Lots of you know that I write articles for a living, as well as do marketing and demographic research. I’m getting a ton of questions lately about marketing your websites. I always answer, use common sense marketing. Frankly I don’t live on mine, that’s true, so my method may not suit you. It doesn’t bring in vast sums of money, but it does tank my articles high.

For those who are new to the game, well website marketing is competitive. It’s a game that everyone wants to get into right now because the economy… well frankly.. it sucks.

The advice I am giving to all of my clients is this. Use your own good sense. Common sense marketing right now is going to serve you a lot better. If all of those bankers and bakers and millionaires had all the answers, then why is the economy this bad?

In marketing, September sees us begin to trend toward Christmas thinking.. Its been that way for years.. Why marketing people, article writers and others don’t see that and act on it mystifies me.. It’s not a guarded secret. Website marketing is common sense. Marketing anything is common sense but particularly this.

School beginning sets crafters and others toward an autumn way of thinking. Autumn invigorates the crafter and the canner and the “homestyle” person, which we are trying to touch base with right now. People who make things themselves are more motivated. They do well at websites because they use common sense marketing strategies that aren’t taught in business classes or on those lovely self help things I hate so much.

Setting up articles using the Christmas gifts, home made Christmas gifts and etc is good to do NOW because they need time to rank. October will see even more of that trend. People who craft need time to make the items before Christmas. People who cook for hordes of others want recipes now, not at the last moment.

One things those silly business sites and all the marketers in the world fail to disclose or discuss is that an article takes time to rank.

Putting them in before they are searched to give them that time is the smartest moves. Trending now is fixing your house for fall and winter and getting set for Christmas. Keywords need to be in the first paragraph, and th last paragraph but sprinkling in there we need things like. holiday crafts, Christmas crafts and etc. Websites trend in common sense ways. Marketing people fail to add that in more than ninety percent of the silly marketing classes and discussions and if they do, they don’t’ use the common sense way of looking at it.

Getting set up and seeing your articles rank high means that you need to get them in a week or so ahead of when you want people to search them NOT after you find them already searching… that’s just silly. Finding key words that you would search for now, not those people have already searched for after the fact… although of course those help. But anticipating what is GOING to be searched is just as important and very often overlooked… Common sense marketing in action. Anticipate trends.

Website trends are easy to identify if you use common sense. Think about what you’re doing at any given time. What your wife might be doing or searching for. right now. What your husband is checking out online. The numbers of people searching for Christmas crafts, Christmas cookies, and Christmas things to make, holiday recipes is just astounding.

I’ve got a lot of recent articles ranking in number one search return pages in Google… nearly half are Christmas ones, but here’s a peek at the website searches for last week that will give you some insight.

Christmas 95897
Christmas tree 18216
Christmas trees 7616
Christmas decorations 5932
Christmas cards 5830
Christmas wallpaper 4308
Christmas borders 3726
Christmas ornaments 3564
Christmas crafts 2867
Christmas clip art 2437
Christmas cookies 2084
Christmas villages 2057

I use a few different rules to make them rank that lots of folks don’t use, but they are moving up fast with Christmas stuff in them. One website I work for has key words in each paragraph, with my main one in the last sentence of the first paragraph and the last sentence of the last paragraph. The truth is that keywords will help, but getting your pages online, with time to rank before the competitions helps just as much.

Getting some holiday stuff online now, is going to see it ranking and moving up in about 5-7 days… just when the searches for holiday crafts will intensify. Bingo. Common sense marketing for your website. Use the same approach to gardening, to butterfly gardens, to just about any topic or subject.

Get cracking folks. Get something online for the holidays. USE YOUR IMAGINATION!! Anything can be a holiday gift. Software, a genealogy chart, a box of all natural oatmeal… Use your common sense when it comes to marketing those things and bill them as unique gifts for birthdays, for Christmas or anything else.

. September and October is time to anticipate the trending toward Christmas. March sees gardeners start thinking about gardening. July has us seeking ways to lower our cooling costs and January means we want to cut the heating bills.

Think about the rest of the world, what they are buying, when they begin to look for it and get it up on your site. Right now, with our economy in the toilet and the banking industry willing to foreclose, and all the other lovely happenings, common sense is worth more than gold. Common sense marketing works best.

Happy Friday..