Month: July 2007

The Power of a Dollar site was down late last week, due to exceeding their bandwidth. It’s back up now, with a modified plan in place.

They’ve taken the concerns some members have had about the problems of filling up lower levels of the matrix (I posted my analysis on their forum) and adjusted their plan quite a bit.

You can now participate in the traffic exchange for free, or as a paid member. This is typical for traffic exchanges, and their $11 a month for pro membership is on the inexpensive side for most exchanges.

As a free member, you surf your three sites a day and get your site reviewed once in return. They have a set of review questions reviewers must answer, including one you specify yourself. The value of this cannot be stressed enough, since in typical traffic exchanges you have a couple of seconds to catch the surfer’s attention. In this one, they read your site looking for the answer to your review question.

As a paid member, you also surf your three sites a day and get your site reviewed once in return. You get some bonus credits, too, like most pro traffic exchange memberships. After you surf your three sites, you can get a better surfing ratio on additional sites you want to surf.

Both free and paid members get paid commissions on the upgrade fees of their personally referred members (50% for free members, 70% for pro members). You also get paid commissions on various recommended products the traffic exchange features (one per month, 30% for free members, 60% for pro members). These are nice commissions for free members, compared to other exchanges.

The matrix is gone. You have personally referred members, and that’s it. You earn based on the activity of your personally referred members. Anyone who joins the site without a referrer is placed randomly under a pro member.

This change is definitely for the better for The Power of a Dollar. They’ve focused on making a great traffic exchange, and not on building a matrix by earning new positions through surfing. Yet the earnings potential is still there, by referring other members to the exchange.

The traffic exchange should launch in the next week or so, at which point you’ll be able to start having your site reviewed. At first, only free memberships will be available. You can upgrade to pro when that becomes available if you wish, after you’ve had time to try it out for free.

Click here to signup.

At this point in the article marketing series, we’ve pretty much done it all.

If you’ve followed the steps in the previous articles, you’ve generated over a dozen articles promoting your landing page or mini-site and posted them to an article directory. Over time, those articles will get picked up by search engines and you’ll begin to have multiple positions in search engine results that lead to your site. You’ll also have increased the search engine results positioning of your site through the anchor text linking to it in the articles.

What else can you do to maximize your results?

The last step is to write more articles, but this time use a pen name. EzineArticles.com allows you to setup multiple author names in one account. This can be used for pen names, or for authors you are managing. Creating a couple of pen names can help to lend credibility to your articles.

Look at it from the point of view of a typical web searcher. They type a search phrase into Google, and see an article or two come up in the results. All those articles are written by the same person. This does a lot for branding you as an expert, but they may also wonder why nobody else is linking to the same site if it’s any good.

If you’ve created a couple of pen names and written similar articles linking to your site, now a web searcher will see that multiple people are recommending the same site. This can create the perception of authority for the site itself, as opposed to branding you as an expert.

It’s a trade-off, and you’ll have to decide which is the right way for you to go.

When using a pen name, try to not write the same article you wrote under your own name. Write a different sort of article, give it a different style of writing, a different voice. The intent here isn’t to deceive the reader, but to provide the same information in multiple styles, so that you can maximize your chances of building a rapport with whoever your reader happens to be.

Above, all, the key to successful article marketing is the quantity of articles you write, and how widely distributed they are. While EzineArticles.com is the premiere article directory, you shouldn’t submit all of your articles to them. Spread the articles around to different article directories, including ones that regularly get picked up by various ezines and newsletters.

Think of article marketing less like writing a well-crafted love letter, and more like dropping ten thousand leaflets from a plane.

When using article marketing, we can turn the old saying on its head.

Quantity is definitely better than quality here.

We have to carefully choose the topics of our articles to be most effective. We saw in the last post how to write the article, and now we’ll look at how to choose the topic of each article.

The overall topic of all our articles is determined by the product we want to promote. Let’s say that we wanted to promote a product for watching satellite TV on a PC. That’s the overall topic. In that broad topic, though, are lots of more detailed sub-topics.

We’re primarily interested in sub-topics that other people care about, so we’re going to do basic keyword research. We can go to Overture’s keyword tool to do some brainstorming. We could start by seeing what suggestions it made for the overall topic, “how to watch satellite tv on a pc”.

Unfortunately, Overture is fairly brain dead when what you put in is a long-tail keyword, so you’ll get back only a few fairly nonsensical results. Instead, type in “satellite tv” to see what suggestions it makes. You end up with dozens of keywords suggestions, ranging from those that get half a million searches a month, to those getting only a couple hundred a month.

We want to look through these keywords and try to pick out ones that could be the basis of an article topic. The following list would serve as a first pass:

• pc satellite tv
• free satellite tv
• satellite service tv
• free pc satellite tv
• guide satellite tv

I only went through the first dozen to pick these out, you’d actually go through the entire list. Note that Overture also mixes word order up, so you would want to reorder words in the above to a phrase that makes sense. The last one would be “satellite tv guide”, for example.

Do another pass, putting each of the possible keywords you picked back into Overture to pick out more possibles. Eventually you want a list of twenty to thirty keywords that can serve as the basis for an article.

Now go out to Google and type in one of the keywords, surrounded by quotes. Pay attention to the total number of results shown. For “satellite tv guide”, it’s 53,200 as I write this.

Our ideal keyword would have 10,000 or fewer results when we search it with quotes around it.

We probably won’t find many that low in the satellite TV niche, so we’d choose the 15 keywords with the lowest number of page results.

Then we write a separate article for each keyword. Each article can have much the same information, but slanted so that it makes sense in the context of the keyword. For example, for “satellite tv guide”, I’d write about how the satellite TV on PC technology provides an easy to use guide to channels.

Each article will, in its about the author box, link to our landing page or mini-site with appropriate anchor text. This gives the landing page SEO benefits, and provides extra spots in search engine results that, effectively, lead to the landing page.

Writing those 15 articles should be done in a couple of days, not weeks. You can submit all of them to the same article directory, or spread them around to different directories. Multiple directories makes the most sense, as you’ll get more chances of taking up multiple spots in search engine results for the same keyword.

In part 5 of the series, we’ll see about the use of pen names to make all of this more effective.

So far we’ve seen what article marketing is good for, and why we need a website for article marketing.

Today we’ll look at the process of writing an article, even if you know nothing about the topic.

What if my article isn’t any good?

First, take a deep breath, relax, and repeat after me…”It doesn’t have to be perfect!”

That’s the biggest lesson to learn when writing articles for article marketing. There are no grades given, nobody to impress, nothing to win. Your articles do not have to be perfect, because the majority of the people reading them write English worse than you do. For many English is not their first language, so they’re happy if you present a topic in a reasonable way. Others have English as a first language, but are still reading at the seventh grade level.

Write simply, and to the point, and don’t worry if it’s a masterpiece.

What if I don’t know anything about the topic?

Most people think you need to know something about a topic before writing an article. And that actually is true, you need to know something about the topic before writing the article, but you don’t have to know anything about the topic before you decide to write the article. The time between deciding to write, and actually writing, can be used to research the topic.

Since you’re writing a short article, you don’t want to read through thick, detailed books for research. In fact, the absolute best place to research for article writing is at article directories. Read what other people have said on the topic, look at the differing opinions, come to your own conclusions and then put it all into your own words.

If you can’t knock out a 500 word article after reading a few other articles on the topic, then use resources like Wikipedia to get more information.

I don’t recommend, though, that you promote a product that you have never used. But once you’ve verified the product works as advertised, you can use other people’s experiences with it as research for your own articles. This saves you a bit of time using the product for weeks to build up your own experiences.

I found lots of great information!

Write down all the ideas you get as you do research on a piece of paper. Then put that paper away and write your article on your original topic only. Do not expand the topic!

Yes, you could neatly tie together several different topics under a broad umbrella, and maybe find a way to monetize each of those topics.

As we’ll see in part 4 of this series, we’ll need all the articles we can write to be effective. So keep each focused, and when possible split topics into separate articles.

Don’t.

Write an article that is focused on a single topic that has a single action that will make you money. Your other ideas you came up with during research will become separate articles. Remember that each article can take up a spot in search engine results. Don’t dilute the effect of that by lumping different topics together under the same article.

I’m the worst offender at this, unfortunately. The winner of the comment contest will need to keep me on track!