Guide to make money online!

For years, it has been well known that Google’s search algorithm is driven by the number and quality of links pointing to a particular URL. And as a result, it was all the rage for some time to buy links on web pages that had a high Google PageRank (PR).

But in March of 2007, Google’s mouthpiece Matt Cutts declared that Google was going to fight back against Paid Links. Google put a shot across the bow of many online marketers, letting them know that the days of easily buying links from high PageRank pages in order to influence a website’s ranking in Google were over.

The Shot Heard Around The World

With Matt Cutts declaration, a world full of online marketers began to cry foul. It was said that “They can’t do that!”

But the truth was and is that the Google Search Algorithm is Google’s intellectual property, and therefore, Google can do anything they want within their algorithms - no matter who those changes might hurt or help.

By the end of the Summer of 2007, the people crying foul had quieted down a bit and got back to the business of trying to find new ways to manipulate their website’s rankings inside of the Google search results. That is the way it has always been and always will be.

The summer of 2007 was just such an oddity… For me, it has always been exciting to challenge the brains at Google to get my websites to rank well within Google’s search algorithms. But for some reason, at that moment in time, many of those who held the top rankings in Google felt as if it was their God-given right to be at the top of Google’s search results, and how dare Google oppose God’s decree in this matter.

Yep, I know I am going to catch flak for that statement - comparing a few webmasters to religious zealots - but that is how I roll sometimes.

For me, Matt Cutts was telling people to work harder to actually “earn” what they have been given. For me, it was a chance to rededicate myself to the goal of ranking well in Google for competitive keywords. For me, I did not have to change anything I was already doing, because I have never gained a single ranking in Google by paying for a link from any web page. (wink)

Google’s Search Engineers Are Not Foolish

Matt Cutts has said time and again that Google does not want to attack any problem in their search algorithms by manually deleting any participant in the Google search ranking game.

Instead, Google in every case wants to program a solution to address a particular bad practice.

I guess it might be easier for me to understand since I am also a computer programmer. It is a hobby I really enjoy, and I exercise my mind with computer programming anytime I want to improve my own websites or to build a new website. I keep my brain sharp by solving problems in computer code.

So, whenever I see Google making moves in one direction or another, I try to visualize how I would solve their algorithm problems in computer code.

In my mind, solving the paid links issue was a super-easy solution. Just look at the pages linking to a particular website, and then do a cross-comparison of the PageRank of all of those linking pages. If all of the pages linking to a particular URL have a PageRank of Four or higher, then chances are that those links were artificially created, through some kind of paid linking system.

Let me explain this in an example, where all of the sample web pages have 100 inbound links each:

• If Site A has all of its 100 links on pages that have a PageRank of 4 or higher, then that is unnatural and therefore suspect.
• If Site B has all of its 100 links on pages that have a PageRank of 0, then those links offer no value to the Internet community as a whole, and therefore Site B should not measured as a quality search result.
• If Site C has a mix of PageRank 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 links, then that is more natural in its structure and it also shows that some of the links are considered to have value in the Internet community as a whole. Therefore, Site C has proven itself worthy above Site A and Site B in Google’s search results.

This example should show in no uncertain terms how easy it was for Google to properly address the issue of paid links and to put a stop to people using paid links to manipulate their websites’ ranking in Google’s search algorithms.

Publication Standards

A couple years back, I wrote another article discussing this concept in relationship to article marketing. You can read that article with third-party commentary from Chris McElroy, aka NameCritic, on the Article Content Provider Blog.

In a nutshell, I was discussing the role of article directories in the article marketing industry. Again, this solution came to me from my programming mind. The simple way for Google to have dealt with all of the junk articles that have been written for the purpose of building links to a website is to look at the article in the context of where that article is published.

The article marketing carpet bombers send their articles to hundreds of article directories to get hundreds of links pointing to their website. But the role of the article directory has always been to be a repository where newsletter publishers and webmasters could go to find articles that they would like to reprint in their own newsletters and on their own websites.

Some article directory managers bring a commitment to providing publishers with only quality articles. Other article directory managers approve anything and everything sent to them.

Through computer programming, it is relatively easy to identify which websites are article directories and which ones are not.

If an article is of good quality, then niche website publishers will find the article and put it on their own website. If the article is a crap article, then the only websites that will accept it are those article directories that publish anything and everything given to them.

As a result, it is easy for Google to look at the Linking Portfolio (list of publishing websites) of a single article and to see which articles were considered worthy of reprint by human reviewers. If the article only exists on article directory websites, then the article must not provide any real value to other people. But if the article is of good quality, the article will be able to be located on article directories AND on niche websites.

This concept very elegantly feeds into Google’s overall strategy of determining which web pages people recommend to others. After all, if you look at Google’s PageRank, it is very simply a system which measures how many people have voted on the quality or value of a particular web page.

Expanding On Google’s PageRank Formula

• Google loves any system that they can conceive to measure how much value the overall Internet community gives to a particular web page.
• Google naturally treats links found in the Yahoo! Business Directory and the Open Directory as higher value links, because the search engineers at Google understand that links in these directories are all approved by a human being.
• Google also gives extra value to social bookmarking websites, because the concept behind social bookmarking is that individuals “bookmark” a web page when they find that web page to offer good value to its readers.
• Google openly dislikes paid links and can easily identify those paid links, without having to jump through too many hoops. (This should not be confused with paying for a service that will help you increase your rankings in Google. Paying a service provider to provide services to you is very different than just paying for links on high PageRank web pages.)
• Google also appreciates reprint articles that have a Linking Portfolio beyond the article directories. Once again, Google appreciates reprint articles that are shown to provide real value to individuals in the greater Internet community.

When you take a close look at the original premise of Google’s PageRank, it has always been about creating systems that measure the value of a web pages to find which web pages will best answer a searcher’s question. Rightfully so, Google believes that the best way to ensure that they are able to give their users good quality search results is to look at what web pages others have already deemed useful.

Herein rests the secret to ranking well in Google’s search results. If you can create content that people will find useful, interesting, and valuable to others, then Google’s seach algorithms will look favorably upon your website.

"I want to be number one on Google for (insert hyper-competitive keyphrase here).”

It’s usually the first thing we hear in terms of search engine optimization - a company wants to be in that coveted top spot on Google, Yahoo!, Ask, and MSN. No matter the industry or specialty, when companies approach us with their desired goals for an SEO campaign, it’s usually all about improving their rankings and positions…and often nothing else. Yes, achieving first page rankings or top spots on the search engines is an incredibly desirable accomplishment to many companies who want immediate and noticeable results. But with such a considerable investment in an SEO campaign, you’d think companies in need of search engine optimization services would also be concerned with their overall ROI, especially in light of the current economy.

Vastly improved (or even #1) rankings are rather easy to achieve in an SEO campaign, even by a novice search engine optimization company. I once wrote an article demonstrating that top rankings were simple - and proved it by optimizing the article for the phrase “Leprechaun Repellent.” To this day, that article, on various sites, takes up nine of the top ten spots on Google for the ridiculous phrase. The obvious question, then, is what those rankings ultimately accomplish. And so we peel back the layers of the onion until we get there.

The First Layer - Rankings

Rankings, rankings, rankings. This is by far the most popular metric for any SEO campaign. Occasionally, a search engine optimization company may not be concerned with your bottom line because it can offer guarantees and focus exclusively on achieving this goal (even though, as in the ‘Leprechaun’ example above, it’s really not getting you anywhere significant in the long run).

Rankings by themselves mean little, and the problem with companies obsessed over rankings is that it doesn’t demonstrate the usefulness of search engine optimization. For a company website, high rankings are great (and impressive for an SEO campaign), but they are just the first layer of the onion. As any good search engine optimization company will demonstrate, our goal is (and yours should be) to bring and/or improve the levels of high quality traffic to your website, meaning visitors who come to your website via a search are already reasonably interested in your products or services.

The Second Layer - Search-Engine Referred Traffic

Increasing search-referred traffic is not a perfect metric because, if visitors are not converting on your website, there’s not a big value proposition to be had. Alone, the metric relies heavily on the right keyphrase selection by your search engine optimization company during the beginning phases of your SEO campaign.

Say that a farming supply company who wanted to be number one on Google for “affordable farming equipment” decided to try a different tactic while attempting to improve its search-engine referred traffic. If the website had been optimized for ‘Britney Spears,’ for example, traffic levels would undoubtedly be high (if the site ranked well for the term - admittedly a huge challenge), but few visitors would be converting, and business, in turn, would be far from booming. Visitors will jump ship immediately and serve as an immediate reminder of the negative impact that poor phrase selection by your search engine optimization company can have on your long-term ROI.

The Third Layer - Take Rate

Essentially, the take rate refers to the number or percentage of search-referred visitors showing interest in your products or demos (your POA or Point-of-Action). The take rate merely signifies a visitor who demonstrates an interest in your POA, for example, by clicking on a “Contact Us” link. The data you’re gauging here is simply overall interest, since not all of the visitors will follow through and actually convert.

Fortunately, there are ways to improve your take rate during the SEO campaign - making the point-of-action blatant and clear on every page is usually the most effective (but overlooked) method. Collaborating with your search engine optimization company to make certain that the primary POA on your website is indeed the most desirable action that a visitor can take is of paramount importance.

The Fourth Layer - Conversion

Strictly speaking, “Conversion” is the percentage of visitors to your website that actually follow through with your POA. Once your search engine optimization company has helped you improve your take rate, you should work on getting more of those people to actually convert. Is your form too long? Do you show a prominent privacy policy promising not to use or sell personal data? Is it a quick, easy process or do people have to jump through hoops? A good search engine optimization company will be able to help you to identify the elements that are serving as barriers to conversion.

The Fifth Layer - Offsite Metrics

If a client allows it, we like to get involved in the nitty-gritty of offsite metrics as part of the SEO campaign. Though the usual search engine optimization company doesn’t go this far into the process, this area alone proves invaluable to demonstrating your ROI.

By analyzing offline metrics on a granular level, your search engine optimization company can examine and report on your average dollar sale for search-referred traffic, the average dollar value of each search-referred lead, the average lifetime value of each search-referred lead, and much, much more.

A software system is usually required to report the data acquired during your SEO campaign; we use Salesforce, a leading CRM (customer relationship management) solution that can be implemented to track these statistics for you. Though it requires diligence to analyze (as well as follow leads from cradle to grave), your company can analyze which engines attracted the most visitors, which keyphrases were the most profitable, the value of customers, and retention levels.

More than Rankings

All layers of the onion, so to speak, are important to an SEO campaign, but the closer you get to the actual dollar return, the more accurate your assessment of success or failure will be. Rankings alone are no indication of success. For that matter, neither is search-referred traffic if the visitors don’t take an action on the site that can lead to a sale. And when the lead finally comes in, there is no way to track the value unless you follow up with offline metrics to determine exactly how much leads from your website are worth.

These are all base metrics - many campaigns are much more involved and use thousands of different data points. But if you are new to the conversion/ROI game and are thinking about hiring a search engine optimization company, make sure that its goal is to be attuned to your bottom line.

When it comes to increasing your blog reader base and driving more traffic to your posts, there are few platforms more effective than Twitter. Twitter is an excellent tool for connecting with your readers and building a rapport. All businesses should use Twitter as a part of their marketing and branding strategy. For bloggers, knowing how to use Twitter effectively can lead to unbeatable exposure. Here are 5 steps any blogger can take to get his posts to go viral on Twitter.

1. Increase Your Followers

Obviously it’s going to be challenging to get your tweeted posts seen by a lot of people if there are only 20 people following you. Your first strategy should be to increase the number of people that are following you. The easiest way to do this is to follow lots of new people. Newbies tend to follow you right back. You can also look up the target keywords in your niche and follow the people who are talking about those keywords on Twitter. It’s particularly helpful to find the users who have a big following in your niche and then try to get them to follow you because they are the ones that will help your content go viral. Avoid following too many people who don’t follow you back because this can make your account look spammy and give you a bad image. Make sure the number of followers you have and the number of people you follow are about the same or at least not drastically different.

2. Become an Expert in Your Niche

Be consistent with your tweets. Regularly link to interesting articles that you think would be of interest to your followers and provide them with value every time. By regularly linking to informative articles in your niche, your followers will begin to look to you as a great source of information. This is an effective way to build your brand and it will pave the way for you to tweet your own posts. Your followers will be expecting valuable content since you have already positioned yourself as an expert in your niche.

3. Promote Your Blog

Don’t expect people to find your Twitter page and click on your link. Make the most of Twitter by tweeting your own posts! Treat your tweets as if they were your headline. Make them attention-grabbing and interesting so more people click through. Try posting the same tweet twice at different times of day to make sure you reach all your readers who didn’t see your first tweet. When you post a tweet multiple times, make sure to delete the first tweet so you don’t look like a spammer.

4. Write Interesting Articles for Your Blog

This might sound obvious but sometimes the more obsessed people get with promoting their blog and social networking, the less they pay attention to writing posts of good quality on a consistent basis. When you are just writing to fill up your blog, it shows. Make sure your posts are very informative, well-written, and that they provide unique information your readers won’t be able to find elsewhere.

5. Make It Easy for Your Followers to Re-Tweet Your Articles

After you’ve done all of the above, you have to leave it to your followers to do the rest. To make it easier for your followers to repost your tweets, add a “tweet this” link at the bottom of your tweets. How do you do it? Simply go to http://addthis.com/ and place the bookmarking plugin in your html.

If you aren’t already using Twitter, you’re missing an immense opportunity to give your website/blog good exposure. If you’re looking for a strategy to increase subscribers, traffic to your site, and a loyal reader base, Twitter is an indispensable tool that should play a prominent role in your master plan.

For those of us who are running an online business certainly know that it’s not easy to gain traffic to our websites. It requires plenty of tedious work, consistent action, and a desire to make our online business succeed.

There are many ways to get traffic to your website. Some people suggest using a plethora of traffic generating methods. I suggest to find just one way, become very good at mastering this one method and use it over and over again. Learning all the different ways is fine, but keep in mind that the learning process itself will take time in which you could be implementing a traffic generating method that you already know.

In this case it only makes sense to find one method that you think you can master and just stick with it. That way you will optimize the amount of time you have to spend on your online business towards gaining that much needed traffic. Trust me, you will not make any money if you can’t get traffic to your website.

If you want your online business to succeed long term and would like traffic to come as cheap as possible, you’ll want to utilize the power of back links. Back links are simply links on others websites that point back to your website. The more back links you have, the higher your website and websites pages will rank in the search engines.

This is a very important concept to know for any internet marketer. Your goal should be to use a method where you are constantly picking up back links on a daily basis. When you combine those back links with keyword research and search engine optimization, over time you will begin to see your traffic drastically improve. Here’s an example of how I get traffic two ways using one method…article marketing.

The first thing I do is my keyword research. Ill write down a list of about 10 or so keywords that get a decent amount of traffic and very little to moderate competition. Once I have compiled the list, Ill write an article using one of the keywords and post it on my blog. Then I will write another article and submit it Ezine Articles using the same keywords as a hyper link in the authors resource box.

Over time I’ll see that page slowly move up the rankings for those keywords. The more back links I have pointing at that page, the higher and faster it will move up the rankings. I will rinse and repeat this process for all of the selected keywords until I have reached page one for each. It may take a month or more to do. Then I will select another 10 keywords and repeat the process all over again.

You can see how powerful this method is over time. After a year of this process you can be ranked on page one for over a hundred keywords all of which will bring targeted traffic to your website.

SEM SEO Experts are finding ways of establishing higher ranking in search engine results by serving quality content to users. Over the past 10 years, SEO techniques have evolved with the demand of the search engines to serve quality search results to users requesting information. It all comes down to user experience and what online marketing professionals are doing to contribute to optimal search engine results. This evolution in demand for higher quality search results has forced SEO Consultants to develop new strategies for higher ranking. These online marketing professionals have learned from history and are achieving higher rankings for their clients by avoiding black hat marketing techniques. Whether you enjoyed history class or slept through it, you cannot afford to miss this lesson. Sleep too long and you may miss some important pointers from our marketing predecessors.

Ten years ago, the online marketing industry was comprised of traditional marketing professionals with a desire to bring their products to the online market. Most companies interested in marketing products online were marketing to consumers in ecommerce environments. A major consideration in any marketing plan included online traffic generated from search engines. In order to increase search engine traffic, black hat marketing techniques were used frequently to market products online. Keyword stuffing was a frequently used technique by SEO Consultants to achieve higher search engine ranking. Attempting to gain high rankings for a specifically targeted keyword or phrase, SEO Consultants would employ a keyword density of up to 50% to secure first page, first position listings in search engines. Needless to say, the results found by search engine users were less than optimal and the search engines were not serving the quality search engine results they were seeking for users on Yahoo, MSN, or Google.

Another tactic used by online marketers of the past was the establishment of link farms. That practice continues today. Over the past 10 years, SEO Consultants have used link farms to establish higher search engine rankings for their clients. Considered by most experts as black hat marketing techniques, link farms are a bank of links on a page which is established without a relevant theme or associated content to the link farm page. Since search engine optimization professionals realized a large factor in ranking depended upon the number of backlinks to their site, SEO Consulting firms of yesterday were allowing clients to establish links to any page online, regardless of the theme of the website. Today, search marketing experts are finding ways to establish backlinks from relevant theme associated content. By establishing relevant links within a theme or category, a website will be perceived at a higher value to the search engines for that particular category. SEO Consultants of today are finding that a higher perceived value within a category by Google, Yahoo, MSN and others, gives a website the ability to rank higher in search engine results.

Pop-up advertising and Spam are black hat marketing techniques once used by experts in online marketing to achieve higher search engine ranking. Today, search engines still use traffic as a factor in search engine ranking. However submission of identical content within comments on websites, creating identical pages linked to website content, or employing advertising companies to spam online users with pop up or pop under ads just to increase website traffic, will no longer assist websites in higher ranking. Quite the contrary, search engines are penalizing websites which employ black hat marketing. The penalty for using spam techniques can be as minor as a lower value to the search engines and associated search results ranking. The penalty of using black hat marketing techniques can be as severe as delisting with search engines for 6 months or longer.

Studying history gives us the opportunity to learn from our predecessors. The growth of the online marketing industry has established an incentivized environment for increased knowledge in the field of search engine optimization. These new consultants are including optimization of social media content, web 2.0 content and applications, article marketing, RSS feeds, podcasts, and video marketing to communicate directly with consumers at a level expected by the online market. The days of serving irrelevant content to online users and expecting to benefit from the dissemination of that content no longer exist. SEM SEO Experts of today have modified the practices of yesterday to offer techniques to their clients which are ranking higher with the search engines. These new techniques are more effective because they offer users the quality content for which they are requesting information. We are not only learning from the mistakes of our industry’s past, but the evolution of these new practices of online marketing professionals is providing a higher quality online experience.

I recently received this question from someone who had just started article marketing his brand new sites:

"If I know that a link exists to one of my sites via an article which has been published or indeed from another website, how come I don't see it when I do a backlinks check? For instance, at the moment, www.mysite.com definitely has a link from www.myothersite.com and also from articles that have been published. So how come a backward link check registers no links? Just hoping to find out how this works."

That is an excellent question–I think that's a common point of confusion, especially for people who are marketing brand new websites.

Let me help you understand how the the backlink registering works and give you some tips on building more traffic to your site with article marketing.

Here are 2 ways I would recommend doing a backlink check:

*Go to Google, and in the search box type in link:http://www.yourwebsite.com/

You would of course replace the 'yourwebsite.com' part with your real URL.

*And/or you can use Yahoo Site Explorer

Yahoo Site Explorer actually gives more detailed information, so you may enjoy using that tool.

Both of these link checking methods will tell you how many backlinks that Google or Yahoo has registered.

Now that is *not* telling you how many backlinks you actually have–it's telling you how many links are registered at Google/Yahoo.

Search engines typically take 3-4 plus months to register backlinks for a site, and it can be longer if the site is brand new.

This is just the way that search engines work–they do not reevaluate links on a daily, weekly or even monthly basis–usually it is more like every 3 or 4 months.

I remember when we were first starting our blog, it was only in the 5th month that the links started turning up in a backlink check. We had been building links for all that time, but it just took 3 months for the backlinks to be registered by Google. Then all of the sudden in the 3th month a whole bunch of links showed up.

For a brand new site, you need to give Google a chance to…

1) index your site, and

2) register your incoming links.

That can take anywhere from 3-5 months.

As the site gets more established, the backlinks tend to register sooner (like every 3 months or so), but especially for a new site it just takes Google a bit of time to recognize the site and count the new links.

So, stop looking at your watch, and start looking at the calendar

During that time, you should be busy–busy marketing your site and submitting articles.

I have a few resources that should really be helpful for you as you're starting to market your site:

5 Things To Do Before You Start Article Marketing… (this is a great resource that tells you how to gauge your progress and how soon you can expect to see results–please read it)

Use Yahoo Site Explorer

So, just to go back over things–there are 2 reasons why you might not see backlinks for your site yet:

1) Your site is brand new. Until your site is indexed by Google, no links will show up at all in a backlink check, even if you know for certain that you have links coming in. Once your site gets more established the backlinks will register more regularly, but at the beginning it takes longer.

2) Not enough time has elapsed since you have submitted your articles. After you start article marketing, it will take 3-4 months for the backlinks to register in Google and other search engines. This does not mean that the links are not there or that they are not accumulating with each article you submit–it just means that the Google spiders have not gotten around to visiting your site and checking you links. The links will show up in a few months.

Here's What To Do:

*Read over the resources I gave you above.

*Develop a submission schedule where you're submitting articles for your site(s) every single month.

*If you're very interested in keeping on top of your website's progress, follow the instructions in the post I referred you to above 5 Things To Do Before You Start Article Marketing. You can keep track of your stats every month, but know that it will likely take anywhere from 3-5 months for the backlinks to be registered. There are still other ways to measure progress even as you're waiting for the backlinks to show up. See that post for the other ways.

*Be patient, I know it's tempting to want to see results right away (we all want that immediate gratification!), but this is a marathon, rather than a sprint. The links created with Article Marketing have long lasting impact on a site's ranking and traffic, but it does take months before seeing the impact of your work. Even after you see the impact of your work you should continue to submit articles to build on the momentum, as it's just a natural part of marketing your websites and your business.

From time to time I'll get an email from a person saying, "I've submitted several articles and I'm still not seeing results."

My first questions to them are always–

• What type of results are you looking for?

• What is your means of measuring your results?

• How long have you been article marketing and how many articles a month have you been submitting?

Sometimes the person's answer is,

"I don't think I'm getting any results because I haven't had very much of an increase in sales on my website, which is why I'm doing article marketing. I submitted 5 articles the first month, then I got busy the second month and didn't submit any, and this month (my third month) I've submitted a couple."

At this point I'm wishing that I had the ability to turn back the hands of time so that I could tell this person some very helpful tips before she started that would have eased her mind, helped her measure her results more accurately, and increased her success rate.

For anyone who has just stared doing article marketing, or is on the verge of starting, or who is considering starting, I've got 5 tips for you that will make your life easier.

Oh, and even if you've been submitting articles for a while now and didn't have these tips when you started–it is never to late to do these!

1) Have a realistic time frame for results.

Although a article marketing can produce dramatic results right away for some folks (for example if your article gets picked up by a major ezine and sent out to tons of folks), it is generally a long term marketing strategy that usually does not show significant results for several months.

The reason for this is that Google and the other search enginess don't update your rankings on a daily or even a monthly basis–usually their cycles run every 3 or 4 months where they will re-establish the ranking of a website based on incoming links.

So, when you start article marketing, you may see a dramatic result right from the start if one of your articles gets picked up by a major ezine or something, but please do not expect to see immediate drastic results. Commit to doing your article marketing consistently over the long term, and know that it will likely take 4 months or so to see a noticeable impact.

2) Make a note of your traffic baseline.

Writing things down helps soooo much. It's easy to say after the fact, "Well, I think I remember my traffic being higher than this previously" but if you aren't conscientiously tracking things your memory may be a bit foggy.

There are stats programs out there to help us track traffic–use one of them! Then, create a spreadsheet where you insert your monthly traffic results. Or, if your traffic tracking program generates monthly reports, use those, but please don't look at your stats and try to go off of memory for a few months back. We want concrete data!

For the last completed month, jot down what your traffic was. This is your traffic baseline.

3) Check how many backlinks you have before you start your article marketing campaign.

Google has a cool way of checking your backlinks. Just type this into the search box: link:http://yourwebsite.com (you would substitute the URL of your website after the "link:" part).

Another great tool is Yahoo Site Explorer.

After pressing the "search" button, you should see a list of results that indicate the websites that are linking to your site. In the upper right area of the page, you can see the number of sites that are linking to your site.

In your notebook or spreadsheet, or whatever you're using to keep track of all this information, jot down the number of your website's backlinks. This is your baseline for your backlinks.

4) Check your ranking for your keywords.

This sounds like it might be technical, but it's not! It's soooo easy–just type your keyword or keyword phrase in the Google search box.

Where does your site come up in the results pages?

Are you at #5, #25, #357 or something else?

Whatever your ranking is, jot down that number. This is your keywords baseline. Repeat this process for all your keyword phrases and make a note of your rankings.

Oh, and what if you can't find your website in the results listings?

Don't fret!

Everyone has to start somewhere, and remember that even the #1 site on the search results pages at one time wasn't visible ranked at all! You are just starting out–you don't have ranking yet or perhaps you're so low on the ranking that you're not even listed.

This is fine–you're starting to market your website at least–just make a note saying that you're unranked. You're about to change that!

5) Check your PageRank (click that link if you're not sure what PageRank is).

It also isn't hard to check what your website's PageRank is–just install the free Google Tool Bar found at http://www.toolbar.google.com

When you install that tool bar, you'll be able to see what your web page's PageRank is by looking at the PageRank bar (it will turn green when your web page has PageRank). Hover your cursor over the PageRank bar and you'll see a message similar to this:

"PageRank is Google's view of the importance of this page (5/10)".

In this example, the web page has a PageRank of 5– when they say 5/10, they mean that it has a PageRank of 5 out of a possible 10. Zero is the lowest and 10 is the highest. (We are all aiming for a 10, but it will take a while to achieve that!)

So, look up your PageRank and jot that number down in your stats tracking journal. This is your PageRank baseline.

If your web page doesn't have PageRank yet the bar will be clear, and the message will say "No PageRank information available"

If that's the case, no worries. This probably means that your site is brand spankin' new, and you're doing a great thing by starting an article marketing campaign!

Diversifying Your Eggs

As you can see, there are several ways that you can measure results when you start your article marketing campaign–if you become super focused on any one aspect to the exclusion of the others you will end up with a distorted view of your results, and you'll get an "all eggs in one basket" effect.

When measuring our online marketing results we want to diversify our eggs–have several avenues for measuring results. Why?

Well, search engines are in a constant state of flux, so one area may be going great while another area is at a momentary stand still or has even taken a few steps back.

Just to give you an idea of what you can expect as you're trying to build traffic and links to your website (and this is true whether you're using article marketing or some other marketing tool):

A Day In The Life Of A Website Owner

You check your stats and notice that your PageRank has increased .

Then on the same day you notice that you've moved down a couple notches in the search results for one of your keyword terms .

But your traffic has increased.

Oh, but there is not a noticeable difference in the amount of sales you're making on your site

Now, you can see that if you were only looking at one of these stats that you wouldn't be getting the whole picture. This is why I measure several areas, because you won't necessarily be seeing results for each of these areas at the same time.

I always advise people that when you're starting your article marketing campaign to commit to it for at least 4 months. Submit your articles on a regular schedule, be consistent month after month after month.

Check your stats each month if you like, or just check them again at the end of 4 months. I do check my stats every month, but I don't expect to see results for several months when I'm starting a new article marketing campaign.

The Internet is no doubt a powerful tool to market all sorts of products and services. When you have something to market and sell, the Internet can directly put you in touch with your potential buyers. And one low cost and effective way to do this is by setting up an email marketing campaign.

With email being free and easy to setup, many companies are now using it to contact their customers directly to inform them about new products. An email marketing campaign is a great way to deliver a message directly to your consumers and not have it filtered through other mediums. This is one of the best ways to not only promote your products and services but also spread the word about your business.

Email marketing can take a great many forms as well. You will be able to send out company newsletters, invitations, and just informational emails to those that are on your email marketing list. Emails are fast and efficient for many companies to spread the word about their new products or services to those that are interested in them.

When you launch a product or a service, it is only natural for you to be greatly concerned about the way that your market is going to react. Your business’ success, after all, depends on your customers’ positive reactions to the new product that you are offering.

As you surely know, every business must allocate a significant portion of its budget for its marketing efforts. This is also a reason to cause you some worry as it may be difficult to gauge the effectiveness of your various marketing campaigns.

When you are very concerned about the marketing campaign that you are using, there are more than a few marketing services that will help to alleviate some of your concerns. The email marketing service that you use can give you a head start on the campaign to start your business off on the right track. If you wish to ease some of your worries, you should consider hiring a professional service that will handle your email marketing campaign.

When you avail of an email marketing company’s services, you can rest assured that they are developing a strong plan to promote your products. You are taking advantage of their experience and expertise. With a reputable email marketing company on your side, you can be free to focus your efforts on the other aspects of your business.

Using an email marketing company can be a great way to build up relationships with your customers as well. They can help keep you in touch with your valuable customers regularly. Constant interaction with your customers will engender loyalty and help to keep them from buying products from your competitors instead of from you. Your loyal customers are the backbone of your business and you must not neglect them. This is the way that you can keep your business going strong for many years down the road.