NICHE
RICHES….1
INTRODUCTION
When I first started on this report,
it was only supposed to be a couple of pages long. The main reason was to give
a little bit more detail into a method that I use to generate a nice income
every month.
Since then however, I have been
contacted more times than I can count asking to expand the scope of the methods
used and get more in detail about the things I do.
What I quickly realized is that many
people simply do not know where to start and that many of the products out
there today assume that we all know everything already.
So, I have taken this a bit further
and am going to go in detail and in depth about everything. When you finish
this, you should have no doubt that you will be able to generate an income online.
It is going to take work and effort
on your part however, anything in life that is worth having does.
GETTING
YOUR HEAD RIGHT!
A majority of the success that you
will have in Internet Marketing will be derived from your mental toughness.
This is important because many of the things that you read and many of the
products that you buy online set you up for failure.
What do I mean?
If you go and find just about any
sales letter that is selling a product that has to do with making money online
a couple things should jump out at you.
The first thing is, the claims of
instant income that pours into your bank account the minute you buy the
product. Many of these claims are crap and the sooner that you realize that the
better off you will be.
What happens is, you buy a product,
read it, and start to implement what it teaches and if you are not rich
overnight you somehow feel that you have failed, but hold on a minute....
In reality, the person that sold you
the product has failed, for the simple fact that they have set your
expectations in a way that they are impossible to meet. Understand right off the bat that the people
that make money online are the ones that stick it out, the ones that put in the
extra hour, and the ones that fight through the days of no sales.
You have to decide right now, are
you going to be one of the successes or are you going to be one of the people
that gets stuck in a rut and throws in the hat only to try something else and
fail too?
If you are looking for a quick fix
or push button system to solve all of your financial problems, this guide is
not for you. If however, you are willing to put the work in and follow a
system that has proven to be successful, read on and lets get to work.
PICKING
A NICHE
One of the things that it seems like
people struggle with the most is picking a niche to jump into. One of the main
reasons is, many systems and guides tell you to pick something that you are
passionate about or something you love....
There is a problem though!
If you are anything like me, you
can't go to a website like Clickbank and find something that you love or even
anything that you are passionate about.
PICKING
A NICHE
One of the things that it seems like
people struggle with the most is picking a niche to jump into. One of the main
reasons is, many systems and guides tell you to pick something that you are
passionate about or something you love....
There is a problem though!
If you are anything like me, you
can't go to a website like Clickbank and find something that you love or even
anything that you are passionate about. When
deciding which product is right for you, there are a couple things that you can
look at.
Gravity – This can be found in the
product description at ClickBank. This number basically tells you how many
affiliates have sold at least one unit. The higher the number, you can assume
that the product is selling well and that the sales page is proving to convert.
Sales Page – Take a look at the
sales page for the product. Does it interest you? Does it look professional? If
you were in the market, would it compel you to rip your credit card out of your
wallet and make a purchase?
Information – How much information
is readily available online? For instance, if you are in the dog training niche
and type “dog training tips” into Google and the first thing you see is an
extensive step by step system to train a dog, that is free. There is a good
chance that people will not buy what they can get for nothing. This might be a
sign that you should look at another niche. If however, there isn't a whole lot
of free information, but enough for you to research and get information for
articles and other advertising, you probably found a good product to market.
Affiliate Resources – Most of the
time, for every product there are 3 or 4 vendors on ClickBank trying to sell
the same thing.
Some of them give you things like
articles, graphics, free reports, and other information that will help you in
marketing their product. The bigger head start you can get, the better. This is
a resource that I think many people overlook. Some of the affiliate resources
even go as far as to give you a list of profitable keywords that you can start
your campaign with.
All of the things above combined can
guide you to making the right decision when you're trying to come up with the
right product for you to promote.
The most important things out of
what was covered above are the
sales pages and the information
sections.
You want to pay close attention to
the sales page. If it makes you think that it was just quickly thrown together
or if you look at the sales copy and think to yourself “ who in the world came
up with this”? You might want to look at other similar products and skip over
that particular vendor. Make sure that the process from beginning to end of the
site is smooth. You want the headline to grab your attention and for there to
be plenty of opportunities for the visitor to buy. Another thing to look for is
to see if there are bonuses being given. Many times, the bonus that a product
comes with make it a no brainer in and of itself.
Another very important thing to look
for is “leaks”. This refers to the ability of the buyer to purchase the product
through another payment processor. What you want to do is follow all of the
links and make sure that your affiliate ID is still showing up at the bottom of
the page. From what I understand, this is not as big of an issue anymore, but
definitely something to watch out for.
One other important thing to keep an
eye on is whether or not the vendor is collecting email addresses on a squeeze
page. If they are, do yourself a favor and sign up. As you start to get emails
from them, follow the links inside the emails and make sure that your affiliate
ID is still intact and that they are not replacing yours with theirs. There has
been some talk recently about vendors possibly stealing commission from
affiliates in this manner.
Keep in mind that there is more than
likely more than one person selling the same kind of product, so you do have
options. Once you find a niche that you would like to get into take a look at
all of the different vendors and see which one you think gives you the best
opportunity to make a sale by sending visitors to the sales page.
The information portion is also
going to play a huge part in your decision. As I said earlier, if someone is
giving away for free what you are trying to sell, how many do you think you
will sell? Chances are, you might still
get a couple sales, but not enough to make any type of long term passive
income.
Our main goal is to find a niche
that we can settle into, do the initial work, and then collect money from it
for years to come. This is exactly the reason that it is so important to do
thorough research. By doing so, we are making sure that we have set ourselves
up for success.
DOING
KEYWORD RESEARCH
Keyword research is one of the most
important things that we do online. It can be very time consuming depending on
how deep you need to go in order to get keywords that you are happy with, but
it is well worth the effort and will pay a great return if done correctly.
The most important thing that we
need in order to do effective keyword research is a keyword tool. For the
purpose of this guide I am going to be using WordTracker's free tool, due to
the fact that everyone has access to it.
Before we start though, it is
important to understand that for the most part these tools make guesses at the
results that they give. For example, in one niche that I am in, all of the
keyword tools that I have used said that a particular keyword was only getting
1 search a day. This is funny
1 search a day. This is funny to me,
because I currently get 30 visitors a day to one of my sites based on that
keyword. The point I am trying to make is there is a little bit of wiggle room
in the results that you get.
WordTracker reports results based on
a daily search volume. This means that if it shows the number 5 after a keyword
that it is searched for approximately 150 times a month.
Normally, a guide like this would go
into a long drawn out ramble about how you should do keyword research and it
would be really boring and you would lose interest.
I'm not going to do that. I'm going
to show you how to cheat your way through keyword research.
This is by far the easiest way that
I have found to research keywords and has helped me to expand out into
different niches and even given me some great product ideas.
I'm going to give some examples here
and try to make it as easy as possible for you to follow along. I want you to
understand exactly what I am doing and how I come up with the numbers that I
come up with.
Make sure that you have a web
browser open and ready to go.
For example purposes we are going to
be researching keywords that relate to the relationship niche. It will work for
just about any niche though. As a matter of a fact, I have not found a single
niche that I have not been able to do my keyword research in this manner with.
Open up www.ezinearticles.com in your browser. Now because we are using the relationship
niche as an example I am just going to type in a random keyword in the search
box. I am going to use “relationship problem advice”.
When I do that, the first article
that shows up for me is this one:
http://ezinearticles.com/index.php?Some-Relationship-Problem-Advice-That-Can-Save-Your-Relationship&id=1252566
When that article opens, I really
don't care what it says. Basically, I just want to take advantage of the fact
that this person has probably spent hours researching the niche and keywords.
So, what I am interested in is the keywords that they are going after.
To get that information you want want to look at the source code. To do that,
simply right click somewhere in the article and choose the option to “view
source code”. When you do that, this is the part that we are concerned with:
<meta
name="keywords" content="ways to end relationships, questions to
ask before ending a relationship, get your ex back"
NOTE: YOU CAN ALSO GET THIS INFORMATION
BY SIMPLY CLICKING THE EZINE PUBLISHER BUTTON ONCE INSIDE THE ARTICLE. HOWEVER,
BY DOING THIS YOU ARE GIVING YOUR COMPETITION ANOTHER VOTE TO BE LISTED IN THE
“MOST PUBLISHED” SECTION OF THAT category.
This tells us that the keywords that
he is going after are “ways to end relationships, questions to ask before
ending a relationship
and get your ex back”.
Lets take the first one of his
keywords which is “ways to end relationships” and put it in keyword tracker.
When we do that, we see that it is searched for 520 times a day.
Next, go to Google and enter the
keyword with quotation marks. Surprise, only about 8,000 competing sites!
Now save that keyword and move onto
the next one. When we put “questions to ask before ending a relationship” into WordTracker
we are told that this term is searched for 324 times a day. When I check
Google there are only 416 competing sites!
At this point we have 2 keywords
with high daily searches and low competition. Now, you may have to go through a
couple articles in
order to find good keywords, but it
still only takes a couple of minutes and it is much easier than the way that
the “gurus” tell you to do your keyword research.
You will want to continue looking at
articles and checking the source code until you have somewhere between 10 -15
keywords that you are comfortable with. It should not take you long. One thing
that I will say is, I'm not sure if this niche is profitable or not. I have
never marketed to it so I have no idea how the niche converts or how much money
you could make which these types of products. One thing that you can do to see
what people are marketing when using these keywords is to simply follow the
links in their resource boxes.
This will allow you to find out what
kind of affiliate products are out there and give you some ideas about how you
can monetize the keywords that you find.
Some people might find this method
of keyword research unethical, I don't though. As a matter of fact, I think it
is a very smart way to find keywords that we can use quickly without a ton of
effort on our part.
The great thing about this method
is, it will allow you to get involved with just about any niche that you want
to enter.
If you put any base keywords in the
search box at Ezinearticles you are going to come up with a ton of articles and
can easily see what keywords people are trying to rank for. How much more of a
sure thing can you ask for?
PICKING
THE RIGHT KEYWORDS
Once you have your list of keywords
together that you are going to be working with, list them in order of daily
searches. Since we are going to be dealing with relatively low competition, the
number of competing sites does not really matter that much.
When checking Google for the
competition of the keywords, keep a careful note of how many Adwords campaigns
are showing up. Obviously if you can find a keyword that is getting a couple
hundred searches a day, low competition, and a decent amount of Adwords
campaigns showing up, you very well could have found a jackpot.
There are many things that go into
deciding which keywords are “the right ones.” One thing to keep an eye on is
keywords that have negative value in them such as “free”. While you will surely
find a ton of keywords with these types of words in them, often times they are
simply not profitable.
Lets say that you do find some
keywords that generate a ton of visitors, but no sales. What do you do
then?
Well, the first thing that I would
recommend is to change the product that you are trying to sell them. It could
just be that the sales page or the offer does not appeal to people the way that
you thought it would.
If after changing the product you
still don't see any sales coming in, you might want to consider a adding
Adsense to either your own self hosted site or to a free platform like Blogger.
This will give you another revenue
stream, even it if is only a couple of dollars a day, it still adds up over
time.
ANALYZING
YOUR COMPETITION
I have already gone over this a
little bit, but this is an important part of the process so, some of the things
need to be gone over a little more thoroughly.
When you plug the keyword into
Google using quotation marks, there are a couple of things that you want to
take note of.
l What kind of sites are ranking high (are they authority
sites?)
l How many Adwords campaigns are being run (pay attention)
l How many competing sites without quotation marks
The first bullet point above is
probably the most important. This is true because it is going to be our goal to
take over their position if they are on the first page of Google. Therefore, we
have to see exactly how strong they are. This will tell us how much work we
will have to put in for us to rank well.
One of the best indicators to me can
be found by using Yahoo Site Explorer. Basically, we will be able to find out
exactly how many links the site has coming in and exactly where they are coming
from.
For the purpose of an example lets
go back and use the keywords from the relationship niche that we found earlier.
One of the first keywords we found was
“relationship problem advice” so, lets take a look at exactly what Google will
tell us so that we can analyze it a little bit further.
When you plug the keyword into
Google with quotation marks it shows that there are 8,770 competing sites. Now,
take a look at the Adwords Ads that are running. Not only is there a full front
page of 10 ads, but there are 11 more under “more sponsored links”
So far, we are looking real good. We
have low competition and 21 people are spending money to get traffic from this
particular keyword.
Lets take it a step further though
and analyze what the sites that already have top billing have going on. We are
going to do this by analyzing what kind of links they have coming in and where
they come from.
To do this, we are going to use
Yahoo Site Explorer. So, open Yahoo up in a different tab. Make sure that
Google is still open with the information regarding the keyword “relationship
problem advice”
The first site you should see is www.links2love.com/advice
go ahead and open that site up and you will see that the site does not really
offer any good content. Honestly, it looks like it is set up to generate income
through Adsense. So, we should be happy about that. Copy the URL and click over to your Yahoo tab.
Once there we are going to see how many links the site has by putting it in the
Yahoo search bar in the following format:
Hit enter, what you see next usually
is a bad sign. It is showing that the site has over 4,000 links pointing to it.
However, in this case, if you look close enough they are all internal links.
This means that pretty much all of the links are coming from other pages on the
site. Usually when I see that, I take that as a good sign.
After evaluating the first site, I'm
not too worried. I'm fairly confident with a little bit of work, that first spot
is attainable and I could have it with some patience.
Take a look at the second competing
result in Google and lets analyze it the same way. The site you should be
looking at is www.couplescompany.com when you plug it into Yahoo using the same format as the
first site, you will see that it has over 2,000 links pointing to it. However,
again most of the links are coming from within the site with the exception of a
couple of directories.
Another site with a couple thousand
links pointing to it is not exactly what I wanted to see. However, because of
where the links are coming from, I'm not that worried about it either.
Just to do a little more
investigation, lets do the same thing with the third site on the front page of
Google. The URL that you should see is a URL within www.askmen.com when you run it through site explorer you will see that
there are only 9 links pointing to it.
The fourth competing site has about
the same stats as the third.
From everything I have seen this is
a keyword that I feel comfortable attacking with a fair amount of certainty
that I can not only rank on
the first page of Google , but that
I can rank high on the first page. Therefore, I am going to put it aside as a
good keyword to go after.
You are going to want to go through
this process for each of the keywords that you have compiled. Make sure that
you do this! Incomplete or sloppy research very well could hurt you in the long
run.
Once you get it down, it shouldn't
take you any longer than a couple of minutes per keyword and you will be done a
lot faster than you think. Even though it might seem tedious, this is part of
the ground work that you lay down to ensure that your campaign is successful.
No matter what you do, do not skip
what we have talked about in this section. If you do, you could end up wasting
a ton of time on keywords that are unattainable or even worse spending time
ranking well for a keyword that is not profitable.
INTERMISSION
Lets review what we have done so
far. At this point we have done the following:
1. Got
our heads right
2. Picked
a niche
3. Keyword
research
4. Decided
which keywords were the “right keywords”
5. Analyzed
our competition
As it stands right now, we know
exactly what we are going to market and which words we are going to use to do
it.
It is important to understand
though, that you can not skip steps. If you do, you will find yourself involved
in a niche that you are not making any money in, wondering why.
The fact of the matter is, the
people that are not making money in this business are the ones that refuse to
have structure even when a step-by-step guide is put in front of them.
Do
yourself a favor and make sure that you have done each of the 5 things listed
above before going any further. The rest of the steps will still be there
later, but the first 5 are the foundation that is going to determine whether
you earn money or not.
COMING
UP WITH CONTENT
Now that we have our niche selected
and the keywords that we are going to attack picked out, the next step is to
create some content to generate traffic for us.
This can be done in a couple of
ways. Personally, I like to use Google to do a little bit of research. Chances
are good that just by entering your keywords in Google you are going to come up
with a ton of useful stuff to write about.
One thing that I like to do even
before checking Google though is to go to Yahoo Answers and search for variations
of my keyword. This will tell me what problems people are having and what kind
of solutions are being given to them.
If you pay really close attention
you will pick up a couple great titles for articles and a list of different
things that you can write about. However, in this case because we have been
using the keyword “relationship problem advice” what we are going to do
right now is head on over to http://answers.yahoo.com and type in a variation of our keyword , for now we will
stick with “relationship problem”. One of the first threads I see is:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AjfoHesso6OOjY6FoiHn_40jzKIX;_ylv=3?qid=20070818194709AAXJlYM
The title of the post is:
“How is ignoring someone ever a good
solution to a relationship problem”
Just from the title of the post
alone, I can come up with a couple of article titles right off the top of my
head.
Relationship Problem Advice – Will
Ignoring The problem Make It Go Away?
Relationship Problem Advice – Why
Ignoring The Problem Will Not Help Your Relationship
Do you see what I am doing here? I
am letting people that are having problems in this area of their life determine
what my content is going to be.
Why?
I do it this way because there is
not a whole lot of guess work. I do not have to wonder whether or not my
content is something that people will want to read. People are already telling
me that they are searching for this type of information to help them in their
lives and their relationships
Lets take a look at the next
question and do the same thing. Even though this might seem repetitious on my
part, I want to be absolutely certain that by the time you are done reading
this guide you will be able to put it aside and carry all of these steps out on
your own easily and with confidence that you are doing it correctly.
The next thread that I see is this
one:
The title of the question is, “what
can I do to resolve this distance relationship problem”
Again, right off the bat a couple of
different article titles come to mind.
Relationship Problem Advice – Is A
Long Distance Relationship For You?
Relationship Problem Advice – How To
Make A Long Distance Relationship Seem Close
Do you see what is going on? I could
literally spend hours in Yahoo Answers and come up with 100 article titles and
different problems that need to be addressed in this niche.
Now that we have a couple article
titles, the next thing we have to do is come up with content for the articles.
This is what I like to use Google and my own life experiences for.
You can also read other articles
that are in circulation and put your own spin on things. I know that when I
read almost any article, when I am done, I have ideas for how I could expand
that topic in three different directions. This does take a little bit of
creativity on your part, but the more you do it, the easier it will come to
you.
We now know how to come up with
content to write about, so it is time to put it into action. A couple pages
forward in this article we are going to set up our virtual real estate, but
before we do that, we
are going to need some fresh and
interesting content to put on it. The initial content that you have to create
is kind of extensive, but keep in mind that you are opening up a new niche so
there is some legwork involved. Don't let it scare you away, if you do, you
will be stuck in the same ruts that you find yourself in now.
This is what you are going to need:
l 1 unique article of about 600 words
2 rewrites of your 1 unique article
So, what we are doing is writing a
total of 3 unique articles and then rewriting each of them 3 times. If you are
creative and can come up with all unique articles and do not have to rewrite
anything, thats great! That is always an option, but what I am doing here is
trying to make it as easy as possible to get started.
There are also other ways to come up
with content. You can look for PLR material that relates to your niche or you
can even outsource the article writing all together. If you decide to go the
PLR route, make sure that you completely rewrite the entire article so that it
is unique to only you. Once you have all
of your content ready to go, make sure that you save it. I recommend to start a
new folder for each one of your niches. This will help you stay organized and
allow you to find everything quickly and easily.
SETTING
UP YOUR VIRTUAL REAL ESTATE
This is where everything starts to
get fun. At least for me anyway. When I get to this point, I know that I am
getting close to being able to get some traffic and make some money.
Since Bum Marketing is the strategy
that I use and because I am a technological moron, I choose to set up and use
all free sites. There are plenty of them out there and they are both easy to
get going and easy to update.
These are the sites that I use:
Now, if you are more technically inclined you can substitute
Squidoo for your own site on your own hosting, or even better still set up your
lens with Squidoo and use it for a little more linking power.
The first site that I set up is my Squidoo lens. This is
because it is going to be my main landing page and also because I have found
that for some reason it just ranks better in the search engines.
Setting up a site at squidoo is
easy, it will walk you through the whole process and you should be done in a
matter of a couple of minutes.
One thing to keep in mind though is
you will want to title your Squidoo lens something that has to do with your
keyword. So, if we stick with the “relationship problem advice” example then
ultimately, relationship problem advice would be our first choice, but if it is
not available you can try to put the word “review” at the end of it or even a
word like “good” in front of it.
So, it might look something like
this:
relationshipproblemadvice
relationshipproblemadvicereview
relationship-problem-advice
relationship-problem-advice-review
Those are just examples, it is
important to have a keyword rich title. This makes it more attractive to not
only the search engines, but also to people that might run across your URL in
the search engines. It makes it look relevant to what they are looking for and
that is what we want.
Make sure that when you set your
page up at Squidoo that you include the bells and whistles.
What I mean by this is, include a
YouTube video, don't worry you don't have to make it, just select the option to
let YouTube select it. You will also want to use the guestbook, flickr,
and amazon feeds. All of these things will make
your Lens look more alive and will
help it rank better in the search engines.
Make sure that in the “about me”
section, you do your best to make it interesting and to put yourself out there
as someone who is generally interested and well versed in the niche you are in.
The more you look like an “expert” the more likely it will be that people that
visit your page will buy something.
Now, you are going to need the
articles that you wrote earlier. What we are going to do is take one of the
longer UNIQUE articles that you have written and put it in the first text
module. Make sure that the spelling is correct and that everything looks up to
par. Right above where the text starts, put a nice attractive link that the
visitor is able to click out to get to the vendors page. If they just want to
buy, we want to make it as easy as possible for them to do just that.
In the second text module, you want
to come up with either reviews of several products that are in the niche or
simply come up with a feature and benefit module on the one product that you
are promoting. Make sure that
there are several links in this
module that allow the visitor to make a purchase.
Just to make sure that I'm not
taking anything for granted, you can make your anchor text in the following
format:
a href="http://link you want them
to go to/" target="_top">Anchor Text You Want To
Use</a>
Simply replace “link you want them
to go to” with your hoplink or site that you want your visitor to go and
replace “Anchor Text You Want To Use” with just what it says, the anchor text
you want to use.
When it comes to anchor text, I have
always found it better to use positive words. For example some good anchor text
in the niche we have been talking about, the relationship niche might be
<FIX YOUR RELATIONSHIP> or <FOR A BETTER RELATIONSHIP> all you have
to do is <CLICK HERE>
Your anchor text is definitely
something that you will want to test. Some niches respond to different words
better than others.
As of right now, you should have
your Squidoo Lens set up and ready to go. Make sure to copy the URL of your
Lens because you are going to need it for the other sites that we are going to
set up.
The last thing you are going to want
to do is head over to www.pingomatic.com and ping your lens to let the search engines know that your
site is up and ready for visitors.
Try to make it a habit to do the
same every time that you add content, to let the search engines know that you
have made an update.
When it comes to the sites that you
are going to set up at blogger, hubpages, and wordpress it really does not
matter in what order you set these up.
There are no special modules or
anything at all complex whatsoever about setting these up. As a matter of a
fact, if any of them takes you more than 10 minutes I would be very surprised.
The one thing that you are going to
want to do with each one as you set them up is to link them back to your
Squidoo lens. You are going
to do this by using anchor text,
which we just went over, but this time make sure that the actual anchor text is
the main keyword that you are targeting. By doing this you are going to give
yourself some initial backlinks for the search engines to see. This is very
important so, don't skip it.
With each one that you set up you
are going to add one of the longer unique articles to it and send a ping to www.pingomatic.com to again let the search engines know that you are there and
ready for visitors. Keep in mind that
you will want to name these sites similar to the same way you did your Squidoo
Lens. If the same name is available take it, if it is not just make sure that
it is “keyword rich” and similar to the keywords that you are going to be
targeting.
Checklist time! As of right now as
far as your virtual real estate goes, you should have the following set up with
initial content and have already pinged them.
1. Wordpress
Blog
2. Blogger
Blog
3.
Hub at HubPag
4. Squidoo
Lens
Make sure that you copy down the URL
to all of your sites and put them in a notepad file somewhere for easy
reference. This will help you later.
NOTE: IF YOU ARE ABLE TO CREATE YOUR
OWN SITE, ALL OF THE SITES ABOVE WOULD THEN LINK TO YOUR OWN SELF HOSTED SITE.
GENERATING
TRAFFIC
Initially, we are going to get some
traffic by using a site that we have already used. Head on over to http://answers.yahoo.com and find some questions that relate to your niche. Make
sure to answer the questions like you are genuinely concerned. Directly below
where you answer the question there is a box for “resource” .
You are generally safe if you put 2
links in that box. So, make sure that your Squidoo lens is always one of them
and then just alternate the others.
Chances are good that you will not
see a ton of traffic by doing this, but you will get some trickles and maybe
even a sale. This is especially true because you are putting your links in
front of someone who needs what you are selling.
The main source of traffic will come
through writing and publishing articles with sites like http://www.ezinearticles.com If you have already written articles and used them, then
you already know that by far they are the best source of targeted free traffic
that we have at our disposal.
As a rule, I recommend writing and
publishing 3 articles per day for each niche you are in. You can scale that
down to meet time constraints that you have, but 3 or more articles a day will
give you a steady flow of traffic and allow you to start making sales sooner
than later.
Don't let the article writing
intimidate you. Earlier we went over how to come up with article titles that will
attract readers and how to come up with content. Just follow the same
procedures and you will find it easy to come up with content daily.
While traffic is our main reason for
writing the articles, there are other benefits. Remember earlier when we were
“analyzing competition” we were paying close attention to the number of links
that a site had coming in. Every time that you submit an article you are going
to link it to your Squidoo lens which will give it another backlink for the
search engines to consider when choosing where to rank your site. The more the
better.
There are other ways of getting
backlinks and traffic that you can do. This is kind of like extra credit
though. You hear a lot of talk about generating traffic through the use of
forums and other social sites and for good reason. These kind of sites are for
the most part open forums where people can post whatever they want and then
have a discussion about issues.
One of my favorite ways to find
places that are pertinent to my niche is www.boardreader.com for example, I just went and typed in “relationship advice”
because it is the niche we have talked about throughout this and it gave me
over 37,000 results of forums and other social mediums that I can register to
and include a signature linking back to my Squidoo Lens as well as talk about
the subject.
You can also take advantage of the
social networking sites like www.digg.com
and www.stumbledupon.com
with these sites you can post a link to all of your virtual real estate as well
as the articles
that you write. This is just one
other way that you can put your name out there and lead people to your content
and ultimately try to convert them into buyers.
One thing that is very important and
I can't stress enough is that where the article writing is concerned you have
to be CONSISTENT! If you aren't, you very well could see your traffic and sales
dry up.
The
great thing about articles though, especially when you are dealing with low
competition keywords is you stand a great chance of landing a top ranking and
getting hundreds of visitors a day because of it. Once this happens, you can
make a decision on whether there are other keywords you can target or maybe
move into another niche to give you an additional revenue .
MAKING
YOUR VIRTUAL REAL ESTATE VALUABLE
Lets face it, if you have a site set
up and it is sitting on the 10th page of Google and nobody is
finding you through the search engines, that site is not worth very much.
Therefore, it is important to do what is necessary to get a good ranking.
The way that you do that is to
update your sites. Earlier, you should have written a couple of extra articles.
Every other day or so, update your sites with a little bit of content. It does
not have to be a novel, even 100 words will do, just something to keep the site
fresh and up to date. With each update you do, make sure to ping them at www.pingomatic.com
Another thing that I like to do is
mass article submissions. If you are determined to keep your budget at $0 there
is a ton of free article submission software out there for you to use. I have
chosen to use a service that costs $47 a month called unique article wizard.
They can be found at www.uniquearticlewizard.com basically, I can submit as many articles as I want a month
and
they will distribute them to
hundreds and in some cases thousands of other websites where my article will be
published.
The fact is, I did not include this
in the traffic part of the guide because most of the time you won't see much
traffic from the sites where your articles get published.
The biggest reason that I do this is
to get a large amount of backlinks in a small amount of time with little effort
on my part.
It is “shortcuts” like this that
allow us to rank better in a shorter amount of time than would normally be
possible. This definitely is not required though.
As a matter of a fact, I recommend
that if you are struggling financially that you DON'T SPEND ANY MONEY until the
time comes that you are generating an income online. Once you start getting
some checks you can start investing back into your business to automate the
process more and more.
BOBBY GOWEN
