EzSEO Newsletter # 110

February 12, 2006 by Andy

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Andy Williams ez SEO

ez-search-engine-optimization.com

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This week:

1. Building Affiliate Sites – Miniseries Part XXII

Hi again.

Thanks for those who voted or wrote a review at:

Best Ezines

It is much appreciated.

Today, time is a little short as I have friends over for lunch in a few hours. I have had to limit this newsletter to the mini-series only. However, this is the part of the miniseries where you can start building traffic to your site, so is well worth your full attention. The next few weeks should be exciting times for your site.

Incidentally, I bought myself a new toy this week (as my wife keeps telling me I need to take more time off to unwind). Its a Sony PSP, and I am looking for some good games. Anyone got recommendations? BTW this is a great toy, if like me, you go shopping for groceries and spend most of your time waiting for your other half to emerge from the shoe shops, clothes shops etc etc ;o)

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1. Building Affiliate Sites – Miniseries Part XXII
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If you have been following this course so far, you will have:

a) identified your niche and checked for profitability
b) carried out your keyword research at Wordtracker.
c) sent yourself your keyword research from Wordtracker.
d) selected several phrases to use as main page keywords.
e) selected suitable phrases to be used for article pages.
f) learnt how to theme pages. You should use this information to begin collecting themed keywords for your planned pages.
g) seen how main pages differ from article pages, and understood how these differences dictate how the pages are created.
h) seen how selling differs from pre-selling, and learnt one way to sketch out a blueprint of your pre-selling content.
i) looked at a top selling sales page, and dissected out the various pre-selling techniques highlighted by the “pre-selling blueprint questions”.
j) looked at two models for building main sales pages.
k) looked at how to write articles, and learnt a simple “Value Test” you can use to decide if your article is good enough.
l) Found a suitable web host, domain name and web editor.
m) Looked at links, and understand that some links will server you better than others.
n) Seen how Page Rank can be passed onto other pages, and also that the Google toolbar is not accurate.
o) Seen that links in to a page are a vote for that page, and that the link text used on incoming links, gives your page some reputation for that term. The more incoming links with that term, the higher the reputation.
p) Seen how tracking your visitors can give you a lot of useful information, and chosen a stats script for your own site (if your host does not provide one).
q) Seen how to create a useful links page that can act as a resource for your visitors, and looked at one way to automate this page.
r) Seen that putting Adsense ads on all pages is not usually the best strategy for maximum profits.
s) Seen how owning your own products can be fun, as well as help avoid the thin affiliate label. Most of all, it can be very lucrative.
t) Seen how to use the nofollow tag to block Search engines from certain pages, as well as the importance of getting quality links to your pages (both internal and homepage).
u) Seen how to add content to your site for maximum impact, and looked at a tool that can do this for you.

If you missed any of these newsletters, you can read them online here at my blog:

This mini course begins in issue #89 and continues to the latest post in the blog.

Text week we’ll start on the most important part of creating a pr0fitable site – off-page factors. These are the factors that will build traffic to your site.

Let’s start with Article Distribution.

Article distribution is a technique that a few people have used for many years to build traffic to their websites. In the last year or so, that technique has been sold in eBooks and software to the masses, turning what used to be a secret guru strategy, into an over-used and abused traffic generation system.

In the past, a lot of traffic-generation systems that became popular with the webmasters, soon became a target of the search engine. Its not that search engines have anything against you and your desire to make a living online, it is just that they want their search results to show quality content, that is visitor friendly and genuinely informative and unique.

There are a few notable traffic generating systems that have dies horrible deaths at the search engines, probably most well-known is Traffic Equalizer (and clones).

Did you know that link exchanges are also being targeted? From looking at my own websites, I don’t think reciprocal links from highly related sites are suffering the same fate as unrelated site links, but that may just be a matter of time. I anticipate that the future is bleak for all reciprocal links. For that reason, you really should be turning your attention to one-way (or non-reciprocal links).

Earlier in this mini-series I told you that I don’t bother with reciprocal links at all any more. I do have some on my sites, but they all come from other webmasters asking me for a link, not the other way around. If that webmaster’s site passes my criteria (again, see the earlier parts of the mini-series) I will accept the reciprocal link. My link page script keeps an eye on them for me, so I can tell if they remove the link, or indeed if there site is penalised with a PR 0. I can quickly disable those links before they cause me any problems.

So, can article distribution help, and for how long will this technique work if it is being abused?

At the moment, article distribution works, and works well. If done properly, it can drive targeted traffic to your site when visitors click on your resource box link at the end of your article. That visitor comes from another website, not the search engine.

Notice one thing about what I said in the last paragraph, as this is very important:

“..click on your resource box link at the end of your article”

That’s right. The link back to your site (which can bring you traffic), is at the end of your article. So, who will click that link? Well, the people who will potentially click that link are

* Those that read your entire article *

Now, of those that read your full article, which will click the link to visit your site?

Well, that is a difficult question to answer, so let’s put it another way.

How can we get people to read our article and click the link to our site?

1. Make the article interesting to the visitor. Tell them something new.

2. Make the visitor want more of your information.

3. Make it clear what you can offer them.

OK, now we are getting somewhere. The first point means we have to write stimulating, unique content. This is something I have been talking about in this newsletter for a very long time, so should not come as a shock.

NOTE: If you are getting ghost writers to create your articles, try to force that writer down a specific path. Telling an author to write an article on “blue widgets” will usually end up as some sort of keyword focused search engine spider food, not a genuinely informative article on blue widgets.

e.g. I like to send my ghost writers a list of questions about the topic, and ask them to write the article in answer to those question. I go to Wordtracker to do my research, but make sure I use words like “how”, “which”, “what” etc, in combination with my main phrase. Once I have collected my phrases for a niche, I often have 3 – 4000 phrases. With my favourite keyword tool (KRA-WT).

I can quickly filter out the phrases that will work best for these articles, plus find secondaries for each phrase that will work to theme the page.

My authors are then sent the questions, plus a handful of secondaries to work into the article where appropriate. My brief to the author is simple. Write an article that answers the question, using as many of the secondary words as you can, while making the article read naturally. Put the questions as the title of the article, and work that question into the body of the article near the beginning. That’s it. No mention of keyword densities, not complicated keyword usage formulas that some other marketers teach. When you find the right authors, you know that your content will be useful, unique and informative.

The real key here is knowing that the question your article answers, is a question that people do ask when searching for information. You give your visitor the information they need, which in turn is likely to lead them to wanting more of your information.

OK, back to our three points. We have kind of answered the second point already, but we can do more. The resource box at the end of your article can make or break a potential visitor into clicking. Offer them something in the resource box. This can include:

* a link to your “active” forum where people are discussing this and other related information.
* a link to your newsletter where you provide them with further information on the topic
* a link to a fr.ee mini-series
* a link to a free report on the subject. I like to force the visitor to sign up for a newsletter before they can download the report, so that I get their email address. I only use double opt-in here, as it safe-guards me against people reporting me for spam. As long as your newsletter is the same quality as your initial article, you should keep hold of that visitor on your list for a very long time.
* a link to another “must-read” article on the subject (and your article can lead the visitor into this by making it only part of the story).
* and whatever else you can think of to get the click.

OK. so you have your articles. Where do you submit them?

Well, there are a few options here. Today we will look at just two of those options.

1. Article Directories.

There are a number of quality directories where you can submit your articles. My personal favourite is ezinearticles.com. This one site is responsible for a lot of traffic to my sites. If you only submit to one directory, submit it here.

I have been playing with some software called Article Dashboard which is fre-e.

You can get it here if you are interested:

Article Dashboard

This software makes it easy for you to setup your own article directory. I setup a directory a few months ago and forgot about it. I had not even finished editing templates, so the directory has some dead end pages I need to fix. However, to my amazement, I went back to check the directory the other day, and found that over 100 authors had signed up to submit content to the directory. There were also 30 or 40 articles waiting approval. I have been getting articles trickling in ever since, and I checked again this morning and have another 20 or so to approve. This is without any promotion of my site. Incidentally, if you want to submit some articles to my directory, you can do so at:

BiblioTekk

The site will improve in the coming months (including working on the templates I have not yet touched). In return for submitting your content, you will get links back to your sites in your resource box. These links pass PR and link reputation, so your sites will benefit. As the PR of the article site grows, so will the value of those links back to your site.

To get articles distributed far and wide, I use a tool called Article Announcer. This tool is very expensive, but does the job well.

The value of distributing articles in this manner reach far beyond just the backlinks you get and the traffic you receive from the article directory. You see, other webmasters pick up your content, and publish it on their own sites, giving your article even more exposure, and your site even more backlinks, and traffic.

In addition to article directories, you can also submit your articles to other webmasters.

2. Submission to webmasters.

I have found a method that works very well and gets a good response.

* Find 100% related sites that do have articles published on the site.
* Write quality content for that site (I only submit the articles to one site, and don’t even have a copy on my own site).
* Submit several articles to that webmaster using Content Publisher “packages”. I take a page from the other site, and create a template for Content Publisher that matches my target site. I send the package to the other webmaster as a download URL (don’t attach the package to an email as these often get filtered out by Spam filters, and it can also annoy the other webmaster), and tell them about the content and how to publish it on their site. I also stress that this content will only be published on one site. If they are not interested, I repeat the process for another site.

I usually end up with a batch of articles published on another “high-profile” site. These articles nearly always bring in good traffic to my site.

OK, so what are these “packages” I mentioned?

Well, I will let you download one in a minute, but first, let me explain how it works.

In Content Publisher, I create a project of around 10 articles.

Content Publisher then packages these up for me in a distribution file.

The other webmaster just needs to run the distribution file, and all articles are published to web page that match the exact look and feel of the target site. In addition, the program also creates an article map for these articles. All the other webmaster has to do is upload the files produced, and link to the article map. Viola, I have articles published on another site with links pointing back to mine, and the other webmaster has 10 new unique articles on his/her site that wont be found anywhere else on the internet. It is a win-win situation, and it only takes a couple of minutes for the other webmaster to get this new content live on their site.

OK, if you want to see what one of these distribution packages look like (it contains only a basic template, but you can get the idea of how it works), you can download it here:

Content Publisher Distributor Demo

I find that once you can identify a few sites that are willing to publish your content, you can keep sending them more content, and they are happy to publish it.

EzSEO Newsletter # 110

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