Cyber Flopping!

I was a struggling writer who’d been working on a novel for over a year. Needless to say, writing a novel when you’re an unpublished author doesn’t pay all that much–approximately zero. Since I was behind on the rent and slowly drowning in a pile of bills, I realized that I had no choice but to get a second job. My first job was teaching night classes in creative writing to a group of untalented suburbanites at the local community college.

I had just applied for a position in a bookstore when I learned about writing articles for online publication. I had never considered myself a journalist or an article writer, so I dismissed the suggestion out of hand. At least until he told me how much money could be made. No, it wasn’t a six-figure salary, but he was making a lot more than I ever could working at a bookstore. He indicated he was free to take on the task of authoring pieces, because his time was his own. The best thing about his job was that he worked from home and didn’t have to waste money on gas or tolls.

I was hesitant, but I decided to give it a try. Truth be told, I was a tad scared in the beginning. I didn’t know if I’d be any good at it. I wasn’t sure I could write articles, as my expertise was in writing fiction. My friend impressed upon me how simple it was. He said all I had to do was create a writing resume and submit it to any one of a hundred freelance writing sites online. These sites were driven by businesses who were looking for writers to compose articles that would then be submitted to an article directory.

Article directories are websites that gives users free access to insightful, informative articles. The person creating the articles will get guidance as to what topics to cover, which then get submitted to the article directory. If the article is accepted, the writer receives two back links, which he then connects to the website of the business he works for. It helps to enhance the purchase level by creating the traffic for the business.

After I had landed my first client, I wrote ten articles on the best way to wax hardwood floors. Articles are written differently by some authors, and narrative fiction is one of the styled I used in article writing. When I had completed the web content, I submitted them to the article directory they had selected. While all of the articles were not accepted the first time out, the article directory gave me expert advice on how to improve my articles and give them just what they were looking for.

Instead of working at the bookstore to pay my bills I started working for an article directory. It even paid my rent. I also enjoyed the fact that the article directory I was submitting my work to was providing useful information to interested users for free.

Popularity: 3% [?]

You’re About to Discover the TRUTH About Success & Wealth!

"Ultimate Guide To Webhosting" Click Here!

Technorati Tags: article directory, Article Marketing, Article Writer, article writing, articles, Bookstore, content, Creative Writing, Figure Salary, free content, journal articles, Journalist, Local Community College, Money 99, niche articles, Novel, Second Job, Suburbanites, Success, Suggestion, Unpublished Author

Article directories help you in two ways – they get you ranked faster on new keywords and they help spread your marketing message. While you can write a lot of generic articles about your niche topic, you can also write articles that are a promotional piece that links to your site, or even a review of your site. Article directories usually do not discriminate against such content unless the quality is poor or it appears overly spammy.

Some article directories such as Ezine have human editors that read and approve every article. An article directory like this does not allow links in the content other than would be required to understand what you are writing about. These types of article directories do allow you to have a signature area where you can place a follow link back to your website. For these types of directories, you want to appear as objective as possible, and avoid sounding too much like a sales pitch or your article will get rejected.

Remember, any articles you submit with a link to your site will usually be associated with your brand (or remembered as such). So you always want to submit quality articles and not a lot of junk that does not read or make sense even if an article directory allows you to do so without anyone rejecting your article. If you have others writing articles for you, remember this point and try to focus your efforts on submitting quality to article directories because this will additionally make others want to redistribute your content (additional links you did not plan on). Also, you should try to not submit multiple copies of the exact same text to different article directories. A few times is ok, but when the same one is distributed (and then redistributed by others who grab it) too many times with exactly the same text, you may actually get penalized by the search engines rather than the boost you wanted.

Popularity: 3% [?]

You’re About to Discover the TRUTH About Success & Wealth!

"Ultimate Guide To Webhosting" Click Here!

Technorati Tags: article, article directory, Article Ezine, Article Marketing, Article-directories, articles, content, directories, free articles, free content, Human Editors, internet marketing, journal articles, marketing, Niche Topic, Objective, publish articles, Quality Articles, Sales Pitch, Search Engines, SEO, Signature Area, traffic, Two Ways, Web Content

Most people who build a website eventually figure out that the only way to make anything, no matter how cool your site is, no matter how great the content is – is that traffic is king. Without people seeing what you have to offer, there is no point in offering it. Think of it this way, lets say you invented the next great widget – you know it will really sell and everyone you have shown it to agrees that it’s the best. If you spend a ton of dough and advertise in the middle of nowhere, it does not matter because no one sees it. If you spend your advertsing dollars in a busy city, you will have success because everyone sees it. the key difference is the level of traffic. Article directories are like a gateway to the city from the desert.

Submitting to article directories is very easy, but first you need to do keyword research. While this may seem slow and boring (or even a pain), it really has to be done to get decent results from your work. The link back to your site uses the keywords, and they are also used in context within the article. The keywords that are used to link to your site are gathered and analyzed by the search engines as one part of the determining formula for ranking. Research is needed to define what are useless (hardly used) keywords and super competitive keywords that are a waste of time because they will be too hard to rank with initially. So when you submit your articles to an article directory, you want the keywords to have decent search volume, but not massive so you can get the most bang for your time.

Article directories then take this content you published and post it to the site along side many thousands of other submissions. Users looking for great content for their site will come to article directories to grab it. Additionally, people subscribe to the RSS feeds from article directories that have them to get fresh content via RSS when it is published. Sometimes an article directory is also considered an authority by Google and others, thereby getting a link coming from that site garners more weight than from other links that do not have this authority.

Popularity: 3% [?]

You’re About to Discover the TRUTH About Success & Wealth!

"Ultimate Guide To Webhosting" Click Here!

Technorati Tags: article directory, Article Marketing, articles, Busy City, content, Decent Results, Desert, directories, free articles, free content, journal articles, keywords, Links Directory, People, publish articles, Search Engines, Search Volume, Submissions, Time Article, traffic, Waste Of Time, Widget

Anyone who begins down the path of internet marketing will soon learn there are all kinds of "guru's" who claim to have the latest trick to boost your search engine rankings.The reality of it is there are some key things to pay close attention to, but a lot of success just comes down to hard work and consistency.  Depending on what keywords you want to rank for, you can achieve success in a week or 2 or it may take months of hard work to get any results.

Asisde from basic webpage SEO stuff to make sure everything is done correctly, the biggest single factor still in your rankings is the number of links and where they come from.  The PR(page rank) of the site linking to you is important, as is the content on that site.  Recipricol links used to work really well (you link me, I link you) but now its really downplayed by Google as a valid method of links.

The easiest way to get links is through article marketing.  This is not the least work path, its the easiest as far as results go in my opinion.  The setup is simple:

1. Do some keyword research on your topic.  Pick 2-4 keywords you will focus on.  Make sure they get decent search volume but do not go after stuff that is too generic (meaning it will have unusually large seached volume) - those will be way too hard to rank on in a reasonable time.
2. Plan on writing 10 – 12 articles of 300-400 words each, using 2 of the keywords with links to your site in each article, with no more than 3 links per article total.Use the kwyword itself as your link text, not http://.
3. Publish 4 of the articles on a major article directory that has good ranking such as Ezine Articles or ArticlesBase.  These have human reviewers so it will take a bit of time to get your article published.  Luckily they do not expect it to be the first time its published, so while you are waiting there you can post it elsewhere.
4. Make sure you get some software that helps to spin the article content and links.  Basically spinning allows you to subsitute words and sentences for one another so that you can get a different article from the same basic article.  DO NOT try to use rewriting software – I have seen none that do a decent job – usually it reads like garbage and that will not help your rankings.  If you spin an article right, you can easilly get 10-20 different reading articles from a single article, enough to not worry about duplicate content out there (and possible penalties). 
5. The next step is to mass distribute your articles to sites looking for great content.  You can do this manually for free, or find some tools to purchase that can greatly speed this up.  I usually choose to pay some money in the savings of time.There are so many aspects to getting good rankings, you need a trade off somewhere so you can get more done.  You want to make sure you spread out the distribution – its unnatural for any site to go from no links to 500 links in 1 day – what is more natural is 0 to 10 to 18 to 25 to 40 … over many weeks build the level up.
6. You will need to start tracking your ranking level on the few keywords you have picked out.  After you have about 300 or so links you should start to get decent ranking.  Some keywords that are not as competitive, much less, and of course, some it might take thousands.  Your goal should be to get on the top 2 pages of Google for your search terms. 
7. In addition to the article work, you can also use social media accounts to link to each of the articles you publish AND also to your main web site.  You should make a hub pages site and a squidoo lens about your site or niche as well with links to the site.

Sites all want fresh content on them to improve their quality score.  Most look to articles about their niche topic to keep the viewer on the site and get better ranking.  This is exactly why article marketing works – you get links on disribution sites, webmasters get to search for content to add to their site from what is published.

Popularity: 3% [?]

You’re About to Discover the TRUTH About Success & Wealth!

"Ultimate Guide To Webhosting" Click Here!

Technorati Tags: Article Content, article directory, Article Marketing, articles, Articlesbase, Consistency, content, Ezine Articles, free articles, free content, google, Guru, Human Reviewers, internet marketing, journal articles, keyword research, keywords, Page Rank, Recipricol, search engine rankings, Search Volume, Spin, Time Plan, Work Path

Finding free articles to put on your website does many things to help you with search engine rankings.  First off, free articles provide direct niche content that your viewers are always looking for.The better the content on your site, the longer on average people will stay online at your site.I cannot really see many circumstances where more quality content would ever hurt a site - almost every scenario it is better.Having a bunch of additional content allows you to broaden out your target keywords and pull in more page views.

One of the main keys to keep in mind is to really tailor the articles you add on your site to your specific niche.If you have a site about gardening and tools - you dont want information non related to gardening, it just does not really make sense.  Often the addition of a blog to a site about the niche is a great addition, as you can post all the articles you find interesting to this blog.Not only is it free, it is very easy and simple to do.One great benefit of adding lots of niche content is users will bookmark your site and come back often to read more.The big thing is to add content to make your site more interesting - this expands your audience.If you don't want to add a blog, you can also just add an RSS feed from a few niche sites to automatically update content on your site.  This is a viable option if you don't have the time or resources to update content every few days and/or scour the web for the content.Blogs by others are often a terrific source of niche content, all of which you can pull in using an RSS feed.  Whenever that person updates a story or article,  The RSS feed can pull all or part of that content into your site so your readers can have access to it.

Whichever method you choose to get the content on the website, usually this will equate to higher search engine rankings as they get smarter about assessing the quality of sites and knock down the ones that don't meet the benchmarks for quality.Sites that have little valuable conent and have used black-hat methods to get Google ranking will get knocked back down - which is your gain.

Popularity: 4% [?]

You’re About to Discover the TRUTH About Success & Wealth!

"Ultimate Guide To Webhosting" Click Here!

Technorati Tags: article directory, article submission, Audience, Benefit, blog, blogs, Bookmark, Circumstances, Few Days, free articles, free content, Gardening, journal articles, Many Things, niche, Niche Content, Niche Sites, Page Views, Quality Content, search engine rankings, Search Engines, Target Keywords, Terrific Source, Viable Option, Web Content, Website Content