Articles have been a good way to grow organic search engine traffic. But to be highly effective, you must have a large volume of quality articles.  You have to become a recognized authority in your market, or you have to have the right mix of keywords and readability.  It’s becoming more difficult to survive on pure article content alone to find your way to the top of the search rankings. And you have to get your visitors to actually read your content.  This is one reason you should consider using video in conjunction with your article marketing.

Online video is nothing new.  But not everyone knows how to effectively use video. 

• You can use video to get more traffic to your sites – Post humorous or entertaining videos on YouTube and display your site link.  The viral effect of a good video can launch your site’s traffic.’
• Create free video content for your website and incorporate some good keyword-rich article content on the same site.  Search engines will index your videos to improve your ranking.
• Turn your old articles and ebooks into videos and sell them on your site.  You can set up a membership site and provide new videos each month for a monthly subscription fee.  Use a membership script like AMember or DLGuard to protect your video downloads.
• Use videos to promote your own products or promote others’ products as an affiliate.  Provide some useful bit of content in your intro video, and give the link to your product at the end – or better yet, redirect to the product automatically at the end of the video.
• Use videos to encourage visitors to sign up to your mailiing list.  Fewer people want to give away their email addresses due to spam, so a creative and useful video can help to persuade them to trust you.
• Link to your videos and sites with video content from twitter.  But be sure the content you provide is actually useful.  if it’s obvious that you’re simply promoting a product for quick profits, you may just lose some followers.

There are numerous ways to use video content.  And if you’re not comfortable in front of the camera, you can create a PowerPoint presentation or a screen-capture tutorial video with Camtasia.  If you’re the creative type, you may also enjoy creating your own cartoons with a tool like Toon Boom Studio.  With the right approach, you could become the next YouTube celebrity and have all the traffic you can stand.

Serious online marketers know that the best way to achieve scalability in their online business is to automate as much as possible.  If you’re doing everything manually, you’ll likely never make more then a few thousand per month.  That’s because there are only 24 hours in every day, and you have to sleep at least a few of those hours to maintain your health – and sanity.

But if you can outsource some of the work to others – or better yet, automate it through the use of software, you can build your business to work without your direct involvement.  You can be the captain of your ship rather than a member of the crew.  This allows you to steer your business toward the goals you’ve set for yourself, and it allows you to create real wealth – and to help others do the same.

Social media sites allow you to interact with others and get the word out about your products and services.  It’s important to engage your visitors and to provide quality information that will help to position you as an expert on your chosen topic.  But you don’t want to spend all of your time at the keyboard interacting with visitors.  After all, you have a business to run.

Where it makes sense, you can automate a lot of the mundane aspects of social media interaction.  A perfect example of where automation makes sense is the Twitter follow process.  If someone follows you, and you want to reciprocate, you would normally send them a message to thank them for following.  And you’d click their follow link to add them to your list.  But that takes a lot of time when you’re usually going to respond with the same information for each follow.

To automate this process, there’s a great tool at TweetLater.com that is perfect for the task.  You can set up an automatic message to be sent to your followers, and you can automatically follow those that follow you.  You can also un-follow those that drop you.  This helps to keep your follow ratios in balance to stay within the Twitter terms of service. 

Your follow message should be something that sounds somewhat personal.  I get responses from a lot of users that include a link to one of their products.  That’s okay if you have lots of followers or already have an established reputation.  But if you’re just getting started and trying to build a following, you’ll probably do better to keep it to a simple “Thanks for the follow” type message.  This sounds more personal, so you’re less likely to have them drop you when receiving your reply. 

People are smarter than you think.  If they think you’re simply after their money, they’ll find someone else to provide the information they’re seeking.  But if you genuinely care to provide quality information while also getting compensated for the effort, you’ll be much more successful.

Although some would suggest keeping Google in the dark when it comes to their sites’ performance, I have a different opinion.  After working all last month to get my niche sites switched over from Commission Junction to the new eBay Partner Network, I decided to try to optimize my AdWords campaigns.  I send a lot of traffic to my niche sites using AdWords. 

Although I do use tried and true SEO strategies to get organic traffic, I’ve found that PPC traffic converts better for some reason.  I can spend weeks optimizing my sites to get them ranked for some decent-performing keywords, only to find that the majority of visitors coming from the search engines are just browsers.  I can send a fraction of the traffic to my sites using AdWords ads to get the same results.  It takes far less time and effort, and it allows me to focus more on building better content.

Anyway, I recently began optimizing one of my campaigns based on some knowledge I gained from a new StomperNet video on PPC ads.  I was able to improve my click-through rates dramatically using their strategies, and I was excited about the results.  But the excitement was a bit short-lived.

You see, I have my Analytics account tied to my AdWords campaigns.  I like to be able to track the performance of my campaigns down to the specific ads and keywords I’m using.  Using the StomperNet ideas, I was able to add a new ad that got a whopping 60% click-through rate. 

After seeing the results, I moved on to take care of other business.  I came back later to find that Google had doubled the minimum cost per click on my account and set my account to inactive until I raised my bids.  I was alarmed, and I waded through my campaign settings looking for an answer.  But the answer was only to be found in my Analytics account…

After clicking over to Analytics, I went to my AdWords campaign and clicked down to what I thought was my best performing ad.  Sure enough, the bounce rate for that ad was over 50%.  So, although the ad attracted lots of clicks and had relevant keywords for my site content, it wasn’t attracting customers - only curious clickers.  So, Google had done me a big favor by increasing my minimum cost per click.  They were actually saving me a lot of money.

After removing the offending ad, I soon saw my cost drop back to previous levels and all was well again.  I’ll continue to create new ads and research new keywords, but I’ll be sure to keep a close eye on the results in my Analytics account.  Some may call it the Google-slap, but I now prefer to think of it as a way to quickly learn how to improve the results of your PPC campaigns.