If you own, run and maintain an internet based business or a site you will know you need to write articles. It’s as simple as that. Regular users of the internet know that as well. Articles are there to provide information, help and knowledge but for the website owner or blogger they have a much more important function.

Articles can move a site up the search engine rankings for particular keywords and phrases. The dual function is that they provide content for your site and help to build trust and confidence in the visitor. They can increase visitors to a site and that in itself can have benefits if that site is a promotional tool for selling products or building a list.

The problem is that article writing can be time consuming and an awful lot of people don’t like to write. I do but there are lots of people who don’t. So what do you do if you don’t like writing?

Well you could copy someone else’s work but that is a no no. There is no excuse for plagiarism. It’s dishonest and morally and ethically wrong. You can copy someone else but only if you copy the whole article in full and include the resource or bio box as well. That gives credit to the original writer and you can sleep easy.

So what other ways are there to write articles?

There are free articles in the public domain. Just look in Google. There is no problem with copyright but the problem with simply lifting them is that because they are freely available, others have gone before! You can however knock them around, edit them, put relevant keywords in and so on. You might find this easier than starting from scratch and very often by the time you have finished with it, you will have a unique article. It is often better than starting with a blank page.

If you have some spare funds you might want to invest in getting some articles written for you. I have to say I have had a mixed experience with this. You may find that you have to try a few freelance writers until you find one that “fits” There are many sites catering for this, such as elance and rentacoder.

Hunt around and I will see you tomorrow with some tips on using freelancers

Til next time

jane

]]> http://www.janerobinsononline.com/internet-marketing/writing-articles-when-you-hate-writing/feed/ 0 http://www.janerobinsononline.com/keywords-and-links/finding-backlinks-to-your-blog/ http://www.janerobinsononline.com/keywords-and-links/finding-backlinks-to-your-blog/#comments Wed, 28 Jan 2009 08:43:49 +0000 admin http://www.janerobinsononline.com/?p=205 How do you find the backlinks to your blog? Do you know what they are and why backlinks are important?Backlinks are one of the best ways of pushing you up the search engine rankings and they come about when more and more sites and directories “point” to your and make Google become aware of you.

Content and lots of different methods of “pointing” are the way to do this. You could have a number of associated blogs with links to your main blog.Its common to get the main blog as the  “money” blog ie  thats the one that collects the list and sells the occasional product  (or in come cases not so occasional!). The other blogs have content that points to the main blog using keywords and other anchor text.

Other ways include,submissions to social bookmarking sites, to directories and press releases. There are a plethora of methods all of which involve some work to set up but can be automated ( for a cost).

One of the main methods of promoting your blog and creating links is article marketing. This does involve some work at least in the beginning but there are many ways to to do this. I have written about article marketing in previous posts and I will write some more on this on the next few posts.

Backlinks then, the lifeblood of internet marketing. More to follow!

Til next time

Jane

OPPORTUNITIES

So where would you go to start looking for opportunities? If you already have a blog, then you should look for complimentary products. There is no point in blogging about football and trying to get buyers for dog training products! It’s simply a different market. On the other hand it you are going to have an animal centred blog, and then it might work.

CLICKBANK AND COMMISSION JUNCTION

There are loads of digital and physical products to promote. Two of the main sites are Clickbank and Commission Junction. Clickbank is the place to look for digital products ie instantly downloadable once the payment is processed and Commission Junction is more for the physical products. You might also want to look at Amazon.com. I will look at these markets more closely in the next few days posts.

COMPATABILITY

There are a variety of techniques available to connect with a potential product. There is no doubt however that a well focused blog that is reaching a specific target audience should seek to display marketing links directing website traffic to companies which complement the blog without acting as direct competition to the blog. This helps to ensure the blog visitors will not only be interested in the affiliate marketing links and therefore more likely to click on the links but will also help to ensure the blog visitors do not find the affiliate marketing links to be irksome, ie they have at least the potential to be of interest to the visitor.

Why do I say there should not be a direct competition to the blog.Well, you may think at some stage of producing your own product, so you have to be careful.

MONITOR

Once you decide on a product and have got a link to them (more on this later) you should monitor how effective this is. If you have a high traffic site and only a small percentage click on the links then you need to consider why that might be. Make some changes, either in design, size or location.Don’t do them all at once or you wont be able to monitor what has worked and what hasn’t.

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ADDITIONAL TECHNIQUES

You can do a lot to maximize your potential profits from affiliate marketing, joining forums, social networking and article marketing top name but a few. There re a lot of self promotion methods available but like anything else they can take time and effort, not necessarily money although you will undoubtedly want to look at PPC (pay per click or AdWords as it is known) marketing. That means spending money by the way!

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AND FINALLY

You have to be careful that you adhere to the product owners guidelines. Some of them are touchy about trademarks! If you are going to use any of their logs, check that you can before you do.

Lets have a look at Clickbank tomorrow

Til then

jane

You may not know anything about keywords. I know I didnt a few months ago. You can read about them in earlier posts. I suppose if you think about it it makes sense because keywords are the words and phrases you or I type into google or whatever and search for the things that come up. For example if you are looking for a garden shed,thats what you might type in. There are keywords which is the singular and what are called longtail keywords, thats the phrases you might type in.

So what relevance do they have to making money on the internet? They are SO relevant! They are the money making engine! You have to look at keywords and get a basic understanding of what they are and where to look for them to have any real chance of making money online.

There are a number of free tools and paid tools out there. You may have heard of Overture and this is certainly mentioned in lots of things I have read over the last 12 months. Dont bother with it. I think its now been taken over by Yahoo but it never seemed to work anyway.

The first tool you can try is the google keyword tool. No money need change hands! Its free. There are at least 2 great ways of getting free keyword ideas there.  You might find it useful for brainstorming sessions. I  certainly do. Think of a “seed” word or phrase and type it in. The tool automatically defaults to the keyword finder but there is a another way of searching just underneath that which I will tell you about in a minute. I have only just found out what it means but its a very useful addition to my learning curve and it might help you as well.

Anyway, type in the seed keyword and you will get a number of words back showing you alternatives that could be used. If you ticked “synonym” as you should you get even more variations. As I say this is a great brainstorming tool and will give you a good number of keywords you can use.

Whilst researching your potential money making markets, visiting forums etc, you may have come across websites that were already in that market. You can use this same keyword tool to find out what sort of keywords that site might be using.  If you click on the website content button on the google keyword tool, you can enter the website address and google will go out and have a look and report back. Great eh?

I’ll give you more ideas tomorrow. In the meantime if you want to have a look at a free trial for a paid keyword tool, have a look at wordtracker

Just how do you find the basics of establishing links and exchanges? Have a look at

htttp://www.marketleap.com;There are tools and a link popularity checker in there. Have a look at other

sites like yours. This particular tool shows you the number of inbound links that site has. The more links

you have the more likely people will want to be with you. The further you get up this then the more traffic

you will get.

Should you be approaching the competition? Absolutely. If you are both open to it. Think of parallel

markets as well.

Anyone you link to would have to have a page rank of at least 1 and they would need to have an existing

links page. If they don’t then there is no point. Also find sites that are open to linking. If you see a phrase

that they are willing to exchange links then that’s a good start.

Have a look at a sites page rank which is on a scale from 0-10 depending on its importance to Google.

When a site with a page rank links to you you get a bit of their ranking. Its not simple maths because this

is many layers deep and they are all filtering down. If you can get links from the higher ranked sites then

you will get more traffic. Look for the higher ranked site with at least a 1. You will need the Google toolbar

http://www.toolbar.google.com for this. Download and install it!

You need to look at exchanging links as another tool in your search for more traffic. It gives a network of

sites that are linking to you and back. It’s also about the network, it gives you market information and

you can see what other sites are out there. Looking at this will improve your market knowledge and give

you direct traffic. It will give you better search engine rankings and give you search engine traffic as a

side effect.

Linking will boost your profile on line. People will start to see you and it gives you content because if you

have a lot of links then you can get a lot of quality content.

Take time to work on your links page, add in a bit of content or an image to it. Get a links page that adds

content and keywords. Think of this as another way of building a presence and increasing search engine

traffic