The Article Egg Hunt
Are you filling your Article Eggs with value?
I was talking to my 6 year-old daughter yesterday about this weekend’s egg hunt. She was sharing her excitement about finding brightly-colored plastic eggs and not knowing what each egg might hold until she pops it open. Maybe it holds a piece of candy, a few coins or a small toy. Or maybe, just maybe, it holds the BIG prize.
That got me thinking about how searching the Internet for valuable information on a particular subject is sort of like an egg hunt. You search through cyberspace using keywords and phrases until you spot some promising looking links hiding in the search engine results. You pop one open with a click of your mouse in the hope that it holds the BIG prize.
Typically, it holds a small prize.
So you click again. And again. And again. Popping open your metaphoric eggs in an attempt to find the elusive BIG prize. Sometimes you find it… sometimes you don’t.
As an Expert Author, YOU are the person filling those metaphoric eggs with your niche articles and putting them out on the Internet for your readers to find.
If we stretch this metaphor a little further, we discover some great advice:
- Bring joy to your readers by filling as many article eggs as possible with the BIG prize.
- Make your article eggs easy to find by cross promoting them all over the web.
- The more article eggs you hide, the better the chances are that one of your eggs will be one your reader finds.
- Make your articles stand out from the background by painting them with the neon colors of a great title.
- Turn the resource box into a map that helps readers find even more great prizes from you.
- Remember, if your reader finds the BIG prize in your egg, they’re probably going to stop looking for other eggs.
- Give your readers a basket full of your article eggs by pointing them to your Expert Author Page or by putting a widget on your website.
- Put an extra prize in your article eggs  like a free downloadable report or an excerpt from your book  and watch their eyes really light up… metaphorically speaking.
Bottom Line: By stretching this metaphor to its limits we’ve discovered (3) key article marketing basics for success:
- Write more, write better
- Promote more, promote better
- Give the reader something of value
Now hop on over to your computer, fill up your basket with prize-filled article eggs, put them in plain sight on the Internet and let the hunt begin! =)
I like it.. the idea of finding a ‘prize’, something unexpected.
What irritates me about some sites is that they promise things and give you nothing.. but a pitch. I recently signed up for two like that and got ‘nadda’. What they hey?
I also feel irritated when I go to a link and their sales pitch goes on forever. I know that is maybe how it is done, but woe.. it just feels so typical now. I think people should be more creative with that effort. When I see those now, I just think forget it.
All of this does remind me that I probably need to consider another ‘gift’ to offer, an Ebook or something, but I sure am not going to offer it with a catch. Ewwe. The catch is merely a good feeling on both ends and that IMHO resonates better with the recipient and even in me. Thus they will come back to read what I have to say or view my art.
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