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"The Diary of an Online Business Professional"
Website Promotion Blogby Lee Gilbert |
Latest Posts
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Are You Getting The Most Out Of Your Article Marketing Efforts?
Most Internet Marketers understand the importance of article marketing as a means of creating valuable backlinks to their sites. And most of them also do a pretty good job of either writing those articles or having someone else write them. But today I'd like to talk to you about where you're submitting your articles because that's one of the most important steps in article marketing.
How Much Are Those Backlinks Worth?
A lot of marketers believe that the more directories they submit to the more backlinks they'll get and that's true to a certain degree. It only makes sense that, if you have 2 links back to your site in your resource box and you submit your article to one directory, then you're only going to get 2 backlinks. So if you want 200 backlinks then all you need to do is submit you article to 100 different directories.
But once you start submitting to more than the first 5 or 6 high ranking directories, like Ezine and GoArticles, etc, those backlinks that you're creating start to lose value. When you use an article submission program or service, and they tell you they'll get you thousands of backlinks from just one article, that sounds pretty good, until you start considering where those backlinks are coming from.
First of all, most of those submissions services only submit to 2 or 3 or the high PR directories. The other 1994 backlinks are going to come from places like joesarticles.com and mylistofrubbish.net. Your article may very well be posted on one of those sites but who's going to see it? Most people, when they're searching for articles go to the high PR sites first to find what they're looking for. And if they're doing a Google search for an article, the higher PR sites are going to be the ones they get back in their search results, not those little directories that no one has ever heard of.
Now I'm not saying that you shouldn't go after as many backlinks as possible, but if you're spending extra time spinning an article a few hundred times so you can continue to submit to these unknown directories then you need to look at what kind of return your getting for your investment of time.
It's nice to have 2 or 3 thousand backlinks coming into your site but Google and the other search engines also look at where those backlinks are coming from and when they see them coming from those unkown directories they don't really give them that much weight meaning, after you reach a certain number of backlinks they no longer have any effect on your rankings.
If you're spending a lot of time or money on article marketing then you really should be looking at your stats to see where the bulk of your traffic is coming from and see if the extra money you're paying for a submission service and the extra time you're spending spinning is really worth it.
What's The Alternative?
Start consistently submitting articles to EzineArticles or eHow or GoArticles. If you use a submission service or a program, check to see what directories they're submitting to. Chances are, they're either submitting to thousands of unknown directories or they're submitting to the top 5 or 6. But they very seldom do both. Which means if you switch submission services regularly you're not consistently submitting to the higher PR sites.
You need to establish a presence on these higher ranking sites because any backlinks you develop at those unknown directories can be easily beat by your competition. All they have to do is publish their article at Ezine or GoAriticles and yours is instantly bumped down the page. And if they publish enough, yours will disappear completely. You might have 2,000 backlinks pointing at your sales page but if they're all on the second page of Google and back no one is going to see them.
Become The Authority On Your Niche
Those who are most successful with article marketing consistently publish to the same directories over and over again until they've built up a backlog of articles in their niche. If you're using a service that just sends your article out willy nilly, you have no idea where it's going to end up or if it's even going to be accepted. But if you focus your efforts on just a few quality directories then you'll be able to edit your articles and improve your content until you know they'll be accepted every time. And once that starts happening people will see the quantity of articles and the quality of your content and you'll become the authority on that topic.
Another Benefit Of Article Marketing
We all look at article marketing as a way to develop backlinks but you can also use it as a source of additional income. For example, eHow is one of the higer ranking article directories and it's very easy to write and article and have it accepted there. And eHow, like most directories, makes it's money off of the advertising they have on site. But they also share that income with the people who write the articles. And some people make a very good living off of doing nothing but submitting How-To articles all day. You can get more information about eHow's Writer's Compensation Program here.
But think about it, what if you were to have a whole series of How-To articles, relating to your niche, published on one directory, like eHow. Most directories have an index somewhere on the page that lists the author's other articles. If someone liked the article they were reading and then saw that you had a few dozen more, they'd think you must really be the authority in your niche. And of course, you'll have links back to your site in your resource box.
And when you're articles are on a site like eHow, who pays you a share of their earnings, if the reader doesn't click on the link in your resource box, chances are they're going to click on that Adsense link when they leave the page. So now you not only have 2 backlinks to your site in that article, but you're also earning additional income with it. Imagine if you have a couple of hundred articles out there.
Another site that pays you to submit your articles is Xomba.com. The great thing about Xomba is that it's like blogging. Your posts only have to be 150 words long. Of course, you can make them longer if you choose, or you can just post more often. Xomba is another site that pays you a portion of their ad revenue and you can also include affiliate links in your articles.
When you publish to sites like eHow.com and Xomba.com, and several others, you're getting all the benefits of article marketing – you're getting the backlinks to your site that will help with your traffic and rankings and you're setting yourself up as an authority in your niche. But you have the added benefit of earning money with your articles. Money that you could use to pay for that article submission service you've been using every month!
How To Get More Followers On Twitter
Several people have asked me lately how they can get more followers on Twitter. They realize that Twitter is a great source for getting traffic back to their blog but they haven't had much success in growing their number of followers. And like anything else related to blogging and traffic generation, when they ask me how to get more followers on Twitter, I have some questions for THEM.
How Many Followers Do You Want?
Yes, we all know Ashton Kutcher was the first person to have over 1 million Twitter Followers and we all know someone who has 20,000 followers or 150,000 followers. So you think the measly little 1 or 2 thousand followers who are listening to your Tweets aren't nearly enough to do you or your website any good.
Sending traffic to your blog is just like sending traffic from anywhere else on the web. It doesn't really matter how many people you send, it's the quality of the traffic and the quality of the content on your blog. For example, if your blog is about Gardening but your Twitter followers are coming to your website because they like what you had to say about March Madness then of course none of them are going to buy your gardening book. They're all there because they thought you were talking about basketball.
On Twitter your first concern should be that the right people are following you, not how many of them there are. You want targeted followers. And to do that you have to be very careful about who YOU follow. Twitter is a social site and when someone starts following you it's considered polite to follow them back. So if you just go in and start following random people, then random people will be following you.
You want to use the search feature and look for people who are interested in the same niche that you're trying to promote. Then, when you follow them they'll follow you back. And the people who are following them will also start following you and you can follow them back. But it all starts with YOU and you have to follow carefully. For this reason you should also set up a separate Twitter account for each of your blogs so you can keep your followers separate.
Are Your Followers Listening To Your Tweets?
Are the Followers that you do have listening to your Tweets? Are you generating any traffic from your current followers? Just because you have 1000 Followers doesn't mean that every time you send out a Tweet 1000 people are going to rush to your blog. A lot of those Followers may live in a different time zone than you and when they are online they may not spend every minute watching their Tweets. So before you start worrying, look at your tracking statistics and see where your traffic is coming from.
If they are following your Tweets, maybe it's your content. If you're sending them to a sales page maybe it needs to be rewritten for better conversions. Or maybe it's just not something your Followers are interested in. But the first thing you need to do is find out if they're following your Tweets at all.
What Are You Tweeting About?
My next question is probably the most important. What are you Tweeting about? This is the biggest mistake I see. I have several Twitter accounts of my own so I know what types of Tweets internet marketers send out.
You first start off with some ridiculous motivational quote for the day. Something about sunshine and lollipops. And then you follow it up with a link to your sales page. Then you Tweet some inane joke or another ridiculous motivational quote. And follow it up with another link. Then you send out 7 or 8 ridiculous motivational quotes in a row, all spaced 3 minutes apart...and follow it up with a link. And then I don't hear from you for the rest of the day.
Twitter is a social site. Which means people go there to socialize. Not to trade inane, worn out motivational quotes. They want to chat and gossip and trade basketball scores and talk about the latest movie or current celebrity gossip.
In fact, you can tell exactly what everybody on Twitter wants to talk about by looking over on the right where it says “Trending”. Those are the current hot topics on Twitter. I look at those topics all the time and have been for months now. And not once have I ever seen the topic “Motivational Quotes”. Why would you think that a tired, worn out motivational quote would give me reason to pause and go check out your blog? If I sent you a motivational quote every fifteen minutes for a week would you be tempted to go buy something from MY blog?
How Often Are You Tweeting?
Are you Tweeting regularly or do you get to it when you think of it – say every four or five days or so? Either way, it's fine but it will have an affect on your traffic. Your Followers won't mind if you only Tweet every 5 days. Everybody has a job and a life to tend to and people don't expect you to hang out on Twitter 24 hours a day. But just be aware that the more often and regularly you Tweet the more Followers you'll get and the more traffic you'll see at your blog.
Schedule Your Tweets
To be more consistent in your Tweeting, and to provide better quality Tweets, try scheduling your Tweets just like you schedule your blog posts. When you schedule your Tweets, obviously you can Tweet all day long whether you're on Twitter or not.
But you'll also have more time to put together quality Tweets that will engage your Followers and show that you're actually listening to them. After a while, I unfollow people who send me nothing but motivational Tweets because I assume they don't really care if my day is full of sunshine and lollipops or not. They just want to make sure I hang around and click on their links.
I believe there are a few Wordpress plugins that can handle this but the ones that I've tried have been mediocre at best. I've finally settled on SocialOomph to handle all my Tweets and keep them organized and on schedule. They have a free account option that will let you schedule Tweets for the day but if you go with the paid version you can schedule all of your Tweets to all of your Twitter accounts out into eternity if you want to.
Now that doesn't mean that I do. I generally schedule my Tweets for the week and I leave breaks in the schedule so I can go in and manually Tweet about the day's relevant topics and participate in the conversations. This lets my followers know that I really am there, I really am listening and I'm not just using an autoposter.
SocialOomph has several other features like allowing you to post to your Facebook account and tracking of your statistics. It also has a feature that will automatically follow and unfollow people and you can set keywords to target those people. Twitter is a brilliant marketing tool and if you're really interested in using it then you should do it right, using SocialOomph to schedule and organize your Tweets. |