The “Up” Part is Easy

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It’s coming back down successfully that’s the hard part!

Anybody who knows me knows that I’m a devout fan of high-power amateur rocketry. It’s an exciting hobby where ordinary men and women launch huge rockets to amazing altitudes.

At launch events you’ll frequently hear the old-timers say something like, “The ‘up’ part is easy. It’s coming back down successfully that’s the hard part!” This saying was born of the fact that although most rockets will actually achieve some altitude, many of them will never return to Earth in one piece. Instead, due to some failure in design or construction, they end up smashing violently into the ground rather than floating down to their intended gentle landing.

I got to thinking recently how this axiom is true with article marketing as well. Getting your articles up on the Internet is the easy part. You need only become an EzineArticles member, write articles that adhere to the EzineArticles Editorial Guidelines and submit them. In a matter of days, they’re up on the web.

Getting traffic and sales to come back down from those articles is a whole lot tougher. There are myriad factors that can influence whether an article reaches great heights of success or simply crashes and burns… delivering zero traffic or sales in the process.

So let’s follow the flight of an article’s performance from launch to recovery to see where many failures can occur and how to prevent them.

(6) Steps to a Successful Article Flight:

1. Ignite Reader Interest with a High-Power Title – It’s impossible for your article to generate traffic and sales if it never gets read. The key to attracting readers is to craft an irresistible title. [Learn How]
2. Launch High-Quality Articles – The success of your article marketing campaign is based not only the quantity of articles you write and submit, but also on the quality. A poor quality article that offers no value to the reader may get off the ground, but it’s not going to soar to great heights of traffic generation. [Learn More]
3. Deploy an Effective Resource Box – This is where the tough part begins. Even the best article, with the perfect title, does nothing to improve your traffic if your reader can’t learn more about you and your products or services. Your Resource Box serves that role and needs to be a skillfully-crafted link between your article and your website. [Learn How]
4. Provide a Smooth Ride Down to Your Site – The ride ends abruptly for your reader if the link they click in your Resource Box takes them to someplace you never intended them to go. [Learn More]
5. Give Prospects a Soft Landing Page – Once the reader arrives at your landing page, will they want to stay? Will they quickly and easily find the information or products they’re looking for? If your landing page doesn’t quickly deliver on the promise of your resource box, your reader is as good as gone. [Discover Why]
6. Utilize Tracking – In high-power rocketry we use electronic tracking devices to help find our rockets after they’ve drifted miles away. In the same way, you want to keep track of your site visitors and customers so they don’t simply “drift away”. Wherever possible, harvest visitor and customer information, at the very least email addresses, so that you can maintain contact with these people. And utilize the tools available to you in your monthly Article Performance Reports to gain a better understanding of what works… and what doesn’t.

If you’ve done everything right, your percentage of successful article flights should be fairly high. But just like high-power rocketry, sometimes things just don’t work as planned and your article ends up failing dramatically. When this happens, pick up the pieces, investigate the reason for the failure and learn from your mistakes. The best teacher is experience… which, in the case of article marketing, means write, write, write (and submit, submit, submit).

Metaphors like this one are an excellent way to help us understand complex processes. What other similarities can you find between rocketry and article marketing? Share them with the rest of us by leaving a comment.

Posted by Marc, Product Marketing Manager on August 10, 2009 at 10:43 am | 3,720 views