The New York Times “Skin Deep” recently reported a discovery that has piqued the interest of quite a few consumers who were on the fence about pursuing a cosmetic procedure. Recently, in order to compete during a deep economic downswing, many dermatologists, plastic surgeons, and cosmetic surgery offices are increasing, or trying to maintain their current patient numbers, by offering broad discount rates on all kinds of procedures.

These broad discounts are a direct result of the amount of individuals looking for a cosmetic procedure declining sharply along with the fall in the economy. Those who are still seeking a cosmetic procedure are using due diligence and basing their decision more on quality and recognition than overall cost. This has meant that plastic surgeons have had to come up with new ways of selling themselves and their individual services. This has led to a tremendous movement to dig deep into the marketing of the surgeons’ persona as much as the actual surgical background and experience. Online branding of surgeons has started to become the staple of plastic surgery marketing during this economic downturn. Surgeons who once relied heavily on magazine ads, local newspaper, and word of mouth are now researching the web as an actual tool to find and validate new potential patients. While many have websites, or more to the point, html pages online, most never fully utilized or even realized the potential of the web. Now with over 70% of all medical patients searching online first for medical professionals, from family doctors to plastic surgeons, it is now more important for surgeons to maximize their online presence.

The first place that many plastic surgeons are starting to turn to online is to pay per click (PPC) advertising on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Sometimes they even turn to PPC management companies who, at a cost plus a percentage of the budget, will help them create a budget and even setup the campaigns. The potential conflict here becomes obvious very quickly. On average, the cost per each and every click to a surgeon’s site from the average Google adwords campaign for a plastic surgeon is between $4.00 - $20.00. In an average size metro area that is a moderate monthly spend of around $16,000 - $80,000 PER MONTH. The cost can be considerably higher with more keywords pursued in any one area. For example “Los Angeles Plastic Surgery” is a single keyword with over 4,400 searches per month. There are literally hundreds of other keywords for the Los Angeles keyword base. The price for that one particular keyword is currently just over $21. While this may be cost effective for well known surgeons who are already converting through alternative branding, it can quickly bankrupt new or emerging cosmetic talent.

This leads to a solution that surgeons are starting to more readily grasp, organic search engine optimization. “By seeking out those who are seeking you, you simply change what has become a depression to some, into a golden opportunity for you” Says Todd Williams of plastic Surgery Website Design, a marketing and design company that works exclusively for plastic and cosmetic surgeons. “The first thing that we do with any new client is to analyze their current web presence. What is their bounce rate, what is their conversion rate, what kinds of search engine traffic are they currently getting, etc… Core questions that tell us where to begin,” he says. “Most of the time we can increase conversions by simply changing their design to something more aesthetically pleasing to the consumer” pointing out the fact that many of the older plastic surgery websites online today are old flash driven templates that tend to carry higher bounce rates and lower conversion rates. “It’s at that point we can start building out their organic search engine saturation and they really start to see just how many people are still actively searching for a cosmetic procedure”.

Some plastic surgeons are really taking the initiative discussed here and going to the next level by integrating social media such as twitter, facebook, myspace, and their own plastic surgery blogs where they communicate with potential patients in an individual capacity.

One thing is certain, micro targeting online is no longer “something extra”. It is now a requirement and a necessity for any surgeon looking to not only make it through this recession, but also continue to grow and thrive.

Press releases can be one of the most effective ways to drive traffic on the Internet. There are many advantages when you issue a press release about your organization.

1) Instant traffic.

Almost immediately, you will be able to get tens of thousands of page views for your news story. Given the comprehensive coverage, it’s only a matter of time before some one picks up on your story and make contact. That is when doors are opened and more business opportunities present themselves at your door step. And to think that all you did was to release a story.

2) Instant brand recognition.

Press release distribution services can get your story submitted to many well established news wire. That means your story will appear in many well respected websites. You are building a brand for yourself, whether you know it or not. That way, reputable companies may contact you to enquire more about the products and services that you offer. And these are the customers that you want to attract and keep, for they are the likely to be the ones with the resources to pay you higher prices for your quality work.

3) Published by other websites.

Usually, your release will be sent out to thousands of opt-in journalists. This gives you a chance of having your story picked up and published in other online or maybe even offline channels. These are channels that you may not have heard off. In other words, your press release can give you far better reach than you could possibly imagine.

4) Other unplanned traffic sources.

Content is usually syndicated to major news aggregators such as Google News, EIN News, Topix, etc. There are literally hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of sites that may end up carrying your news story. You never planned for your news article to appear on these sites, but they get published anyway. In the process, you get traffic from these unexpected sources.

5) Mid to long term traffic.

The traffic may taper off after the first two to three weeks. This is because your press release is giving way to other fresher (upcoming) stories. If you want your target audience to remember you, try to release at least one or two stories per month. That way, your target market will always be hearing from you.

But even if you do not publish additional press releases, you will still receive traffic in the mid to long term. What happens is that the major search engines will start indexing your news stories and treat them as fresh and unique content. When someone makes a search for relevant information, your press release may still surface in the search results. This is not uncommon because many news sites are considered to be authority sites by the search engines. Therefore, the content tends to rank very well in the search results. You want to be sure that when a potential customer makes a search for a product or service that you are offering, your press release is the one that comes up. You don’t want your competitor’s story to be overshadowing you.

Get instant traffic and maximum exposure - press release distribution service. Distribute your PR to high Page Rank authoritative sites (Over 300+ sites).

Many internet marketers complain that it is very hard to very their websites to rank well in the search engines. What they are saying is that they find it hard to build links. Link building should be the core activity in any search engine optimization process. You want to rank well? Simply build more inbound links.

Still, a huge portion of marketers fail to rank well in the search results after spending lots of time and maybe even money on link building. In this case, what is happening is that there is not enough link juice from the inbound links.

The term “link juice” is a loose term that is used by many internet marketers. It refers to the authority of a website. The higher the authority, the more link juice a link will have, and the more desirable the link. But what exactly are high authority websites?

Google has a way of letting the world know whether a website is an authority site or not. The indicator is known as Page Rank. The higher the Page Rank, the more link juice the website can pass to external websites. For example, a link on a Page Rank 7 website is much more valuable than a link on a Page Rank 1 website.

For the other search engines, there is really no way of knowing whether a website is an authority site or not. In this case, the only way to know is to make smart guesses. If you see a website ranks well consistently in the search engines, it is likely a high authority site. What you want to do, is to think of ways to get these sites to link to you. Unfortunately, that is easier said than done. How do you get a well established website like EIN News or CNET News to link to you?

One way to do so, is to publish press releases. You can write your news story yourself, or you can hire a professional PR writer to write your release for you. If you want to hire someone, make sure that he or she knows enough about your company and your products and services to do a decent job at writing the release. If possible, work with the same PR writer so that the writer learns more and more about your organization. Over time, you will observe a rise in the quality of the releases.

The next thing you need to do, is to identify a press release distribution service that will submit your news stories to these authority sites. Many of these News sites (at least according to Google) have high page rank. With a single PR, you can get hundreds of these sites to link to you.

Whenever possible, always try to include your target keyword phrases in your anchor texts. Not all news sites allow you to do this. If you can’t use anchor texts, simply use your URL in the PR body. This will be converted into active links and web visitors can still click through the link and arrive at your site.

Get instant traffic and maximum exposure - press release distribution service. Distribute your PR to high Page Rank authoritative sites (Over 300+ sites).

FastSubmitArticles.com is announcing the release of Premium Article Submission packages for individuals, small business owners, and corporate organizations. The service will help individuals and businesses to achieve higher rankings in the search engines. Companies who use the service will also receive traffic through the articles that they distribute.

In the beginning, FastSubmitArticles.com started out by offering article distribution services at an affordable rate of $6. For this fee, the Company distribute an article to over 300 well established article directories on the Internet. By utilizing the article distribution service, business owners can expect to receive traffic from links that are included in each article. For every article submitted, the author is allowed to include 2 to 3 links. When a visitor reads the article and find the content interesting, he can click on the links to find out more about the Company promoted in the author resource box.

In addition, the links will also help boost search engine rankings. Each link points to the official source of information. The search engines see this as some kind of “vote” for the official site, and learns to recognize the site as an authority site. This leads to higher rankings in the search results.

Many business owners welcome the new service because writing and submitting articles can be a very time consuming process. To write an article of professional quality will take an average of 15 minutes. The submission process takes even more time, depending on the total number of article directories involved. Due to the time consuming nature of article marketing, many business owners have decided to stay away from this traffic generation method.

With the release of the article distribution service, businesses can now outsource all their article marketing activities. With an additional $10, FastSubmitArticles.com will provide an article for the client. The client has the option to vet through, make an necessary edits, and approve the article before distribution commences. The turnaround time for distributing an article is about 3 to 4 business days.

Seeing the initial success of the service, many clients started to request for manual submission to several high page rank websites. To cater to this need, FastSubmitArticles.com has recently decide to release Premium Distribution Packages. All submissions done for premium sites are manual. If for some reason an article is rejected, FastSubmitArticles.com will work with the site editor to get the article approved.

However, problems are extremely rare. There are over 20 Premium sites (all with high page rank) included in the package. Due to the high quality content that is submitted on a daily basis, many of these Premium sites have granted FastSubmitArticles.com expert author status, which means that articles are approved instantly upon submission.

Darren Chow, the founder of the article distribution service, commented, “Since launching the premium packages, 80% of our clients are signing up for premium submissions. Although the normal distributions are much cheaper, most still see value in our Premium packages. Many business owners have seen a boost to their search engine rankings after signing up for Premium submissions.”

He then adds, “Article marketing has been a proven traffic generation method. Many marketers have achieved great success with it, and there is no reason why it wouldn’t continue to work well for others.”

To date, the Company has distributed thousands of articles on behalf of their clients. Their portfolio of clients include many successful Internet Marketers as well as well known organizations.

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Every now and then, I receive emails from new article marketers asking me how to build links with article marketing. The emails come through from my article distribution service, which I’m still running. For more experienced marketers, writing and submitting articles is just like walking or running. But for new marketers, it’s like walking through a thick jungle - i.e., it’s easy to get lost.

So here is a simple guide for all new article marketers. Use this as a blue print to guide you. Article marketing can be very effective in boosting your search engine rankings. You just need to know what to do.

Link Building Guide for New Article Marketers

1) Prepare a list of article directories.

Don’t worry about writing articles just yet. The first thing you need is a list of high quality article directories. There are several such lists loitering around on the Internet. Just make a quick search for “list of article directories.” Many directories may be defunct now. So you need to scrape those sites from your list.

If you are hiring someone else to do the job for you, make sure that the list is well maintained. You don’t want to hire a service that promises to submit your articles to 1000+ directories but only 300 directories are online. We’ll discuss more about outsourcing later on.

2) Prepare your articles.

If you are starting a new website, you need a lot of momentum to get things going. That means writing and submitting AT LEAST a couple of hundred articles. Don’t shoot for 5 or 10 articles. Each article normally averages around 10 - 20 unique visitors per month. If you only have 10 articles published, that’s not going to amount to a lot of traffic. You probably make 1 sale a month - nothing to get excited about. And that’s not going to replace your full time income either.

Very soon, you are more likely to give up on your online venture. Have enough faith and confidence to forge ahead. Article marketing is a time tested method that has been proven to work for many marketers. There is no reason why it will not work for you. Instead of just writing and submitting a handful of articles, prepare to write two hundred articles.

If you are doing this on your own, split up the work load. Write just 10 articles a day for one whole month. You will have 200 articles by the end of the month. That will give you a substantial amount of traffic to work with.

Your articles should not be less than 450 words. You should be writing with the goal of driving traffic to your websites. That means you shouldn’t give away all your content. Talk about the problems that your prospects are likely to face, then drive them to your blog or sales page. Encourage them to click on your links.

Usually, you are allowed to include 2 links to your website. Use a proper URL, and link to a website that you have control over. Don’t use affiliate links in your author box. If you are promoting an affiliate product, drive the traffic to your own sites, then redirect the traffic to the affiliate offer. Remember, your author resource box is where you advertise your products and services. Think of it as a classified ad. You can promote a free ebook, a free download, or whatever. Do whatever you can to encourage the click through.

From my experience, if you do this right, you will see an average click through rate of between 15% to 20%. One more thing about including links in your resource box: when you are submitting articles, you are actually engaged in the process of link building. And link building is important in any SEO campaign. You are already engaged in SEO, whether you know it or not, so use proper anchor texts in your links. You can use URLs as your links if you are not concerned with SEO. You will still get a fair amount of traffic.

But since you are already putting in all that hard work, why not get more traffic from the search engines along the way? Do your keyword research and choose some keywords with search traffic to target. Then make sure you include those keywords as your anchor texts.

3) Submitting your articles.

Start with Ezinearticles.com. EZA is the top article directory on the Internet. In Jan. 09, they announced that they drove 5.1 million clicks to member websites. That’s a lot of clicks. Those clicks must be going somewhere. Can you imagine how much you would be spending if you are to buy those clicks? You don’t have to spend a single dime to get traffic to your sites when you submit articles to EZA.

The reason why you should start with EZA is because they have very strict rules about original content. Original content means that your article must not be published elsewhere. Don’t go post the articles in your blogs before they get approved by EZA. Just be patient and wait for them to approve your articles. EZA accept articles from 250 words onwards, so writing and submitting 10 articles per day is definitely doable. You can always combine the articles to lengthen them for other article directories later on.

Once EZA has approved your articles, you can start to distribute your articles to other article directories. Most of the directories won’t mind having quality articles on their sites, even when those articles have already been published by EZA. As long as you own the rights to those articles, they will be approved. Also, make sure you lengthen the articles to at least 450 words. Most article directories won’t accept articles that are shorter than that. Submit to as many directories as you can. The more sites you submit to, the more inbound links you get. If you are promoting a brand new site, wait 4 to 6 weeks for the search engines to index your articles. You will see your rankings improve dramatically in the search results. I have personally seen this happen for many new sites.

4) Rinse and repeat.

To grow the traffic levels of your website, simply rinse and repeat the above process. Keep writing and submitting to EZA. Once approved, submit to the other article directories. Make link building a habit. Always remind yourself that if you are not building links, you are making it easy for your competitor to overtake you.

Many article marketers tend to kick back and relax when they see their rankings rise in the search results. But after a few weeks, they lost their rankings. Why? Because while they are sitting back doing nothing, their competitors have been busy building links. Ever seen sites with 10k backlinks or more? How did that happen? Obviously, it didn’t happen overnight. Whoever own those sites have been working on acquiring backlinks on a consistent basis. As they continue to work hard to get more links, they are enjoying the cumulative effect. That’s how they build monster sites with tens of thousands of back links. But when you are new, you are like a little fish swimming in the ocean. So don’t rest on your laurels even when you see your sites starting to rank well. Continue to be an aggressive link builder.

5) Outsourcing.

Let’s be brutally honest. Writing doesn’t come naturally to everyone. Some people, after writing just 1 article, start to feel vexed and frustrated. It’s almost impossible for them to write 10 articles on a daily basis. After just one or two days, the individual burns out. For these people, writing is too painful to be carried out on a daily basis.

Then there is the lengthy submission process. The submission process can be very time consuming. If you are trying to submit your articles manually, it will take you a couple of hours just to submit 1 article to a hundred article directories. Even if you use software to help you submit articles, you still have to leave your computer on for the software to function. The most painless and convenient option would be to outsource everything, including article writing and submission. When you outsource, all you do is place an order, submit some information for article writing, and then you go do your own stuff. You don’t even have to be in front of the computer.

You will then be allowed to view and approve the articles. Once approved, the service provider will commence distribution. Contrary to popular belief, outsourcing these days is quite affordable. Article marketing is more reasonably priced than most SEO packages. Have you seen how much SEO packages cost these days? The price can be sky high. It seems only those with deep pockets can afford SEO services these days.

If you are looking for a cheaper option, perhaps article marketing may just be the solution for you. I own and run an article distribution service, so I’m obviously biased. But you don’t have to take my word for you. Take the information in this guide, use it, and see the results for yourself. You can always consider reinvesting some of those profits that you will be making when you see some good results.

Hopefully you will remember this post when that happens, and come back to share with everyone what you have managed to accomplish.

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I just visited a popular Internet Marketer’s forum and I came across a thread started by a 24 year old guy, claiming that he made a bunch of money $885 in a week with article marketing.

Here is what he did:

* Wrote 10 articles each day and submitted to Ezinearticles.com

* At the end of the month, he had 200 articles in his account.

* The traffic generated from his articles made him $885.

* He pointed the links directly to his own website, and redirected the page to the product sales page.

Note that he didn’t build a list. He just focused on writing articles and drove all that traffic to an offer that converts.

The members on the site started encouraging him to start building a list, which he eventually did. After a few weeks, he crossed the $2,000 a month mark. Sales tapered off a little when he stopped submitting articles.

He tackled 3 niches at one time. One niche he was targeting was Run Car on Water. That niche eventually died out as gas prices started to drop. He still had 2 niches, which he didn’t reveal. But one niche continued to convert well for him. So he focused his efforts on that single niche.

Just a little example to show you what article marketing can do. If you know how to monetize the traffic, there is a ton of money to be made from articles.

When he started making money, he outsourced his article writing. You can do the same using this article distribution service, but make sure you know how to convert the traffic into sales. If you don’t, all that traffic coming to your site is just going to be wasted.

From the thread, I also learned that many article marketers gave up after just 10 or 20 articles. They wrote just 1 article per day, and they think it’s an accomplishment. That’s not so. The aggressive marketers write and submit at least 10 articles per day. So stick with article marketing a little before you give up.