The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing

The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing By Geoff Morris www.GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 1 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing THE NEWBIES Guide to Article Writing, For Links, Adsense, Affiliates… Or How To Make Money Without Having To Spend Any Of Yours… By Geoff Morris www.geoffmorrismarketing.com Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 2 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing This is your personal copy. You may not give it away free, nor resell it to anyone. You may not include this in any Membership package. If you want the resale or giveaway rights to this book, you must first register by sending an email to: info@GeoffMorrisMarkering.com. Further information on: Ad Tracking Software Hosting Systems Domain Names Blogging Free Forums Traffic Generating Systems (All White Hat) Can be found by visiting www.GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 3 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing Index Introduction by Geoff Morris ......................................................... 5 Let’s Get Started… ...................................................................... 8 Research Your Topic First Before You Begin To Write….................... 10 How Often Should You Send Out Articles... ................................... 14 Why Are Articles So Important... ................................................. 16 Did You Know That Most People Leave Money On The Table When It Comes To Distributing Articles? ................................................... 18 What In The World Should I Use To Publish My Work? .................... 20 Article Mechanics - How To Do It... .............................................. 26 Do Your Keyword Research......................................................... 29 Recycle Your Products… ............................................................. 31 Use Other People’s Articles ......................................................... 33 Analyse Your Work….................................................................. 35 Using Blogs To Promote Your Articles…......................................... 38 Latent Semantic Indexing – LSI For Short .................................... 41 What On Earth Is A ‘Content Composer’?...................................... 44 Make Money With Articles And Adsense ........................................ 49 Turn Your Articles Into Affiliate Generating Income Streams............ 52 Resources ................................................................................ 56 Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 4 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing Introduction by Geoff Morris Geoff Morris Many people jump on the Internet Bandwagon, spurred on by comments such as ‘Get yourself an Ebook published, and you’ll be rich beyond your dreams in no time.’ Well, we have been there, spent the fortune, and now realized that an internet marketing business is just that – A Business. Products, Services, and Advice all have to be chosen carefully, and the temptation to be ‘An Internet Butterfly’ has to be avoided like the plague. To help you to avoid some of the mistakes we made in becoming mature internet folk, along with this ebook on articles, we have built up a whole host of useful products and services that we have evaluated that can be found on our resource page www.GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 5 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing You would be surprised how many so-called Internet Marketers do not realize the power of articles in their marketing armory. Jane and I used to work in a team of 4 people, and spent far too much money on Pay per Click advertising for very little return, which is why when we decided to set up our own team of 2, articles became the most powerful tool in our marketing bag. Jane and I have individual product pages (property, beauty products, information ebook sites, Self Improvement CD’s and books); a growing number of networks of Adsense sites; and a growing number of Affiliate sites. All of these activities are being supported by articles, either created by me, or purchased from PLR sites. Since I started, a lot of changes have occurred on the web. Things that worked a year ago are becoming not only ‘Old Hat’ but also labeled as ‘Black Hat’ and frowned upon by the leading search engines – Google in particular. In fact, since they went public, Google is spending an absolute fortune on ensuring that people who use their search facilities get as near to what they want as possible, for the obvious reason of keeping Google’s dominant position, and increasing their revenue streams. It is becoming more and more apparent, that unless you ‘play by the rules’ then Google, and the other major search engines, will simply chop you down if they find out that you have been trying to cheat the system. This book has been written from my own experiences, and to help guide newbie’s, and perhaps not so newbie’s, down the path of good practice when it comes to article creation, so your income streams, once established, should remain in place, and grow, so you can concentrate on building up even more… I must admit, I have been very heavily influenced by one particular person, Jason Potash, whose products and support has been invaluable to me, and I would recommend all readers of this book to go across to my site and read Article Secrets and have a look at what Jason has to say about the way things are changing on the internet with regard to articles. What must be borne in mind is that EVERY ARTICLE you create becomes a long-term asset to you in your internet business career. Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 6 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing If you wrote it, or you commissioned it, it is yours for evermore, and as it gathers more and more links, and published on more ezines and web sites across the internet, your business will feel the benefit. As I said the objective of this book is to promote good article writing practice, and so I am including the opportunity for all of my readers to submit up to 5 articles for me to critique. Please allow up to 4 weeks for a response, as from past experience I am expecting quite a few people to take me up on this FREE extra bonus. If you find the content of this book useful, would like to take me up on this extra bonus, and would like to be kept up to date with our regular tips and hints on the latest in the world of articles, please go over to Free Critique and enter your name and email address So Without Further Ado - Let’s Get Started… Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 7 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing Let’s Get Started… How many times, have you sat down with all good intentions to write an article? You know you have a marketing opportunity, and you know that a good article may well set you up on your road to fame and fortune, but when you just sit there, listlessly looking at a blank screen……. How often do you think, no SHOUT to yourself… “Inspire Me!” Questions spinning round in your head include stuff like: • • • • • • • • • • What style shall I use? What topic or topics should I write about? Where do I get my research from? Who else has written about similar products? What Keywords shall I base this on? How do I get it published? How long should it be? How frequent should I publish? (Well… What am I going to do if I can’t get going on the first one?) I don’t or I can’t write Should I get somebody else to do it for me? You probably hate me for saying this, but now I can just sit down and write about anything, given a few hours or so to research the ‘Buzz’ in the marketplace. If I can’t get started, I will often look at someone else’s articles for ideas (not to blatantly copy), but to get my mind in the right direction before I start. I know how frustrating this can be, as I was once that person, sitting, twiddling my thumbs, looking at my email for distraction, but still looking at a blank screen with my livelihood not yet appearing… (Livelihood - please!) Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 8 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing This is why I have put together this ebook, which grew out of a series of presentations I did for a number of people in the UK who wanted help with their Stephen Pierce ‘Business in a Briefcase’ niche products – and this was also the start of The Brit Group (www.TheBritGroup.com). If you have been to any number of Internet conferences lately, especially ones like the Word Internet Summit, and several late last year, you may well have seen the four members of The Brit Group (in our bright Yellow Tee-shirts) either live on-stage, or on a growing number of Seminar Conference DVD’s. Also, another good friend of ours, Brett McFall, interviewed Jane & me before last June’s World Internet summit in London, with the USA WIS in Vegas September 06. To hear his Podcast, go to Brett’s Interviews and check out the dodgy shirt below! (sorry Brett!) Jane Brett Geoff So – let’s begin, and see if I can inspire YOU! Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 9 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing Research Your Topic First Before You Begin To Write… Research what other people are reading about in your market… To get an idea of what is going on in your chosen niche or market, visit a number of article directories, Amazon etc As an example, 1. Go into www.ezinearticles.com Look at the section on ‘facial’ for instance, click on this, and look at what is going on in your market. Spy on your competitors – look at related articles, drill down to their resource box, do a Google search (into Google, LINK: competitor url … and see what’s going on) Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 10 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing Here’s the resource box from the top article on the list. Leni Chauvin , The Client Attraction Coach™ helps small business owners and solo professionals move mountains. If you’re ready to attract more clients, make more money, and have more fun while you're doing it, you'll find TONS of free resources to help you at http://www.AttractClientsGalore.com. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Leni_Chauvin PS Leni, if you are viewing this, I hope you don’t mind the free publicity… Now type the article url (http://www.AttractClientsGalore.com).into Google, and see what you get:- See how you can start to investigate what is going on with competitive web sites. If you are in to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation, there is all sorts of other data you can use, but that is outside the scope of this book) Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 11 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing Just for the hell of it, go to Google and search for me (Geoff Morris) The second and fourth entry is ME! Do the search, and you will find dozens more entries relating to me. And this is all down to the number of articles I have written and published over the last 6 month or so. Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 12 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing 2. Go to www.GoArticles.com Scroll down to the Recently Submitted Articles or the Top Downloads for the last 30 days. Are you starting to see where the buzz is, and how you can do your own research? I will leave you the rest of the links to go and investigate, but hopefully you can see by now how easy it is to get information and carry out research. 3. Go to www.yahoogroups.com Look at what is going on there… 4. Go to www.amazon.com look at best selling books and magazines, look for trends. 5. Set yourself up with Google Alerts – Be prompted when things happen out there. Set up an alert at http://www.google.co.uk/alerts Be prompted as often as you want on any topic you can think of. Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 13 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing How Often Should You Send Out Articles... Once a day … Once a week… Once a month…..? Why are you releasing articles anyway? You want ezine authors to pick them up. If you send out too many too fast - what will happen – you will saturate them with too much information, and you may well overload them – turning them right off… Also, if Google sees a big increase in links to your site – they may well think you are using some automated software to ‘cheat’ the system – and you will get penalized for ‘Article Spamming’. As an ideal rule of thumb, each ‘niche’ market you are in, you should send out one article every two weeks. If, like us, you have half a dozen or so niches, any more and you will be spending your whole life just writing articles, if you do it too often. Also, spare a thought for the poor ezine or web master. All of a sudden, their inboxes get full with your articles - and what do they do - they are in overload so they just delete them all… Not the result you wanted. And there is the fact that most article directories publish ‘Most Recent Published’ list, so if you send out a handful, yes, you will end up in the top couple of slots for a short while, then they will all rapidly slip below the visible horizon. Much better to pop them out regularly say 14 days apart. Have a look at a screen shot from G0-articles; you can see the latest list of articles that I have submitted on that site over the last 2 months since I signed in with them. Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 14 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 15 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing Why Are Articles So Important... If you want to generate Credibility for your product or service, or put yourself up as an expert in your field, and from that, generate masses of highly qualified traffic without spending an arm and a leg on other forms of advertising and promotions, then writing articles is probably the best, quickest, and cheapest way to achieve this. Would you rather: • Waste money on buying unfocussed email lists? • Spend a fortune on Pay per Click campaigns? • Splash out on Banner ads? • Or would you like to make $120,000 in less than 6 months, by just writing 6 articles, and recycling them every month? That’s what a guy called Len Foley did. His activities were actually highlighted by Derek Gehl at Derek’s Millionaire Boot Camp in London recently. Articles get picked up across the web by people desperate for good content. How Many web sites are there out there needing good content? How Many specialist ezines are there out there in your particular market? How Many members can just ONE ezine have ….50,000 – 100,000 150,000? So you win in one of several ways • Your awareness goes up across the web, so if you are trying to set up joint ventures, or affiliate programs, this adds credibility to your story. Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 16 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing • You get hundreds of links back to your web page from article directories and specialist ezines – pushing up your page ranking (also very good in assisting credibility with potential joint venture partners and affiliates) • You get loads of pre-qualified leads coming back to your site from people on ezine membership lists, which means you get quick, easy income. Here’s a quick screen shot from Ezine Articles, of my recent articles, who provide ezine authors with content. Note – over 2,000 page views in the last three months. Would you rather pay money to do this, or get it all for FREE?? Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 17 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing Did You Know That Most People Leave Money On The Table When It Comes To Distributing Articles? How come? Well, for a start, they go to all the trouble of blasting out their articles to a number of article directories, but guess what most people forget? Their own site! Here's a plan that we go through for each article, to maximise its link popularity use. 1. First of all, if you are using Word to create your article , you may be causing yourself some problems, as Word and other ‘smart' programs leaves your stories peppered with lots of strange formatting codes, that can interfere with the appearance of your article when published. 2. Post your article on your own web site, but don't include the resource box (Google does not like links that point back to yourself). 3. Extra Tip – Put AdSense in anywhere where you are giving away free content. 4. Don’t post your article on your blog site, only include a snippet, pointing to your main article page on your web site. (See blog example on next page) Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 18 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing 5. Convert to a pdf format, including your resource box, and post to your own article site if you can (we will be using www.articles4profit.com - when we get it up.) 6. Every 6 months or so, recycle each article. Change the headline, change the keyword emphasis, rewrite at least 25% - and you're off again… I re-wrote one article last week, on a new site we just put up (http://www.horizon-beauty.com) and without any advertising of any sort, we got 38 hits, and seven sign-ups in just under a week. Remember: - Publish, Publish, and Publish Again Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 19 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing What In The World Should I Use To Publish My Work? I don’t know about you, but I am easily confused. Sounds familiar? Then look at all the adverts that purport to show you how to generate buckets of traffic to your site. You can get products to do this, products to do that, learn complex search engine optimization techniques, play with ‘Black Hat’ techniques to cheat the search engines, you can sped a fortune on banner ads pay per click campaigns…. Or you can achieve all that and more – by writing articles. I don’t have to convince you that the internet is full of good content and information, and that webmasters and ezine publishers are screaming out for more new good, quality content. Content is King on the internet, well, at least, good quality content. By writing good quality content in your articles, these webmasters and publishers will grab your articles just like a drowning man clutches at straws... And what happens when your articles get published across the internet on hundreds – even thousands- of web pages…? • Each location is a selling opportunity for you, and pre-qualified leads (not cold leads) will hit your in-box. • Most of these sites will have a high page ranking, and what is in your resource box on all these sites – the link back to your site (boosting your page ranking popularity) • Your own presence will be higher on the web – giving you more credibility when looking for affiliates, or joint venture partners • You can locate and link to ezines with hundreds of thousands of subscribers – imagine what getting just one article in that lot will do for your page ranking. Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 20 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing OK – that was the easy bit – now it’s your turn to do some work. Now, the key to internet success is having multiple income streams, each one pulling in perhaps between $500 and $5,000 per month. So you really need several of these little beauties to build up a good, solid monthly income. We have, for instance: http://www.acnetreatmentonlinehelp.info http://www.badcreditadvice.info http://www.adtrackingsoftware.info http://www.fredshandyman.com http://www.thebritgroup.com http://www.propertyhorizons.com http://www.geoffmorrisonline.com Not to mention http://www.geoffmorrismarketing.com and many more (over a hundred, growing by the day…) Each niche market that you are serving really needs 1 or 2 articles posted every month. Any more and you risk being labeled an article spammer by Google, and might also seriously overload any ezine authors trying to keep up with your fresh content. Now, most people tend to work in isolation by themselves, but I actually work with my wife Jane, and as such have a number of niche markets to serve – over 60 in total, and as I write for all of them, I have to wear several hats, and have several author resource boxes to describe ‘me’. What, then, should I use, from the myriad of article announcing systems, should I go for? Well, the main ones seem to be Idea Marketers (http://www.ideamarketers.com ) Submit Your Article (http://www.submityourarticle.com ) Article Marketer (http://www.articlemarketer.com) and Article Announcer (http://www.articleannouncer.com). Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 21 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing Confusing Huh? Now, I have actually used all of these products, and I can tell you they are all very good, very easy to use products. So, as a ‘Newbie’ how do you decide what to use? Well, as usual, it all comes down to cost, and this is the way they seem to stack up. IdeaMarketers. This is a little gem of a site, an article directory site, and although their navigation bars are a bit cluttered. I have used them a lot, they are a delight to use, and have no sign up costs. This is very important, as I have had to sign up many times with them to accommodate all my pen names and my niche markets. Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 22 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing The only cost involved is if you want to bid for a higher position in their site. This only works out at around $10 to $30 per article, but I have had some fun here, by bidding above internet marketer and close friend, Stephen Pierce, deliberately upstaging him on this site, here he is with Jane and me in the UK earlier this year. Geoff Jane Stephen Article Marketer. This site is also very easy to use, but unlike Ideamarketers it is an article announcer site, which means it also gets your articles into places like Yahoo, Google, MSN and Ask. It has a nice little report facility where you can see how many links your articles have achieved on those 5 areas on the net. The only drawback here is the cost. Although there is a free limited distribution version, you really need to subscribe to their site, and at $39 per quarter per pen name or niche market, that begins to add up after a while. Submit Your Article. This is another good site, which will automatically blast your articles out to around 40 or more article directories (you only have to sign in to all of these the once). However, once again, there is a subscription fee of $37 for every thirty days for every pen name or niche market you are involved in. Article Announcer. Now this product has really caught my fancy. Not only does it combine the facilities of an article directory with an article announcer facility (there are over 100 standard directories listed, about 40 article announcer sites, and literally thousands of ezine publishers. Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 23 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing It is fully tailorable, so you can build up your own lists, prioritize article directory and ezine sites, and fully edit your articles in plain unformatted text, formatted test, or even html. It also has of efficiency tools built in, like a keyword density products, a whole host of reporting facilities, and comes with a whole load of self-teaching DVD’s and CDs. And - the latest version - version 2.1 not only comes as a multi user version (ideal for me and all my 'hats') but also they have just released a 'lite' version, so that you can legally outsource your article posting to ghostwriters with no hassle, and full synchronization. OK, so it costs a whacking $350 or thereabouts, and the training videos will tie you up for at least a week, but that’s it – no more costs. Ideal for people like me who are seriously working on multiple income streams, but probably a bit of an overkill for the smaller operator. Remember, however good your article is, if it’s stuck on your C: drive, it will earn you ZILCH. Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 24 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing Remember: - Publish, Publish, and Publish Again Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 25 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing Article Mechanics - How To Do It... Article writing is just plain and simple - COPYWRITING… Determine article format – When you come to create an article, the first thing you need to establish is what sort of format you are going to follow. A lot of times, once you have decided that, you can build up the outline, the skeleton, of your article, and then you will find it a lot easier to go back and put the meat on the bones. An example of some possible layouts:• • Tips; “7 Tips on writing articles that sell…” How To; “How to Write a Top Performing Article Without Using Your Hands…” Interview style; “Geoff Morris interviews Internet Marketing Guru Brett McFall on his new book …” Product review; “New Ford Fiesta test drive results…” News related; “Background to yesterday’s Stock Market rally…” Any other you can think of…? • • • • Use a strong headline – help poor overworked editors, webmasters, ezine publishers to see how powerful your work is at a glance from amongst all the other bumf crossing their desk. Without this, you may have the best story, or offer in the world, but if you don’t get past this stage – you’ve wasted your time. • “Has this ever happened to you – I was……..” Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 26 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing Begin with strong opening sentence to pull the reader into the article • “Have you ever wanted to grow your list without spending a fortune…” Break the article down into several short paragraphs (3 – 6 lines), so that the reader is not turned off by masses of close writing. • • Easy to read Easy to skim Make the article flow from start to finish • Each sentence leads on to the next one – basic copywriting techniques Wrap up the article with a conclusion and or summary of your main points Craft a strong, persuasive resource box, with a strong call to action. Why should the reader click on your web link? Give them a reason why! Don’t just pathetically come to a stop. This is SOOOO IMPORTANT • • • Keep it short ( 2 – 3 lines best) Try and include a free report of some sort Use anchor text where possible WRONG Roger Bourdon has written several books on Horse Back Riding, and is also an avid editor of a whole series of Self-Improvement ebooks. Visit http://www.anyhorsebackriding.com and for his self improvement books at http://imnosey.com/ei RIGHT Want to get involved with Horse Riding – then click on this page for Roger’s mini-series to help you grasp your dreams http://www.anyhorsebackriding.com Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 27 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing Poofread ; spelchaeck ; Proofread. Spellcheck…. Double check all hyperlinks within the article and the resource box Format the article to match the requirements of where you are sending it. (Plain text, formatted text, html etc) Run it through a Spam Filter - the last thing an ezine publisher will want is the headache of coping with a n article that contains ‘spamming’ words or phrases. A lot of the copyrighting skills we have developed have come from our work with Brett McFall and his AdPack System and Trevor Crook’s KillerSalescopymadeeasy.com Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 28 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing Do Your Keyword Research Now you have seen what is causing ‘The Buzz’ in the previous chapter, check out the keywords that are associated with the topics for your article. Go to http://inventory.overture.com and type in your key word (e.g. vegetarian diet – vegetarian would return too big a result) Overture will produce a report on how many times your keyword has been searched for over the last month. It will also give you a list of associated keywords with their search numbers. You will be looking for results around 10,000 – any higher and the keyword is going to be too competitive. You may have to refine your search, by ether drilling down from a particular keyword, or just scrolling down the initial list, seeing how the numbers drop off. (The lower the number the less competitive, but also less traffic volume). Now put your selected keyword or phrase into Google, and see how many sites are using this term. Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 29 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing www.google.com This shows you how many web sites are using this keyword or keyword phrase. You will probably see millions and millions of other competitive sites. Do some research on both Overture and Google to see if you can get less competitive keywords. The lower the Google search return, the more likely you are to get higher up the natural (left hand screen side) Google listing. (Natural as opposed to the right hand side of the Google screen, where your relative position will depend on the amount you are bidding for a particular key word or phrase.) When you have done your keyword research, make sure that your article contains the recommended percentage of occurrences of your keyword. If it is too low (less than 1%) this will affect your visibility, and if it is too high (greater than say 5%) you could be in danger of being penalised for keyword spam. And don’t forget to make sure your keyword is included in your title, and your Meta tags. A very good tool that we use here is Wordtracker. You can actually download a free trial version, but if you are serious you will soon want to upgrade to the full system. Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 30 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing Recycle Your Products… If you have had good success and pickup in the past, why not re-use your assets? I look at my results in sites such as Idea Marketers, and if I see one or more article has had fantastic pickup (number of times the article has been read), then I know that there is a lot of interest on that topic. For instance, on the next page is an extract from articles I have posted at IdeaMarketers over the last year:Looking at the table of articles on the next page, it is easy to see which article or which topic has proven to be most popular. So, if you already have an idea that you are on a hot topic, why not keep it that way? How do you do that? Well, if you change the headline, and rewrite most of the paragraphs, there you have it – a new article. Not only that, try changing the number of paragraphs, change a few of your keywords. Also, you could write an introduction as well – or add in an editorial – or change the number of paragraphs - anything that changes the ’footprint’ of the article will enable you in 90% of instances to get it republished even by the same article distribution sites. But although this is easier than creating a new article from scratch, it is still a lot of work just to produce one new article, even if it had proved highly successful in being picked up by webmasters in the past? So if you need to do this work to produce one new article, would it not be good if there was software out there that could help you create many versions of your most popular article? That’s all I’m saying for now… Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 31 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing List of articles published on IdeaMarketer.com over last three months. Pick out the ones with a heavy hit, and redo and republish. Hits 126 110 64 256 1004 337 Syndicated hits 1 1 1 81 1 88 Article A Specialist Solution to Buy-to-Let Financing for up to £20 Million. Buy's Property from Lottery for Pension...Why? How can Spanish Onions create a Massive Pension for You? How Often do You Say ‘I Wish I Knew How to Make Money on the Internet' How to achieve financial freedom with your home How To Create Your Financial Independence, and Enjoy a Happy and Secure Old Age How To Get 100% Finance on Residential Buy-To-Lets? How to Rip Off the Rich and Make Yourself Wealthy Pensions and Long Term Care – Why You Should Turn Again to Property. Professional Landlords Mortgage: A Specialist Solution to Buy-to-Let Mortgages. 46 58 86 41 1 1 1 1 696 306 83 213 46 1 1 1 Retirement Worries? Imagine Double Your Investment in 2006... Revolutionary MicroPad properties hit Leeds Spain’s Best Kept Secret for Tourists and Investors… Who else wants to know the 7 Secrets of profitable off-plan property investing 347 1 Who Else Wants to know the Secrets of Making Healthy Capital Growth in Property. Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 32 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing Use Other People’s Articles Yep – you heard me. As well as your own articles, you should be posting as many other relevant articles as you can onto your site. Why? Because the search engine spiders just love new content. Now, it may seem a bit odd, putting potential competitor articles on your site, but what you are trying to do is build up this aura of becoming an expert in your topic. And also – are these people not going to object to you using their articles? Well, the answer to that is NO. Authors just love having their articles republished by anybody. Most authors have a disclaimer with their article (and you should too) that as long as the article is not modified in any way, and the Author resource box is not altered, they will be thrilled to be republished by you. So – what’s in it for you? Well, firstly, you are getting fresh new content to your site – which will encourage the spiders to visit you. (You should put fresh content on your site every day, and there are other methods you can use as well as articles). It’s the old drip feed process. A little every day is better than a big splurge once a week. Where do you get these articles? 1. Well, for one, you can go to Google and type in ‘articles: your keyword’. This will produce a list for you of relevant articles. Make sure that you have the author’s permission to use their articles. Normally, permission is implied unless stated otherwise, as long as the author reference bio box is kept with the article. 2. There are a number of what I would call ‘Black Hat’ technologies around, that go out and just ‘scrape’ relevant and sometimes not so relevant articles to put them on your page. Sometimes these do not even check whether the author had agreed for their articles to be copes (with their bio). I would taka great care about using such products. 3. If you go to a number of article directories, like www.articlefeeder.com , www.articlesender.com, www.goarticles.com you can usually find a lot of relevant articles that you can use. Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 33 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing 4. A really cool tool is ‘Orwell’, which is supplied free of change from Jason Potash (author of Article Announcer) at http://www.orwellpro.com/blog/ . You are VERY PRIVILEGED to get this for free! Have a look at this tool; download and play with it. It is an excellent way of semi-automating the task of getting fresh content for your web site. Well, I think that’s enough for this chapter. But just make sure you get these articles ‘legitimately, and don’t use any Black Hat ways of ‘scraping’ articles. Sometimes these sort of products will ‘scrape’ articles on to your site that even have statements saying ‘This article must not be reproduced …’ Well. That’s Black Hat for you. Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 34 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing Analyse Your Work… How many times do people beaver away in the dark, doing their own thing, never stopping to check what they are doing, and to see if they are succeeding. Too often, they just sit back and say ‘Well – that doesn’t work; I’ve had no money in this week…’ So they then start something else, and another fruit withers and dies on the vine… Working on the internet is not a get-rich-quick scheme, and sometimes you have to follow blindly what you consider to be the right thing (i.e. pure and simple blind faith in what you are doing) for months before the money starts to come in. I know – I have been there, and waited… But the reason you are pumping articles out there is not (or it so shouldn’t be) just to get your name known. You don’t swagger into the local hostelry and say ‘Hey – I’m Geoff Morris – did you see my article last week?’ No. You pump them out so as to get loads of links back to your site – because then you will start to earn the money. Well, the first thing you should be doing, is if you are using one or more article directories to blast your articles, check that they are being picked up by the main directories – like Go Articles, Ezine Articles, Article Marketer, and any others that are main submission engines like Article Announcer , Submit Your Articles, or Article Sender. If not, then make sure you update them all. You never know, that one last site may just have an ezine publisher looking for an article from you to go to his 150,000 or more list! Then you should be checking to see if you are getting many links back to your sites from your articles. The way to do this is to use free products like Link Finder, or even the analysis tools at Article Announcer (http://www.articleannouncer.com/tools/tracker/) Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 35 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing Results taken 3 weeks after getting this site up, and publishing three articles, and just ran SEO-Elite link generator tool. Google always takes longest getting links set up. Already we have a mix of links from article sites and sites we have established back links to via SEO Elite. Give it another 4 to 6 weeks, and we will have loads of extra links generated. If you are getting your articles picked up by the directories, then it will only be a matter of time before you start getting links. When you do, see where the links are coming from, and make sure you pump lots of articles in their path. As long as you can see an increase week-on-week in the number of links, as long as you keep on the article production run, your link popularity can not help but increase. Don’t expect overnight success though, you are probably looking at between 3 to 8 weeks before you start to really see the benefit of your work. Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 36 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing Below is a list of the links created from the SEO ‘Alltheweb’ If you are getting your articles picked up by the directories, then it will only be a matter of time before you start getting links. When you do, see where the links are coming from, and make sure you pump lots of articles in their path. As long as you can see an increase week-on-week in the number of links, as long as you keep on the article production run, your link popularity can not help but increase. Don’t expect overnight success though, you are probably looking at between 3 to 8 weeks before you start to really see the benefit of your work. Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 37 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing Using Blogs To Promote Your Articles… Many people have asked me, should they post their articles on their blogs, as well as on their web site. Well the short answer to that is NO! The problem is, if you do that, you could be violating Google’s new algorithms on ‘Duplicate Content’. Not that I would be too worried about that just yet. However, when you post an article on the web, make sure you do upload it to your web site first, This is because the spiders can read the time stamp when it was first published, so if they see your article on many sites out there (‘cos you’re that popular, of course), your site will not get penalized. Now, due to the way in which Blogs work, and especially Blogger Blogs (owned by Google), spiders love to visit blogs that have fresh content. What you should do is to set up a blog to promote your site (set up a Blogger blog and a Wordpress blog if you can), but rather than post the whole article on your blog, put a snippet …like this. Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 38 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing Here’s the original article, this time, published on www.propertyhorizons.com/articles/ " How to achieve financial freedom with your home The secret disclosed on how you too could achieve financial freedom through property (and tell the pension companies just where to stick their measly, worthless ‘pensions’). Although written primarily for the UK market, we can usually arrange financial facilities for motivated investors from most parts of the world. Geoff Morris is a self-made property millionaire who made it in less than 18 months even with a hectic 'day job'. He has written a series of articles to help people like you achieve the same levels of success – as long as you are willing to ‘Go For It!’ Many people these days are getting more and more concerned as they approach retirement age. Even those in their late twenties are beginning to become concerned about the effects of old age. What has brought on such a dilemma in those so young? It is the plight of the pensions in this country that is causing this concern? Probably. But there is a solution to all this that could not only remove this fear, but also dramatically improve the lifestyle of all concerned. If each property increased in value by just 5% per annum, that’s £10,000 from every unit. Just look what you would be gaining. You would now own a property portfolio of 6 investment properties worth £1.200,000 of which you would have instant equity of around £180,000, and this would be increasing (at just 5%) of some £60,000 every year. Without compounding this increase, if you sold all of your investment properties after 10 years, you would walk away with well over THREE QUARTERS OF A MILLION POUNDS! So, do you still believe that – whatever the cost – your main objective in life is to pay off your mortgage? By all means, have this intention – but only after you have made so many other gains that you can really afford this luxury. " Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 39 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing In your Blog, you would put something like this:- (TITLE) How to achieve financial freedom with your home (BLOG POST) This is an extract from an article about How to achieve financial freedom with your home The secret disclosed on how you too could achieve financial freedom through property (and tell the pension companies just where to stick their measly, worthless ‘pensions’) Geoff Morris is a self-made property millionaire who made it in less than 18 months even with a hectic 'day job'. He has written a series of articles to help people like you achieve the same levels of success – as long as you are willing to ‘Go For It!’ Many people these days are getting more and more concerned as they approach retirement age. What has brought on such a dilemma in those so young? It is the plight of the pensions in this country that is causing this concern… To see the whole article, visit Property Horizons So you see, by putting a ‘snippet’ on your Blog you arouse curiosity on the reader to go and see the whole article, not on your Blog, but back at your site creating that all important inbound link! SO – no duplicate content and a good link back to your site from your Blog. Don't put more than two hyper links in as a rule; it doesn't look like blatant link farming then. And if you can find High PR blogs of relevant content even better if you can post comments on them pointing back to YOUR article! Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 40 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing Latent Semantic Indexing – LSI For Short Now we are really getting technical. This is one of the advanced features that Google is introducing, and is based on a very complex algorithm that I could not even write down, let alone understand. But, to the layman – that’s you and me – it is a measure of how many times words appear together in the same document, and also how often this occurs across all of Google’s databases ( see the issue coming up here with duplicate content?). But what is of more importance, is how you can use LSI to help promote your article, web page, sales letter etc, by creating and enhancing your content so that any web sites your articles are published on come further up the natural ( i.e. free) Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) . Take this example. If you were to type into a Google Search Bar the term “WWI Ships”, from the results page you would see that Google had found “WW1 Ships”, and “World War 1 Ships” and "World War One Ships" Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 41 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing Now, say you had two web pages, both with a keyword “Table” somewhere in the title. Now, Google’s primary reason for being is to make sure it serves up the best content to all of its searchers. Why? Because it wants to continue to grow its revenue, and remain the dominant force in Search Engine usability. So, the word ‘Table’ could be associated with a book – I.e. table of contents; or a restaurant, furniture store or even science - periodic table of elements! Google uses LSI to determine what the page is really all about. If the search it has been given is to find a restaurant, it will look for words that are associated with restaurant, such as food, tables, eating, reservations… If it is a book, it will look for words like, table of contents, index, chapter, etc. Now this brings me to another pointer concerning LSI. Google also looks for proper word association, so let’s say you have a vegetarian website, and you are writing an article to go on the front page. Now, you know all about the right keyword density by now (or you should do if you have worked your way through these article tips), and although you may want to increase your keyword density, you certainly don’t want to make your article look like one of those crappy machine generated pages, like… “Come to Joe’s Vegetarian Café to get the real best in Vegetarian food this side of Vegetarian Town. Well. What are you waiting for? Vegetarian food from Joe’s Vegetarian Café is so green the Vegetarian menu is in three languages. But how many ways can you spell Vegetarian? The best Vegetarian Café is Joe’s….” Now, rewrite even this rubbish, using LSI-based related or Lexical words, and see your ratings pick up… “Are you a real vegetarian? Well, then you will love Joes Organic Café, where you can get a great veggie menu, real tasty vegetables in a variety of sauces, even vegan burgers that can enable or tempt even the most strict animal rights fans to enjoy some of America's favorite dishes. At Joe’s you can try all sorts of great dishes such as vegetarian lasagna, beans with tofu, spicy enchiladas, and even a fat free puddings. Forget the meat; let your taste buds run amok with a whole range of veggie based meals that also will not break your card when you get the bill…” Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 42 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing Tip – to find loads and loads of ‘lexical’ words, you should try Wordtracker. So many people buy this product, or even use the free trial version, and only use a fraction of its power. Example , type in ‘vegetable’ and get up to 300 lexical words. Be one of the people ‘in the know’ and get in there and streak ahead of your competition. Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 43 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing What On Earth Is A ‘Content Composer’? Well, you have heard enough about duplicate content so far, and how Google, in its attempt to present good, wholesome ‘unique’ content to its searchers (thus boosting and retaining its ongoing income) is developing all sorts of algorithms for identifying duplicate content. And- rest assured, as it gets into its stride, more and more duplicate content sites are going to get penalised – mark my words… So, as an author you are getting slowly moved into this uncomfortable position between a rock and a hard place. That is, you need to publish more and more articles to get the number of backlinks to your sites, and you already know that you should not put your article on your article page on your web site and your blog, so then you go and use one or more of the article announcers, perhaps up to 100 or more, and they all get sent the same version of your article. Arrrgggh! You may get half of them to publish your work, and then ezine authors and web masters may take your article and publish it, but can you see what the pattern is that is forming here? You are now posting, or having posted, duplicate content ALL OVER the web. And as that happens, and Google finds all these duplicate content, you WILL get penalised, and the page rank earnings per article you have been craving for will drop. So – what is the solution? Do you have to write 5, 10, 15, 20 versions of the same book? How would that please you? Where would you find the time? I have looked at two content composers, one from Jason Potash, who is already well-respected in the article announcing and ezine creating world (Content Composer), and the other is from a relative newcomer to the scene, David Watson, who has recently released WebsiteContentWizard. Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 44 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing Content Composer. Content Composer was launched in the middle of 2006 as a companion to Jason Potash’s Article Announcer program, and the two interface very well together. One of the beauties of this product is that the is a ‘Content Composer Lite’ version, which mean s that you can very easily farm out the work on your original articles to ghost writers, and easily manage the exporting of your original raw article, and the importing of their results. This is a very professionally constructed product, which enables you (or your ghost-writer) to keep constant tabs on such article statistics as Meta tags, theme keywords, and all other keywords you want to analyse by. You can also create articles, in virtually any format that ezine authors are looking for. You can also check your finished articles against each other to make sure that they are unique, This product enables you to create different headers, footers, and different body paragraphs; has a thesaurus where you can add and replace word sequentially or randomly in your document. You can also create as many ‘custom’ fields to be inserted into your document. When you have done, and created a series of articles, there is a ‘Plagiarism’ button, which will enable you to compare any two articles (on your desktop or web-wide) to see the differences (this can also be very useful when checking that a ghost-writer has not ripped you of with a copy) Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 45 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing Of course, the articles may not have been created by you. If you are a member of a PLR site (Private Label Resellers), you may have access to complete ebooks, or even hundreds of PLR articles, like those from Article Underground. By doing this, not only will you stand a better chance of getting your version of any article picked up and not rejected by Article Directories, but your web site content will be really unique! This product has definitely been written for those authors amongst us who want to create multiple copies of the same underlying theme article, but whilst also maintaining editorial control over keyword content and density. This is very important for ensuring the maximum pickup if these articles are used on webs sites deigned to capture traffic for Adsense or Affiliate revenues. It does take time to get to grips with this product, and to learn all of its features. I am still going through the learning curve and will be producing a free analysis for you in about 6 months time. Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 46 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing WebSiteContentWizard. This is the other product I have been investigating. I must admit I went for this product, and its associated product WebSiteArticleWizard for the ease with which the two products together could create and continually update a whole series of Adsense-loaded web pages. This product has some really cool features, in terms of automating the creating of multiple articles, and once you get top grips with it I am sure the two systems will do exactly what it says on the box. However, there is a large ‘learning curve’ that the product (not you) has to go through before you can really use a lot of its automated features. It is a very clever program, but it really only comes into it own when there is lots of historical data that has been created from previous projects, and pumped into its various thesauruses. It does have some pretty cool features though. For instance, if you want to create a series of articles on say 15 different types of digital cameras, it can take the information on all 15 from an Excel spreadsheet, and create 15 totally different and unique articles about these products. Also, once you have gone through this fairly lengthy learning curve, there is a superb ‘Auto Allocate’ feature which can automatically scan a document, looking for 6,5,4,3,2 word phrases, and transforming them into equivalent phases from Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 47 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing phrases you will have built up in your personal or project-based thesaurus ( hence the long learning curve). These articles can then be fed in a random fashion into Adsense revenue creating web sites, expanding their content slowly over time. The main issues I see with this product are the long learning curve to get a good population of data, and the fact that I have not, as yet, seen an easy way to analyse the articles for keyword density and so forth. Once again, I am still going through the learning curve and will be producing a free analysis for you in about 6 months time. But, the net result is that you can create, or obtain, a number of articles, that you can produce 2 to 20 or more versions of the same thing. What this means is that say you produce 20 copies or variations of the same article. You can now use one version for your web site, and if you have say 100 article directories you want to post to, why not rotate the article versions that you send to each site. So rather than having 100 copies of the same article out there being promoted, sometimes to the same ezine authors, you now have 20 versions. Do you see the power that gives you? Of course, if you are using Article Announcer, there is a built in facility to let you do just that – automatically. So, I think you can see that these tips are giving you more than just an insight to various solutions that are out there. You can now start to be more selective in which ones you decide to purchase. Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 48 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing Make Money With Articles And Adsense So, you’re now learnt one heck of a lot about writing articles. But to date, your main reason has been to create an ‘awareness’ of yourself on the web, and to generate links to your web site, raising the Page Ranking of your site. But now, let’s look at two ways creating good content can make you lots and lots of income streams. This first one we will look at is Adsense. Now to get a good income from Adsense sites, you need good content that is going to attract both Search Engine spiders, and humans, to visit your site. I will not be going into the mechanics of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques in these tips. I am just concentrating on good content for you. So far in these tips, I have shown you how to create your own relevant articles with good, interesting and relevant content, and how to optimise the keyword density of your articles. This has been through a combination of such products as Article Announcer, Content Composer, WebsiteContentWizard, and how to distribute your articles across the internet, using once again Article Announcer, SubmitYourArticles, Article Marketer, and several others. I have also shown you how to get hold of articles written by other authors without upsetting any copyrights, with the Orwell product. All these products have one thing in common. They are all ‘White Hat’ technology. And why do I recommend ‘White Hat’ and not ‘Black Hat’ technologies when building up an Adsense strategy? The answer is simple. If you want to make a load of money from Google Adsense, then you must play by their rules. Don’t try to ‘fool’ the search engines, which is what Black Hat is all about. If you don’t - you run the risk of having your Adsense Publisher account canned – and if that happens, it is virtually impossible to get it back. Now, if you get a product like Joel Comm’s Instant Adsense Templates, you will get around 60 ready made web sites each with between 20 and 80 pages with articles on each page, ready and raring to start earning you Adsense revenue. Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 49 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing But – what about all these articles. If Joel has sold say 500 such packages, and then there are 500 sites with identical content out there. So what do you do? You use one of the content composers we have been discussing, and you slowly but surely go through and edit all these articles. And voila! – You have an Adsense site with good, unique content. Also, if you have this stack of variations on articles, why not set up another similar Adsense site, but use a different set of variations of articles? Now, one of the best ways to get the search engines to visit any of your sites is if you are continually adding fresh pages (articles) to them. From the spiders point of view, if they suddenly see a site go up with hundreds of articles on it, and then no more, they won’t remain very interested for long, so your page rank will slip. Now, if you just put up a site with say 20 articles on, and then upload one or more article every few days, that will really cream the search engine spiders! One way you could do that would be to upload an article variant to your site on this ‘drip-feed’ process, or you could write a new article every few days for every one of your 60 web sites. Hah – Hah! How many hours do you have in your working day then? A better solution would be to use one of the various PLR sites out there, and after a lot of searching the best one I have found is Article Underground, where for each module ( and there are three) you get 800 ghost written articles every month with complete editing rights. Now you could just throw up virgin out-of-the-box Article Underground articles to your sites on a regular basis, but then you will be running into the duplicate content issue again. Now, all of this will take a lot of time, ‘composing’ the articles somehow into many variants, and then uploading to your 60 sites, preferably on a random number, and in random numbers of days just to please the search engines. But, there is another product, that I am getting quite excited about, that will actually take your PLR articles, and upload them automatically in a random number between 1 and 5 articles at a time per site, and in a random number of days between 2 and 10. Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 50 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing This product is WebSiteArticleWizard which I am investigating at the moment. The only drawback, as I mentioned in my chapter on Content Composers, is the learning curve the sister product WebSiteContentWizard has to go through before you can really rapidly use it to convert and compose masses of new articles. This product also comes with around 20,000 ready made articles from other authors, ready and rearing to be uploaded. The potential for those two products working together on Adsense sites is tremendous, and I will keep you informed as t the progress with this combination of products. What gets me excited is the fact that once I have got the system working, there is no limit to the number or groups of Adsense sites I can get up and earning regular cash. Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 51 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing Turn Your Articles Into Affiliate Generating Income Streams By now I think you will have seen quite dramatically how the humble article can be a really great way of getting links to your web site, raising your Page Rank on Google, and giving you the potential to earn really substantial revenue streams from Adsense – all using White Hat technology. I would reiterate that if you are considering Adsense then I would not recommend that anyone uses any Black Hat technology (I will not mention here what products I consider to fit that category, although I will answer individual emails). There’s no point in building a business on shifting sands. I believe this is akin to being a bank robber – you are always trying to stay one step in front of the law, and forever looking over your shoulder. Good policy? I think not! So far, with the Adsense direction, we have been looking at articles that are to be published on web pages generally optimised for Adsense income. Now although you can to a certain extent, includes a few affiliate links on your web pages, in the main these have been optimised to convert as many clicks on the Adsense ads, so affiliate links will just pull surfers away from that. So, what can you do to Promote Affiliate Sales? Well, the first thing is this. As your site is genuinely building up with fresh, wholesome content, which your surfers find interesting and appealing, then you should do the following, as most Adsense sites, if they don’t ‘pull’ tend never to see the same surfer again. Right, so you have identified a number of niches with your web pages. You have articles coming out of your ears on most of these topics – either from your own head, other people’s articles, or from PLR sites like Article Underground. The first thing you should do, is take a bunch of these articles in each niche, combine them, and use your favourite content composer to help blend them into unique ‘Free Reports’. Then, on each page for your web site, have a ‘Free Report’ sign up box. This will start to build up your lists in your various niches. Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 52 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing See the ‘Free Report’ above the fold? Once you have your lists, of course, you can keep at them with your own emails and articles, and usually use sales copy from any affiliate product program that you sign up with. So now we need to look at another twist to your articles. You’re now of course highly aware of the power of the Resource Box at the end of each article, and of the importance of using ‘Anchor Text’ wherever possible inside it. But one area we have not looked at yet is the idea of putting links in the body of your article. Now, most article directory editors can spot an affiliate link a mile off, and will be very quick to hit the ‘Reject’ button when they see them. In fact, you must look at the rules in each case to make sure that links of any sort are allowed in the body text of an article. Some do, some don’t, but it is clearly defined in individual article directory t’s and c’s. Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 53 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing Let’s face it, you are writing, as an EXPERT in your field, so why should you not be putting resource links in to the body of your text, to underline what you are saying. This is where a bit of creativity needs to come into play. For instance, if you are writing an article promoting, if you just put “… the best way to format your articles is to have a look at this site http://www.articleanouncer.com/affiliate=237289 .” This is so obvious an affiliate link it is not true. Bang – Binned! So try this, using redirect on your URL. I have a site called geoffmorrismarketing.com, so I could quite easily set up www.geoffmorrismarketing.com/bestarticles and have this redirected to my affiliate link. Unfortunately this will show your affiliate link in the title bar, but it is not normally noted. Or, you could buy a domain called www.bestarticlestouse.com and use this as the redirect. Doing this will not show your affiliate URL in the address bar, but costs you $7.50 for the new URL. Or, there is another way, which I use all the time now to protect my affiliate links from theft, to provide cover as outlined above, and encourage more people to click the links. That is to use a product called PowerLinkGenerator. Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 54 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing With PowerlinkGenerator, my affiliate links get displayed something like this: www.Geoffmorrismarketing.com/recommends/bestarticles No affiliate link to be cut off, it looks like a recommendation, and actually tests have shown a 67% higher click through rate than standard affiliate links do. Well, that’s about as far as I want to take affiliate income streams now, but I think you can see how the power of articles is building up a tremendous potential for income, and I have so far not spent a penny in Adwords, Banner ads, or any other Pay-Per-Click program. It’s been all down to creating fresh, wholesome content – Articles. Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 55 The NEWBIES Guide To Article Writing Resources I sincerely hope you have found the content of this book extremely useful. When you are making your money from articles, I would very much appreciate you dropping me an email to let me know how you are getting on. In the mean time I have gathered most of the resources used in this book, and also some other great tools that I use and recommend, onto one easy reference guide for your information. You can find these by visiting my website www.geoffmorrismarketing.com To YOUR Success! Geoff Morris Cambridge UK 2006 PS I NEVER recommend ANY product I have not used myself. PPS I will NEVER disclose your information to ANY third party. Geoff Morris GeoffMorrisMarketing.com Visit the site for your FREE critique and regular newsletter full of Great Tips! 56