Using Article Marketing For Direct Traffic

For the most part I tend to focus on getting my website content indexed and ranked, so that I get organic search traffic. This has always been fairly easy to do when I had good original content and was targeting a lower competition longtail keyword phrase. But sometimes I have trouble ranking pages that don't have a lot of content on them and are basically just landing pages to present an offer of some sort to the visitor. I don't want to have a zillion words on the page, because I want the visitor's attention focused on the offer. But search engines like it when you fire off a whole bunch of words. So lately I've been doing a bit more article marketing to get traffic to those pages.

I didn't use article directories as a source of traffic for a long time. I used them for backlinks so my main site would rank high, but I never tried to get the articles themselves to rank high because I thought that would steal traffic from my main site. I still think that's good reasoning, but in cases when I can't rank my main site easily I began trying to get the articles to rank high so people will find the articles, read them, and click through the link in the resource box at the bottom and be directed to my site/landing page. This is working well.

The main thing is to use your target keyword as the keyword in your article. The big article directories have a good reputation with the search engines, and they will rank much more easily for your keyword than your own site will, in most cases. If you are taking this approach, then don't worry about the articles ranking higher than your own site and stealing your traffic. The goal is to get traffic through the articles, that's it. So keyword optimize your article, and then build backlinks to your article just as you would to your own site, to improve its search engine rankings.

In my experience this does not work very well for simple informational sites. The reason for that is, if your visitors are simply looking for some information, then reading your article might be enough and their curiosity might be satisfied or you will have answered their question sufficiently so they likely won't click through to your site at the end of the article. This does work well, however, when the visitor is searching for a product, service, or special deal. If you write a review about a certain microwave oven, and your visitor found your review through searching for that product's name, they are likely interested in buying that product. So after reading your review they will likely click through your resource link to see if they can buy through you, or seek more information.

I like getting my own sites to rank because I don't like my sites to be at the mercy of other ones. I don't like all of my traffic to come via other websites. But this is another way to get some pretty easy traffic when you're having trouble ranking your own site. Attacking things from a variety of angles is always a good idea anyway, because that helps protect you from future algorithmic changes in the search engines. If my site disappears from Google, at least I'll still have some article traffic coming in, and vice versa.

For getting direct traffic, I've had the best success with Ezinearticles, Goarticles, and Articlesbase, which are often called the big three. Ezinearticles ranks the most easily, but on the other two directories you can add links outside of your resource box, even at the beginning of your article, so it is easier to get a high click through rate.

Learning From IM Mistakes

It's a pretty common mantra that there is no such thing as failure, only lessons. But that can be hard to swallow when mistakes, errors, and ommissions cost you money. Nevertheless, I aim to learn as much as I can from my mistakes and failures and channel that new wisdom into future success.

The first mistake I realized today was a simple one: I moved to a new address, but I forgot to update my payment address in my Amazon Associates account settings. So here I was, checking my mail box every day this week wondering where my check was, when really it must have gone to my old address. A dumb mistake, but not the end of the world. I contacted an Amazon Associates representative and was told to wait until the end of the current month to see if my mail will get forwarded to my new address, and if not to contact them again and they will reissue a new check. So I will get my money. But I will not have it for a while. The amount of the check is pretty insignificant in the grand scheme of things, so maybe this was a good time to make this silly error and learn my lesson. It would be much worse to learn that lesson when I was expecting a very large paycheck but was left hanging.

The next problem I had is still a bit of a mystery. One of my blogs was flagged as a spam blog by my free blog host, and was the second one to be flagged as such and deleted. The first time it happened a manual review was carried out and the blog was verified to be spam and deleted, even though it contained 100% legitimite original content written by yours truly. And the free blog host offers no explanation as to why it was classified as such. I am still awaiting my manual review of the second blog, which was flagged in the past couple of days and immediately blocked. With no forthcoming information from The Man, all I can do is evaluate what I've done and try to guess what the free host didn't like. All I can think of is that I sent too many backlinks to the blog. I did build a fair number of backlinks, but nothing too crazy. But I think in response to my assumption, I might take a different approach to building backlinks to my money sites. I should build a smaller number of backlinks to the money site, and then build additional backlinks to those sites rather than having them all link to the money site. I already do that to a large extent, but with that particular blog I may have gotten a bit overzealous on the direct backlinking.

An additional and more definite lesson I took from the deletion was that I need to back up my blogs more frequently. I'm sorry to say that I have no backup of the blog that was deleted, so if it is not restored it will be lost forever. And even more to the point, this incident hammered home the idea that I really need to build all my blogs and websites on my own paid hosting accounts. Free hosting is nice because it's free, but the free hosting provider calls the shots and they have control of your work. If they want to delete your blog based on a hunch rather than evidence, they can do that. What are you going to do, sue them? The bottom line is that I need to own and control all of my own sites. I have a few established blogs on Blogspot that I will leave up because of all the backlinks I would lose by exporting. But all of my future money sites will be on my own paid hosting. And backed up frequently.

Because I'm expecting that the important lessons I learned today will bring me greater success in the future, I have resisted pulling my hair out.

Writing Content Can Be Like Pulling Teeth

One of the biggest challenges for me in internet marketing has been working in niches that I'm not personally interested in. What do I care about convection microwaves or stainless steel frying pans or whatever? Creating content for niches I'm not interested in is a quick way to get bored and harm your momentum, and harm your quality of life.

One way to get around this is to write about topics that you have a real interest in. I'm interested in fitness and working out, so I can shoot off articles and blog posts in that niche very quickly and easily. I'm very well-travelled, so I can spit out short travel destination guides in just a few minutes. Life is so much easier when you can write content about a topic that you love.

But is it always practical to write about things you love? No, of course not. The main objective of your business is to make money, and your passions are not always profitable. So choose niches that are profitable. But rather than torture yourself by writing all the dull content, outsource it. You can commission articles from writers through the marketplace sections of Warrior Forum, Digital Point, Wickedfire and other internet marketing forums. You can also try outsourcing sites like Elance.com. You can order however many articles you need through freelancers on those sites, or if you need an ongoing stream of content you can even hire your own regular part time or full time employee. If you do this, the key is to hire somebody in a country such as India or the Philippines where the average salary is low compared to your own country. That way you can pay someone a good living wage even if your business is still small. Outsourcing is the way to scale your business. Get others to do the work you can't or don't want to do, and focus on other things to build your business.

Life is too short to torture yourself by writing about topics you find boring. It's a surefire way to put you in a bad mood and turn you off of internet marketing. Keep yourself engaged so you can work most efficiently.

Back To Basics

Over the past year or so I've tried a lot of different methods of internet marketing, and put in more effort than ever before. I've had some success with most of those methods, but even so, my rate of progress has still failed to be as mindblowing as my rate of progress at the beginning when I first began internet marketing. I think this is because of a few reasons.

In the beginning I didn't know much about the IM world, and had very little knowledge of different methods and kinds of income streams. So I picked one method and just kept doing it until I figured out how to make money with it. Later on, I started to crave more information about IM, learning about different affiliate programs, types of projects, ways to promote, etc. Because I was now learning about all of these different areas of IM, I now lacked the focus that I had in the beginning and could never concentrate on one method or one project for long enough to make it reach its potential. So the basic lesson here is focus and persistence. Pick a method and stick with it until you can make it work. Don't bounce around from method to method.

Realated to that is my personal desire to make the process more "professional" or complex, because I will take some kind of satisfaction out of learning new techniques and having some kind of expertise or breadth of knowledge. So I was trying to complicate things by adding too many new ideas. I really had to stop that and just go back to the simple procedures I used in the beginning. They worked for a reason. Your business is primarily your source of income, and secondarily it can be a source of self-actualization. If a procedure works, stick to it. Don't try to spice it up. You can enhance the process, but only if it adds to your profits.

I also noticed that I started building sites to look more professional, or to look prettier for people I show them too. It worked, when I showed my newer sites to friends they would be impressed by how they looked and how professional of a job I had done. But they weren't making money! On certain types of sites, particularly Adsense sites, simplicity is key. Beauty distracts visitors from the ads or offers. I went back and simplified the designs of a lot of my projects, and now they are generating much higher revenue. The lesson: build sites for money, not for beauty and not for pride. If you need a site to show off to your friends, ok, build one beautiful site that makes no money. But just one!

Those are a few of the tendencies that developed in me after reaching an intermediate level of internet marketing. Watch out for those tendencies because they can creep up on you without you even realizing it. If it happens, think back to how you used to do things and get things back to basics.

RSS Feed Directories

RSS feed directories are basically websites that function as an online catalog of RSS feeds from various blogs and sites around the web. You can submit your blog or site's RSS feeds to the directories, and it essentially republished all of your content on their site. And every time you publish new content to your blog or site, the RSS feed in the directory will automatically update, publishing your new content.

Until recently I had just submitted my websites' RSS feeds to one or two RSS feed directories. But recently I have been using SENuke, which has an RSS module that currently features 18 RSS directories. There are also other lists online like this one (it's a little outdated, but a lot of the directories still work). At first with SENuke I was only submitting the RSS feeds of the new Web 2.0 properties I created for promotion, but then I decided to submit the feeds from some of my main money sites. I also submitted them to some directories on the list above. The result? I got a pretty sharp increase in search engine traffic that brought my income up by about 50%. This lasted about a week, and then the effects went away. But when I posted new content to those money sites, some of the effect came back (but not all of it).

Basically the benefits of using the RSS directories are that these high authority websites publish your content along with backlinks to your website/blog. Those high authority backlinks improve your site's search engine rankings. That's why I got that huge sudden jump in search traffic, because by submitting my sites to 50 or so directories, I automatically got hundreds of backlinks to each of the sites. The question is why did the effects fade? It could be that Google first notice all my backlinks and gave me credit for them, but then figured out that they were all essentially the same and that I had just submitted my site to a lot of directories, and then reduced the amount of link juice I was entitled to. Or I guess it could be that when you first submit your feed, it is at the top of the list on the directory, but the longer you leave your content not updated, the further your feed slips down on the directory's list and gets less attention. I am inclined to think that's the case because when I updated my money site's content, some of the original effects were restored. Maybe the feed hits the front page whenever you update, then slowly drops down. Honestly I'm speculating, and if anyone knows the definite answer I'd love to know it.

In any case, the benefits of submitting your feeds are obvious and it's a very simple process, so if you haven't done it yet then you should. You can also submit feeds for your accounts on Ezinearticles, Hubpages, your social bookmarking accounts, etc.

Removing Some Affiliate Banners From My Blog

If this isn't your first visit here then you may have noticed that some of the affiliate banners on my blog have disappeared. I used to have a PPC-Coach banner on here as well as a Hostgator banner, both of which had my affiliate link in them so if you signed up for either service I'd get a commission. Just simple affiliate marketing. So why'd I remove them? Well, in the case of Hostgator it's because I felt far too many people get screwed out of commissions they've rightfully earned with Hostgator. They say they pay you $50 per signup, which they do but if person who signed up quits after a couple months it seems they do a chargeback and remove your commission. Hey, it's not my fault if Hostgator can't retain their subscribers. My job as an affiliate is to send them a subscriber. It's their job to satisfy the subscriber. I dealt with a lot of this kind of thing when doing email and zip submit offers, but come on, Hostgator is a big company and should be above that kind of thing. If they want to cover their risks more, then they should offer affiliates a lower payout, saying $25 or whatever, and then pay them properly. I'm not going to promote things that I won't get paid for, because there are plenty of other affiliate programs that will pay me properly.

The other one was PPC-Coach. I don't want to talk bad about this program, because so many people say they get a lot out of it. But I can only feel good about promoting something in the IM niche if I personally have gotten a lot out of it, and in this case I haven't. I'm not the most clear-minded person, I can be a bit of a space cadet, but I can usually make up for that by being a hard worker. On PPC-Coach though, the approach is to basically give you a whole bunch of resources and leave it up to you to make sense out of them and apply them. As a PPC noob and as someone with very little knowledge of scripting languages and the technical side of things, I spent about 4 months being thoroughly confused. And I didn't feel that the staff were interested in dealing with someone who needed handholding. So I quit. Since then I have been using nothing but free traffic methods, but will get back into PPC once I've reached some of my goals for free traffic. But since I quit using PPC-Coach, I didn't feel I could promote it anymore.

In any case, I keep this blog as a kind of diary and way to share what I experience for anyone who gets anything out of it. I don't really see this blog as a source of income, so it was an easy decision to remove the banners.

Outsourcing The Grunt Work

If you look over to the right you'll see a caricature of me, flashing the peace sign (Hey, it's not cheesy here in Japan!) and holding a fistful of dollar bills. On a lot of websites and blogs people place their photo to build some familiarity with the visitor and personalize the experience a bit. I wanted to do that here, but I thought it would be cooler to represent myself as a character. Does it look like me? Here, you can compare. Cheesy peace sign and all.

So I wanted a caricature to use on this blog and maybe some other sites, but I'm not good at drawing. I fumbled around with Photoshop for a bit, and read some tutorial on how to make your own caricature, but I wasted an hour and failed miserably. So I decided to outsource the job. I went over to Elance.com and had a look around for freelance illustrators who could draw me. There were lots! Some are Americans who charge $35 per hour, and others are Filipinos or Romanians who charge $8 an hour or less.

I posted the details of the job I wanted so that freelancers could bid on the job and I could choose the best offer. In the end, I actually got a friend of mine to do the drawing and all I owe him is a beer, but Elance is a great resource for outsourcing jobs you don't know how to do. Because really, I could have spent all day on that illustration and it would have still been terrible and I would have lost a lot of opportunites to make money during that time. So spending a few bucks is the best decision when you're stuck. No successful business person has ever done everything by himself. These days with the internet it is incredibly easy to outsource, you don't even have to leave your desk.

Have a look at Elance and similar sites even if you don't need any work done at the moment. It will be valuable just to know what kind of resource it is and how it can help you when you need it.