In days of old I’d spend a lot of money on PLR.  I’m sure you have as well.  Perhaps it was a monthly membership to something like Article Underground or anyone of the gurus out there selling monthly memberships or some such scheme to get you into their PLR distribution.  You don’t see a lot of that anymore, except for Article Underground that keeps trying to get people to buy into their “Fire Sales” (whatever that means).

You also find PLR through tons of spam offers from gurus that “once sold those very same articles for $47.00 per month” but are now giving them away for joining their mailing list or selling 100,000 articles (I kid you not) for $47.00 and if you happen to be smart enough to try and leave the site they try and grab you by reducing the price by another $30.00.

The problem with PLR is that is written for the masses - and by that I do not mean readers but for marketers.  Have you read some of the PLR out there?  It’s really crappy.  I mean seriously, it is very, very bad.  Broken english, no train of thought in the article at all, very disjointed and written to someone that has only a grade 8 education.

I don’t know about you but on many of my affiliate sites, the visitors are obviously more educated than that.

So you say “but I’ll rewrite the PLR, at least its given me a starting point”.  OK, if you say so.  I’ve tried to rewrite PLR recently by gorging on the hundreds of thousands of articles that I’ve accumulated – it was a fruitless task.  I ended up rewriting the article entirely to the point that there was no resemblance to the original article.  That’s how bad most of the articles are.  It took me twice as long to rewrite, and can honestly say that if I had written them from scratch it would have taken much less time.

You are much better off researching topics for articles in the niche your site(s) are in and writing well thought, logically flowing and informative articles instead of using PLR as a base or for anything.

Writing well researched articles using strong, long-tail keywords will also help you with your SEO – just take a look at this product Amazonian Profit Plan - they generate a 5-figure income (probably 6-figure by now) writing well thought articles and reviews.

There is a lot to SEO and writing good content is just one aspect.

Of course getting visitors to your site can be accomplished through other means as well, but content is the easiest and least expensive.

Technorati Tags: affiliate marketing, article marketing, bum marketing, PLR Articles, Writing Articles

So there are a couple of ways to get visitors to your site.

The old, trusted and true method of organic visits.  But it does take time, and though you could scale your efforts it take a lot of work.

Organic visits come about several ways:

• Article marketing.  You submit articles to all the major article directories.  As these get visited regularly by the search engines spiders, your site should also get indexed quickly and in many cases these are one-way links to your site.  If you’ve written your articles with keywords in mind then you should slowly start to rank for these keywords and in turn will get visits based on those keywords. The only problem with article marketing is that it is slow.  There are tools out there that will spin articles, so one article could become 50 in a matter of a few seconds but few of these tools result in good quality articles.  So your only choice is to either write them yourself or outsource them to someone – I’ve got issues with outsourcing articles.  Most of the stuff I’ve ever outsourced in the past has been real shit.  Serioulsy.  Even when the individual has come recommended.  Now mind you I wasn’t paying a premium for the articles, perhaps as little as $1.00 each – but they were realy crap.

  There are also good tools out there that will help you distribute your articles to hundreds of sites – doing it by hand isn’t an easy job.  Trust me.

  Read up on Mass Article Creator and Submitter.

  Lesson learned has been you get what you pay for.  Pay a little, get crap.  Pay a little more, get better quality.  Pay a lot, get content like it was meant to be written — with an authoratative angle.

  I’ve taken the route of writing my own content for several niches that I work with – my most recent “experiment” has been with best home mortgage loans.  I prefer to write my own content, and if it is for a niche that I don’t know a lot about I read up on the niche.

  Organic marketing and visits are also done through link exchanges, commenting on blog posts (though that may not work as well as it used to), guest posting on blogs and most recently taking advantage of social media.

• PPC – this is one of the easiest ways to get huge amounts of traffic to your site quickly.  Pay for it.  Again it’s not easy – you still need to do your homework but rather than worry about spinning or writing articles you are developing and preparing “winning” ads that are run through Google, Yahoo, MSN or Facebook and the multitude of ad networks out there. PPC is quick but it is expensive and over the years marketers have stated that you can expect about 1% conversion.  So that means for every 100 visitors to your site, 1 will buy something.  So you see where it can get expensive.

There is no guaranteed way to get traffic – for every niche that you work in you need to try different routes – however using a combination of organic growth methods with PPC and building a mailing list will help in securing traffic and being able to monetize that traffic so that you see a ROI instead of nothing.

Technorati Tags: article marketing, organic traffic, pay per click traffic

Submitting stories to article directories is a sure way to get noticed, and visitors to your site – especially if the topics you are writing on are “HOT” AND your writing is good.

Here is a list of the Top 10 Article Directories as based on Alexa and Google PR numbers:

1. http://ezinearticles.com – Alexa 214 – Google PR 6
2. http://articlesbase.com – Alexa 993 – Google PR 5
3. http://buzzle.com – Alexa 2,128 – Google PR 6
4. http://searchwarp.com – Alexa 7,379 – Google PR 4
5. http://goarticles.com – Alexa 16,589 – Google PR 6
6. http://articlealley.com – Alexa 16,655 – Google PR 5
7. http://articledashboard.com – Alexa 23,037 – Google PR 6
8. http://articlesnatch.com – Alexa 23,952 – Google PR 2
9. http://ideamarketers.com – Alexa 26,219 – Google PR 3
10. http://amazines.com – Alexa 28,429 – Google PR 4

There are of course dozens of other top article directory lists out there, along with hundreds of sites.  My favourites from this list are EzineArticles and GoArticles – I’ve used them for quite some time and am happy with the traffic they generate… now if I could only write an article per day ans submit them to the top article directories!

Technorati Tags: article directory, article marketing, Increase Traffic Through Article Marketing, Submit Articles to Directories, Top 10 Article Directories, Top Article Directories

Hi,

If you are using articles as one item in your tool box to make money, you should be concerned with the optimal article length.

As you write articles, you need to keep one thing in mind – why are you writing the article?  Hopefully the answer is clear – to drive visitors to your website.  Your article should provide information, but also be a teaser to what the reader will get if they visit your website.

When writing articles to drive traffic to your website, make sure that it is a length that is optimal for search engine optimization.  Articles that are as short as 200 words or as long as 500 words should fit into this category.

Even if search engine optimization is not your goal, it is still a good idea to keep your articles at this length for your reader’s sake. They are likely to not finish your page if it is any longer. This could leave them with only half of the information you wanted them to have or leave them with the impression that your site is too “wordy”.

Most readers do not read a website page as they would a book, so the shorter the better even if this means splitting one long idea into 4 or 5 pages.  In fact using this technique will ensure that you have several articles and/or posts for your blog.  If you use this technique ensure that the post and/or article stands up by itself — it is fine to refer to the previous article/post but it should be understandable by teself.  If you will run the article/story as a series, then be sure to label them so that the reader can pick and choose which part they want to read or so they know what is coming up next to help them determine if they want to continue reading.

Regards,

Technorati Tags: article marketing, bum marketing, Internet Business, internet marketing

Hi,

Now is the time to start dig up those creative writing skills, and use them for the good of your business.

We are living in an age of information based marketing.  Look around you – everyone offers reviews (information) of their products.  Entire websites are devoted to product reviews — so why not use information to build your business?

Article writing, submissions and publications are the most popular and easiest way to spread knowledge and provide teaser information to drive visitors to your website. 

There are many tools in cyberspace that you can use to make the process of distributing your articles easy — and unless you want to do everything by hand, I highly recommend automating this process.

Let us take a look first at the common mistakes that some people make before submitting their contents to article directories:

1. Confusing the reason to promote the articles with the reason to write them.In article writing, there are three key benefits: branding, lead generation and promotion, which are all part of your optimization efforts.

   But there is only one reason why you write an article, and that is to inform your audience. If the article is not focused on this primary and most important purpose, it will fail to achieve the three promotion benefits because no one will be interested in reading them.

   You need to figure out first how to get people to read what is in your article, then make them click on your resource box.  You can achieve this by producing good content.  If you can not write, consider outsourcing the work.  Check out eLance or Rent-A-Coder.

2. Failing to maximize the promotional opportunities of article marketing.You already know that your articles can help you generate additional links back to your site. But do you know that you can get more visitors and better search engine results from that same articles?

   Mention keywords at strategic places. Just be sure not to overdo them.  Using anchor texts is also an effective method.

   Remember that is not only about the links back to your site. Part of doing well in your article marketing is getting picked up by publishers with a large audience and gaining the ability of leveraging other brands because of the quality of your work.  Better search engine results is the benefit of having well written, and distributed articles.

   But these things by themselves will not money in your pocket.  There are other factors that can turn your article marketing efforts into an opportunity that can boost your earnings, not just increase the number of visitors to your site.

3. Publishing content that does not help your readers.Perhaps in the process of writing your articles, you are thinking that all that is you want is links back to your site.

   Guess what? Not all article banks and directories are going to accept your content automatically. Oftentimes, they have some guidelines and specifications on the articles that they are accepting.

   You can double the number of sites you can submit to by writing articles that the directories want to share with other people. All it takes is one publisher with a hundred thousand readers to increase your potential audience overnight.

   Write the articles that publishers want in their publications if you want your article marketing to work the most effective way for you. This also means you have to follow the standard guidelines such as spell checks, researching on a good topic and even hiring a writer to produce a good content on your behalf. 

In the end, it is all really a matter of choice on your part. You can start getting a little exposure from increased links back but on a very basic level.  Or enjoy massive exposure from a little extra time making quality content.

Regards,

P.S. You can submit your articles to my article directory.  Just click on the link!

Technorati Tags: article directory, article marketing, Internet Business, internet marketing

Hi,

Getting traffic to your website is a challenge, regardless of the type of website you have.

There are many ways to generate traffic – you could risk black hat methods, but that could get you dropped from the search engines pages.  Not a good thing.

You could try sneaky methods, like setting up splogs – but again, try to deceive visitors and you could find yourself in trouble as well.

While there are ways to jumpstart your traffic flows, many sites don’t have the resources that others have to generate more traffic for your site.  On thing you should remember though, at some point those sites were in the same boat you may be in today. 

So what is the best way to generate traffic using only free methods?  Here are a few…

You don’t have to spend a cent; all you need is the proper mindset and a lot of eagerness. You also must have the drive and perseverance to do hard work and research to generate more traffic for your site.

Imagine getting more traffic for your site without spending a single cent.  Now it’s a sure thing that many sites have articles that offer tips and guidelines in how to generate traffic using only free methods. Because it is possible, you don’t need to speed a single cent, it may take time, but it can be done.

Online Forums and Online Communities

The great thing about forums and online communities is that you can target a certain group that fits the certain demographic that you are looking for. You can discuss about lots of things about the niche that you represent or offer.  Another great advantage is that you know what you are getting into and you will be prepared.

If you are running a website on topics such as music, electronics, home audio/video or any other type of consumer product you need to establish your presence as an authority.  Seek out the top 5, 10 or 30 sites and make it a habit to visit them regularly and contribute positively to the discussion.

With online communities and forums you can build a reputation for your business.  Show them what you are made of and wow them with your range of expertise about the subject, with that you can build a reputation and build trust with the people in your expertise and knowledge.

Blog Carnivals

Do you submit your posts to blog carnivals?  Check out the Blog Carnival that OIBO (Online Internet Business Opportunity) hosts every Sunday.  The full title of the blog carnival is “Carnival of Fresh Perspective at Running a Successful and Profitable Internet Business“.  Here is the URL of the Carnival over at BlogCarnival.com website: http://blogcarnival.com/bc/cprof_3549.html - there are OVER 100 posts for the upcoming carnival, so it will be broken up into bite sized chunks!

Free or Subscription Based Newsletters

James Brausch publishes two paid newsletters, I’ve seen other Internet Marketers do the same.  If you provide a consumer related product/service – so could you.  If you can provide true value in your newsletters, you could start-up a subscription based service as well.

Link Exchanges Work!

You don’t have to spend a cent.  Check out my link exchange at http://linkexchange.oibo.org and exchange links with me!  It’s fast, easy and best of all > FREE!

Write Articles

Writing articles that could pique the attention of people that have interest in your product or service.

Try writing articles that will provide tips and guides to other aficionados. Writing articles that provide good service and knowledge to other people would provide the necessary mileage your traffic flow needs. 

Many sites offer free submission and posting of your articles – did you know that I have a FREE article directory?  You can submit your article at http://articledirectory.oibo.org – and yes, it’s FREE!

When people find interest in your articles they have a good chance of following the track by finding out where the article originated.  Include a link or a brief description of your company with the article and there’s a great probability that they will go to your site.

Write, Write and Write

Write good content for your site.  Many search engines track down the keywords and keyword phrases your site uses and how they are used. It is not a requirement that a content should be done by a professional content writer. You could do your on but you have to make content for your site that is entertaining as well as informational. It should provide certain requirements as well as great quality.

I blog daily – sometimes I post as much as 5x — is it information overload?  Yes and no.  I don’t always alert my subscribers of all new posts.  But when there is something interesting, yes I will alert them.

Posting often lets the search engines know that your site is updated regularly so they will visit regularly.  For example, Google, Yahoo, MSN and several other SEs visit my site daily.

Most individuals will use search engines to find what they are looking for.  Search engines in return use keyword searching in aiding their search results. With the right keywords, you could get high rankings in search engine results without the costs.

All of these methods and more will drive more traffic to your site for free. All it takes is a bit of effort and extended man hours. Learn all you can about the methods explained here and you will soon have a site with a great traffic flow without the usual costs that come with it.

Regards,

Technorati Tags: article directory, article marketing, Blog Carnival, blog carnivals, Internet Business, internet marketing