekends to fix the mess.

If you can set up software and use it with minimal instruction then you might want to consider EzineAnnouncer. I only continue using it because I spent so much time fixing it!”

What Ezine Broadcast Software Do You Recommend?

By Charlie Cook   |   October 4th, 2004

“Charlie – I receive your newsletter and always enjoy it. I am in the process of launching my own e-newsletter. I have a lot of signups already and was wondering whether you use any special software? – Steve Strauss

A- I use a third party ezine broadcast service. Click here for the full list of resources I use and recommend. – Charlie Cook

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