Guide to make money online!

The most common reason why articles are declined by publishers is that the article is considered “promotional” or self-serving.

What is a promotional article and how can you submit articles that have the greatest chance of being accepted by publishers?

It helps to know that the purpose of the articles used in Article Marketing is first and foremost to educate and inform, and not to promote yourself, your website, your products or your business. The information conveyed in your article should be for the benefit of your readers and not written with the intention of making sales for your products.

Here’s where the confusion comes in–the reason why people love article marketing is that it’s a great tool for driving traffic to a website which in turn can increase sales. So, the reason why you started submitting articles may have been to increase sales, grow your customer base, or simply get people to visit your website.

This does not, however, mean that you would use the article body to accomplish these goals. To increase website traffic you do not need to say anything about your website in the article itself.

Article marketing is more subtle than that–increasing traffic to a site is an inherent side effect of submitting articles:

You submit an article to an article directory, then website owners see your article, like it, and decide to reprint it on their websites. Each time your article is republished, your resource box containing a link to your site is also republished. This builds links, and an increase in links can elevate your search engine ranking. An increased search engine ranking for your major keywords can of course build traffic dramatically for the long-term.

So, what causes traffic to build is the accumulation of links, rather than a direct plea in the article body for the reader to do something to benefit you.

Always, always, always–your article body should contain information designed to inform and educate the reader. The appropriate place to toot your own horn and talk about your website and products is your resource box–that is the author bio box that sits below your article.

In order to give your article the greatest chance of being attractive to most publishers, you need to remove any impression that your article is written for the purpose of making a sale or drawing readers to your website (remember–save that type of info for your resource box).

Here are 5 things that make an article look promotional (self-serving):

1. The article has a sales slant to it.
2. The article is about a product that you’re selling on your website.
3. The article uses hyped up language, like what you would see in an advertisement.
4. The article tries to get readers to go to your website. (The resource box is the right place to try to get folks to visit your website.)
5. The article is about you and how wonderful you are. (Remember, save that type of info for the resource box.)

If you are having trouble getting out of the “promotional article” mindset, try thinking of yourself as a teacher rather than a sales person.

A teacher provides information that educates and informs.

A sales person presents information with the intention of getting a person to buy a product.

Even if your website sells products, you still need to approach your articles from the perspective of a teacher.

This isn’t to say that your articles shouldn’t be on the topic of your website–your articles should always be on the same topic as your website, but they should not be about specific products that you’re selling on your site.

For example, if your business is Lizzie’s Gourmet Chocolates, an appropriate article topic would be anything having to do with gourmet chocolate or chocolate in general, but it’s best not to write articles about your specific brand of chocolate.

So, that would be NO to an article called “Why Lizzie’s Gourmet Chocolates Taste Best”, and YES to an article called “10 Ways To Tell If Your Chocolate Is High Quality”.

As long as you’re writing articles, why not craft them in a way that maximizes the number of publishers who will accept your article?

The more publishers who reprint your article, the more backlinks you’ll receive. The more backlinks you receive, the bigger impact on your search engine rankings. A higher ranking in Google is what you’re after–that is what will bring the increase in traffic (and sales!) that you’re looking for.

Search engine optimization also known by the acronym SEO is comprised of multiple facets. SEO is not a linear process, but rather a holistic evolution involving intricate layers, steps and cumulative stages which are equally as delicate as they are demanding to perfect.
However, there are fundamental SEO guidelines one can use to incorporate granular changes to improve coherence, functionality and visibility of a website by working in tandem with the metrics that search engines deem worthy and therefore reward with a higher relevance / optimization score.

On the contrary, if you deliberately or inadvertently neglect any one of the necessary characteristics of fine-tuning, then your pages could fall short of their goal which is to find the most suitable audience by way of reaching the most coveted top 10 spots for the contents primary keywords.

Rather than butchering coherence after the fact in an attempt to make a square peg fit in a round hole by editing content, links or the architecture of your website. It is better to start with the SEO goal in mind and building the platform to support it vs. just altering aspects of each after the fact.

With initiating any SEO campaign, you should give credence to:

Understanding your competition - There is a reason why the top 10 spots are occupied, take a look for consistencies so you can emulate certain characteristics if your website lacks them.

Determining the Gap - Determining the gap implies removing the obstacles between you and your objective. Time is the obvious ranking factor; hence, someone online for 5 years in a niche who has achieved keyword saturation and authority has an easier time maintaining visibility compared to a new website (who has not achieved a suitable reputation through peer review).

Before you just build links, your traffic and engagement for the site must be commensurate in order to get past algorithmic filters which can determine things like (1) link clusters from building links in automation (2) the ratio of inbound links to outbound links (3) engagement time / bounce rate factor (which are a metric of satisfaction and relevance) and (4) if there are other supporting topical areas within the site that concentrate internal links, subjects or landing pages to support a more competitive rankings.

Building Internal Authority - Authority is the objective; rankings are merely a side-effect (not the goal). With this in mind, it is more about acquiring a stake in market share that unmistakably positions your website in front of any search which corresponds to any of the terms, keywords or topics covered in your title, content or tags. The more authority a website has, the easier it is to rank for more keywords with less effort.

Gaining Validation from Citation and Peer Review - You can have the greatest website online, but without co-occurrence and other websites referencing your pages, it is merely conjecture. Granted, your website can eventually acquire authority in and of itself, but links from other related sites or websites already ranking for the keywords you are targeting are the fastest way to expedite the process of creating a site that is less dependent on external sources for validation and rankings.

Managing User Expectations - Since no two people think or search alike, you will need an array of landing pages to help direct them to the ultimate conversion objective. The wild card in this equation is the mood of the surfer. Landing pages are all about getting the right person in the right mindset to read the right message. If you can accomplish that with your SEO, there is virtually no limit to increasing user engagement (which is getting them to take the desired action).

Landing Pages are your websites means to an end, they are what keep you in business. With a landing page tailored to a specific array of keywords, the more relevance you can create between what a searcher expects and what a searcher discovers, the higher conversion rate your site will experience.

Landing Page Conversion - The first step in creating a successful online presence is having a page worthy of conversion. Conversion implying that it performs a specific function (sign up for a free download, sign up for a newsletter, subscribe to an RSS feed, purchase a produce, inquire about a service, etc.).

Instead of hemorrhaging user intent or overwhelming users with too many choices, the more refined and focused your value proposition is, the more likely it is that users will engage it. The key behind landing pages are (1) make it clear to the visitor what the VALUE IS TO THEM for engaging the offer, not just to your business and (2) if you have to go back and read anything twice or if a 4th grader cannot understand the offer, then it’s probably too complex.

SEO delivers traffic, but the strength of your offer is what determines if people shop at your website and proceed to checkout or if they move on and use your site like a doormat for the next search result, which is more honed to their mental map of what they consider a superb offer.

The tasks and responsibilities of an SEO company is simple (1) fill the gap with relevant content (2) salvage the existing elements that are conducive to optimization (3) build off page reputation from link building and promotion and most of all (4) fine tune the on page elements that aid conversion until a suitable conversion rate exists.

For those offering SEO services that offer anything less is just theory. The bottom line is, SEO is about results, not just temporal rankings. So, as long as you stick to fundamental guidelines that are not dependent on fickle appearances or tricks but rather real content and real substance, changes in algorithms are the least of your concern, it’s only a matter of producing enough content, links or popularity to cross the tipping point.

I love blogging, but if you’re anything like me, then you find it hard to really grow your blog quickly. One of the main challenges is to be able to add new content to your blog on a consistent basis.

Lately, however, I found a very efficient technique that can be used for this purpose.
Basically it takes one piece of content and turns it into three. You distribute it through the three major avenues of content consumption; textual, audio, and video.
How It Works

Step 1: Twenty Minute Live Ustream Show
I’ve found that my readers love jumping on a live video with me over at Ustream. It’s so much more interactive and for me it’s great because it’s easier then writing. I just come up with a topic related to what I blog about and then talk about it for twenty minutes.

Then during the show they can ask whatever questions they want in the chat box. Which I make sure to answer as I’m going about talking about our topic. The whole time though I’ve got my other computer (or a handheld, a digital recorder) recording my audio during the live stream.

Step 2: Turn Your Audio Into A Podcast
Once you’ve captured that audio from your live stream it’s pretty easy to submit it to any or all of the podcast directories. Then once you have an RSS stream for your audio you can submit to iTunes.

Now if you keep this system consistent people will start to follow along. For example I make sure to do my live stream every Tuesday. Once people know they can count on you to be there they’ll start taking the time out of their day to schedule in your shows.

At this point you’ve now got a weekly live stream and a weekly podcast. Now you just get that audio transcribed and you’ve got an extra blog post.

Step 3: Transcribe Audio Into Article
I have full time writers on staff, but before that I used to use Scriptlance.com or CastingWords.com to get my audio transcribed. It doesn’t cost much if the audio isn’t too long, and there are lots of ways to use that article once you have it in print.

You can turn those transcribed articles into articles that you submit to article directories, blog posts on your blog, Squidoo lenses, or an email newsletter.

Now you’ve got three content streams out there for people to start picking you up. You’ve really not done much more work either but now you can take advantage of multiple content distribution platforms. Not only do you increase your exposure but now your brand is getting bigger too.

When you brand gets bigger more people tend to start subscribing to hear what you have to say, because branding is credibility.

I don’t have enough time to get into everything you can do with all this new content, but if you get creative there is much more. For example downloading your Ustream videos and then uploading them to video sharing sites. Or now that you have multiple streams of content you can pull in more advertisers for each new content stream… And everyone lies “mo money!”