Posts filed under 'articles writing'
Since the search engines have moved away from meta tags and keywords as the most important factors in rankings and moved more towards links back to a website as ”votes” for which are the best websites everyone has been scrambling for links back to their websites.
One of the easiest ways to get links back to your website is by writing articles in a relevant area, and getting them published in appropriate web article directores. The articles, of course, include a resource box as the author with the all important link back information.
The main reason that this has grown so fast as a means of getting publicity and link backs to your website is that special article submission agencies have also developed, to take all of the pain out of submitting your articles manually to each and every directory that you are interested in getting it published in.
One of the best known of thes is SubmitYOURArticle.com which I joined about a month ago and I have been very impressed with how effective it is. This is a relatively low cost subscription service and the way that it works is that once you have written your article you submit it to them with the resource box included. They then manually review it and then forward it on to a vast number of relevant article directories on your behalf. You can choose to submit one “plain” article or to spend about 20 minutes giving variations and they will generate numerous other “original” articles out of it, “leveraging” the article, and submit all of them.
Within days of using this service some of my new websites have gone from having only a handful of links back, to having over 30, and as time goes on this should continue to grow.
Some people worry about duplicate content by doing article submissions if one article gets published in over 30 article directories. This is a worry, but for the article directories…. not you! As they are not sitting on your site, they are on the article directories site. You are still getting all of the links back, but no duplicate content penalty. Which I think is great value for about $30 per month.
John
www.TheGardenLovers.com
http://exback.johnmcguireonline.com/
September 29th, 2007
As well as an auotoresponder, a survey tool, an article submitter service and some keyword research tools, sooner or later you are going to need a shopping cart. Hopefully this will be sooner, rather than later, as if you need a shopping cart then that means you are about to start selling stuff!
The commonly recommended shopping carts such as 1shoppingcart cost a fair amount of money, from around $400 per year to over $1000. This, of course, depends on what functions you need.
The fully featured shopping carts include a whole range of additional features, such as autoresponders, stock control, secure downloads, adtrackers, etc. So although they can seem a bit pricey they may save you on some fees that you are paying for these other services elsewhere.
Alternatives do exist and Paypal for example can provide basic transaction capabilities. These include receiving credit card payments without the need to have a merchant account, but there are some limitations compared with a fully fledged shopping cart. To begin with, though, this can be an easy and inexpensive way to get started in online trading.
I’ve decided to stick with Paypal for now although, I will probably opt for 1shoppingcart in the very near future, once it becomes clearer which of their packages would best suite my needs, as they vary enormously in price.
John McGuire
www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com
www.TheGardenLovers.com
http://exback.johnmcguireonline.com/
September 26th, 2007
I think arbitrage is fascinating word, it has a kind of esoteric air of intrigue and mystery. Perhaps because it is not a word in common use and I would hazard a guess that if you were to conduct a survey in the street, you would find more people who don’t know what it means than who do. Before I started in internet marketing I had heard the term only vaguely, on some stock market report or other on the news, and I had no idea what it meant.
When it cropped up again in association with the word Adsense i.e. Adsense arbitrage, at an internet marketing seminar recently, I took a good deal more interest in it than I had before, but I had absolutely no idea what either word meant, and had to work quite hard to conceal my ignorance. I left the seminar wanting to know a lot more about a lot of things but “Adsense arbitrage” was certainly pretty close to the top of my list.
Since then I have learned a lot about Adsense. This is where you get the chance for Google to have to pay you money per click, for a change! Although, unless you really know what you’re doing, it never seems to amount to very much ;-) Adsense can be thought of as the opposite of Adwords where you pay Google to advertise your product and you pay them per click.
Arbitrage, on the other hand, I had to look up in a dictionary and here is an example definition.
“Arbitrage: the nearly simultaneous purchase and sale of securities or foreign exchange in different markets in order to profit from price discrepancies”
Having gained a working knowledge of Adsense and at least a broad outline of what arbitrage was. I was very interested to read of an internet marketers results recently in combing a Google adwords campaign with a landing page containing Google Adsense ads, who managed to make $4000 in his first month in an Adsense arbitrage project!
What he did was to identify a topic in a subject area where the keyords are expensive, so Adsense clicks would have a high payout. He then published an article rich in keywords in this area, put adsense ads on the article website and mounted a Google Adwords campaign to drive traffic to the article page.
Theis whole arbitrage concept relies on the cost per click of the adword costing you less than the payment per click for the Adsense. Also you have to bear in mind that the conversion rate will not be 100%. That is to say, that not everyone that clicks your google ad and is taken to the site (for which you pay) will click a Google Adsense ad (for which you get paid). The percentage that do is called the conversion rate and can vary from less than 1% up to greater than 50%. In general 5-10% would be accepted as very good conversion rate. So to make this profitable you have to get low cost adwords and have high payment adsense.
Getting this to work is not easy and Google also have some rules which have to be observed, such as having some quality content relating to the adword on the site, the usual privacy, about, site map etc pages and a legitimite informative exit link on the page being the main ones.
Probably the most important skill to acquire to have any chance of this arbitrage working is to study Google adwords in depth to be able to identify affordable keywords from which you can profit. There are many keyword research tools to help you do this and I’ve tried Keyword Elite, which makes it a lot less laborius and time consuming.
Having seen the results referred to above I was very keen to have a go at this method. Especially as it could be set up quick, with no product to develop, just an article to write. I decided to have a site up within a day and see how it goes. I did this eariler this week and chose a common condition call sinusits and I am monitoring the performance closely and will update with results in about a week or so.
John
www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com
www.TheGardenLovers.com
September 6th, 2007
I talked earlier about one of my current projects in affiliate marketing the My Affiliate Store service and outlined some of the special features of this method of getting involved in affiliate marketing.
The more I work on this project the more impressed with it I become and there is probably no easier way of getting a good looking website up and populated with a good range of affiliate products. The products here can be almost anything including a impressive range of even physical products, it’s not just all downloadable digital products either, although it does those as well.
The topic I chose to get into was gardening at www.TheGardenLovers.com as I live on a smallholding which has a large garden and I spend a lot of time working on the garden and have got more interested in gardening as a result. This has the benefit when doing research for the site that it’s an area that I know and in doing so continue to learn more about. This makes adding content such as articles much easier and it keeps it more interesting. It also helps in chosing relevant products and in creating logical department and category indexing.
The built in SEO in the product is pretty good at getting your pages indexed and as content and product numbers increase over time they should climb in the rankings organically. I am seeing this work already and have only had the site up for about a month although traffic does take time to increase. Obviously in addition to leaving it to their system you can employ any of the other traffic generation methods you want, such as pay per click adwords campaigns, article writing, blog posting and trying to get incoming links.
The sites themselves do come from templates but these are very customisable and a number of other members are a bit ahead of me and have improved the visual appearance by steps such as customised banner heading and added more functionality like customer voting surveys and video articles.
Two particularly good examples of what can be done with the websites at My Affiliate Store are www.stylishcoffee.com on a subject which is very close to my heart, as you may know from my earlier posts and www.dreamweddingsource.com which I think is another very attractive site.
So I am planning to emulate some of the features from examples such as these sites by getting a professional banner done first off, which is very important, as the banner is really the first impression someone gets of your website. I also plan to add an “ask us a question” type feature which improves the browsing experience making it feel a lot more interactive.
As well as improving the look and functionality of the site, it continues to just need a steady progressive approach in adding product content and is an ideal type of project to keep just ticking over and growing, in the hope that it will start to pay dividends some way down the line. It and can therefore easily be combined with “juggling” some other more demanding projects.
John
www.TheGardenLovers.com
www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com
September 1st, 2007
After a nice BBQ at the weekend I got back to trying to do a little work. I concentrated yesterday on methods of generating traffic to commercial websites involving writing pieces of text.
I use the term pieces loosely as, when you start to write for online marketing purposes, it quickly becomes apparent that each different purpose requires at least a slightly different structure and content if it is to serve function that you desire. As I am fairly new to this I thought it would be worth sharing my experience.
A commonly used method of increasing sales is to send prewritten messages in a timed sequence to people who have opted-in to your email list in any given topic. The purpose of these messages is to develop a relationship with potential customers. These generally should contain some informative and useful content with little or no sales pitch and although useful should be partly incomplete as the complete version will usually be one of your products which you hope to sell to them at a future point in time. These are called autoresponder messages and once written require little or no effort as they are sent out by the software as scheduled.
There are a number of providers of autoresponders and the one I have opted for seems to be the most recommended by experienced online marketers that I have spoken to and it is called AWeber. This is a subscription bases service and costs about $20 per month. It is very useful but I have found it has a bit of a learning curve to get used to how it handles email messages and lists. Although it is pretty easy to generate the code for your website for email opt in forms etc.
One of the most frequently used content approaches for these early messages to new list members is brief hints or tips on how to do something that is relevant to the subject of the list.
On writing these messages though in order to maximise the benefits of your time and effort it makes sense to use the information in other ways as well. Examples would include as articles for submission to online article directories or even a web page.
The problem that can arise here though is a straight duplicate will be picked up by the search engines and if the purpose of the feature is to generate traffic it won’t work. The problem being that duplicate content is usually not ranked by the search engines. So this defeats the purpose.
A useful way to try to avoid this is provided by a website called dupecop . This handy little program checks the source and the modified version and rates it in percentage terms for originality. To avoid duplicate penalties you should aim for greater than 50% originality.
In addition to the duplicate content problem the text would usually need altering a little anyway, as an email tip would usually be less complete and comprehensive than an article and would also include some personalised information. So writing a fuller version is usually necessary for this purpose and again a web page has different requirements as well and will require a third slight rewrite.
So for any given topic to write about it can require at least 3 versions! This can make it start to feel a little like hard work. It does make sense though, and I think it can be justified as long as the information is genuinely useful and the rewrites are serving a legitimate purpose.
Obviously online marketers who get more successful would outsource a lot of the writing to free lancers although this does run the risk of losing a large element of the character and personality behind the information.
John
www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com
August 26th, 2007
