The Spider World

Archive for March, 2009

The great tragedy of email, is that a great amount of it is never read. Marketers spend copious amounts of time developing content, segmenting markets – only to read reports which tell them their email was never opened.

The problem with email marketing, is it relies on interrupting the recipient at precisely the right moment when they are willing to read your email. Catch them a few moments earlier or later, could spell the difference between being opened and read, or pushed aside and forgotten.

In markets such as Singapore and South East Asia where SPAM laws are relaxed, the problem of interruptive email marketing is chronic. It is no wonder email marketers spend so much time calculating the best time and day to interrupt the recipient with email. No one wants to open them.

Even readers who double opt-in forget they have subscribed, get annoyed by the intrusion, and report the email as spam.

Online banner advertising is not much better. It is still highly interruptive. Search marketing is an improvement. At least it tries to create a positive user experience by tying relevant, non-obtrusive ads to searched keywords.

If you are investing the time to write and post articles or paying someone to write them for you, why not get kill two birds with one stone. For that matter why not get more for your money and use 3 or 4 keywords per article?

The number of keywords or phrases I suggest you should focus on in each article is: 1. You should focus your articles on one important keyword or phrase that you want to rank highly for in search results. Ideally this keyword should be in your title, in the first sentence or at least the first paragraph of your article, and if possible appear as the anchor text in your article. The title of the page you are linking to should preferably be the same. This is not an issue if you are using a CMS (Content Management System) on your website and posting articles.

Be careful not to overuse your keyword or a part of your keyword phrase. If you keyword phrase is “resume writing” for example, and you inadvertently use the word resume another 12 times in your 250 word article, you’ve overdone it. Find alternatives or synonyms for your keywords.