Online surveys turn what was once a time consuming, resource hungry, cumbersome process into a low cost, quick, easy exercise that delivers real-time reporting.
Ease of Design
Out with the word-processor, now there is a quick and easy way for almost anyone to create surveys using a simple menu system that allows surveys to be created in minutes and with the ability to add additional questions and modify and move existing questions around.
Ease Of Delivery
Once a survey has been created it is deployed through the internet or organisations intranet making it instantly available to anyone with access to the internet.
Ease of Promotion
There are a number of easy ways to invite respondents to participate in a survey such as sending an email that contains a link to the survey or linking to the survey from a suitable website.
Ease of Participation
Online surveys don't just make it easy for the publisher as most respondents find that, when compared against the traditional pen and paper survey, completing a survey online is quicker and easier and from the publishers point of view a lot less prone to mistakes such as respondents missing out questions or multiple responses being entered against single response questions.
Ease of Survey Management
With an online survey the publisher can see in real-time the response rate and summary results.
Ease of Analysis
At the end of the survey the response data is ready for detailed analysis, the information can be loaded into a spreadsheet or third-party analysis program where the respondent data can be sliced and diced.
Appreciating the Ease
Once the ease of the total life cycle of conducting a survey online has been appreciated by business managers they will begin to recognise the multitude of new opportunities that exist.
The costly annual employee satisfaction survey can now be done quicker and cheaper allowing the exercise to be conducted bi-annual or quarterly ensuring any employee problems are identified and dealt with early. There is also now an opportunity to conduct smaller and more targeted ad-hoc surveys on a departmental level or a niche area of the business improving employer/employee communications.
A survey can be used to help deliver a management message and measure the employee support and concerns of introducing new initiatives, something a simple one way memo style directive cannot do.
Survey's can be used as a marketing tool as the survey explains the benefit of a product or service and gathers the response from potential customers.
ROI today
Technology too often delivers better ways to perform certain tasks but with a Return on Investment that often requires 'investment' first and the 'return' later. Many of the available online survey services such as www.surveygalaxy.com have not only turned a cumbersome task into a cinch, but reduced the cost down to a pinch, giving you a return on investment from day one and opening up a world of possibilities and further savings.
With the opportunities that online surveys bring it is a tool the smart manager will always have to hand in their personal tool box
First of all use your articles to market for traffic. This is the single most important thing you can do, because people reading your articles represent a tremendous prospect base for you.
Therefore your real goal is to use your articles to get the click to either a landing page, your website or blog. If you have done that you done your job.
Most article directories will allow you to review statistics on how your articles are performing. The most important statistic that you are looking for is how many URL clicks you got.
Secondly remember that your articles do not have to win any writing prize. Leave the Pulitzer prize for the professionals. You just concentrate on writing a good quality article that contains proper grammar and spelling.
That means you do not have to spend all day crafting the perfect article. Understand that your readers are not writing critics either. This should take some pressure off of you and allow you to concentrate on getting your article done and ready to start the next one.
Thirdly article marketing is a numbers game. It only stands to reason that the more people you have reading your articles and more potential traffic you have coming to it.
Therefore spend as much time as you possibly can, either writing articles personally, or contracting them to be written for you. You might even want to consider doing both.
Hiring a company to write your articles for you can be an excellent use of your time as well as a way to expand your article marketing efforts.
Fourthly do not limit your article marketing efforts to just one directory. Try and get unique versions of them into several of the top directories.
If time is a problem use a submission service to do this for you. As a matter of fact automate every portion of your article marketing efforts that you possibly can.
In summary, this is four article marketing strategies that will make a difference in whether article marketing works for you or not. Article marketing can be a lot of fun, a lot of hard work, and a very profitable way to build your Internet business.
Both Martin Day & Manish Kum Bansal are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Martin Day has sinced written about articles on various topics from Marketing, Surveys and Parental Care. Martin Day is a Director of Survey Galaxy Ltd a web site that allows anyone to create, design and publish online surveys. For more information please visit