Sublime Products » Article Marketing

Tips for writing a better article: Bum Marketing – Part 11

Amin — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 10:37:44 +0000

Resourceful resources

When you’ve written a great article with a killer headline there are a few things left to do to get the most benefit.

Arguably the most important part of your article – or certainly the second most important part after the headline – is your signature, or resource box. You want to get people to your site. That’s kind of the whole point of your article, for most people.

To make sure your resource box gets read you have to make it interesting. Offering something extra that your reader wants is one way of doing that. It could be more information, a free report, an e-course. As long as it’s something that naturally follows on from your article it’s likely to make them curious.

So offer them something that makes them want to visit your site immediately.

Don’t make it hard work for them. I’d recommend you keep the resource box between 3 and 6 lines. And make them count. In general a lot of blurb about yourself is less interesting to your reader than it is to you. I don’t mean to be rude, but most people don’t care too much if you have a special interest in lace-making, they just care how they can solve their own problem! So give them what’s important to them.

Example?

Learn how you can get bumped from coach to First Class when you fly; visit…..

I don’t actually know how you can do that, but if I read an article that promised to tell me how to do it I’d certainly be interested. Which passenger wouldn’t? You could include a little bit of relevant bio if it’s done right, but don’t waste their time with unnecessary detail.

Another example?

Airline pilot of 25 years shows how you can get bumped from coach to First Class when you fly; read how at…..

That’s relevant bio information. Can I show an example that maybe isn’t so good?

John Noname is a respected author with over 20 years of experience. He writes on a variety of topics, including airline travel. Sign up to his newsletter at…

Sorry, but that doesn’t offer me enough to be bothered clicking through. What’s the benefit to me? I get to be on his newsletter? That’s his benefit, not mine.

My own early articles in the self-improvement field didn’t do very well on clickthrough, largely because my resource box was too much like the example shown! I know from personal experience that nobody really cares about my 20+ years’ experience in the self-help and self-improvement field.

As soon as I switched to telling people about the benefits they can receive, results changed. I don’t even mention my name now – nobody seems to care what I’m called. If my name were Tony Robbins then I might make a feature of it, but for most of us who aren’t that famous it probably doesn’t hurt to leave it out. Certainly, you don’t need to make it a big feature.

One other thing you can do, if you are submitting your article to several different sites, is to write a different resource box for each site. Knowing which type of resource box works for your particular niche is a good way of maximizing your returns, but you can only do that if you test different resource boxes. You might even want to have them point to a different landing page, so you get absolute figures.

Naturally, when you find out which type of resource box works best you use it more often. Your clickthrough rates could shoot through the roof if you test, test, test. Don’t forget that your keyword research will tell you the types of ‘anchor text’ you should be using in your resource box, so you should be able to come up with several different resource boxes if you do your research.

To access the password protected posts in this series and receive 3 free gifts sign up to my newsletter on the top right of the screen.

Tips for writing a better article: Bum Marketing – Part 10

Amin — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 16:06:07 +0000

Let other people use your articles on their sites.

An article on your hard disk is worth nothing. An article on a single website is usually worth a bit more, but not that much. An article on hundreds of sites, all pointing to your money site, now that’s worth something.

When you’ve written an article you can submit them to the article sites in the normal way, but you can also allow other people to put them on their sites. You may want to take some time to look around for good quality sites, and then offer to let them use your articles on their site together with your byline. When you add your article to other peoples’ sites you’re getting free advertising on quality sites in your niche. Not every site will take an article, of course, but you’ll never know unless you try and you might be surprised how many webmasters are happy to take quality content.

This will also help get you listed in the search engines because you will have a one-way link and in most cases you can control the ‘anchor text’ used. That means you can use a highly targeted keyword phrase to point to your site. It’s one of the finest ways to get good rankings for a particular search phrase and that’s a powerful way to make money. Just be sure to check out the sites you’re contacting to see if they have a high rank and are listed in the search engines. Plenty of hits don’t hurt, either!

For you and the other site owner this is a win-win situation. They get quality content and you get free 1 way backlinks. If you spend some time every day looking for quality sites to offer your articles to it won’t be long before you’ll get traffic from their site and from the search engines. Your site will rise in the search engine ranks as your links grow. Getting a first page position on Google isn’t impossible, but it does take a little work. The more effort you put into this technique the better you can do.

1 way backlinks are actually a vital part of any good SEO campaign. Unfortunately Google has an annoying habit of constantly changing how they rank websites. So, these days, it’s critical to get high quality, 1-way links to your website. As well as writing articles, blog commenting and social networking there are link services which can make the process easier.

Reciprocal linking used to be a popular – and successful – technique to get rankings, but reciprocal linking isn’t anywhere near as effective as it once was. If you’re like most people the problem is that it’s hard to figure out how to get enough 1 way links without doing a huge amount of work. Jon Leger has introduced a tool that solves the problem.

1WayLinks is an SEO tool that helps you generate up to 750 (yes, 750!) 1 way links to your websites every month. The links can go to inner pages, home pages, subdomains, even directly to affiliate promotion links. Using the links to spread some ‘juice’ around the various pages of your sites is a great way to increase your overall site positioning. There’s even a way to deal with any potential duplicate content issues.

With 1WayLinks you can spin your post by creating a few variations. The system will multiply the variations into dozens of unique posts for you. Depending on how much effort you put into the spinning process you can have 100% unique content on every blog that picks up the post. That’s a great way to maximize the benefits of your efforts.

Does 1WayLinks work? Simple answer, yes. I’ve seen my own linked pages climb the search engine rankings after using 1WayLinks. You just have to be sure to:

Target the right keywords, such as the long tail keywords. Primary keywords like GOLF are going to be too hard to compete with
Spin your post and make sure you benefit from lots of unique versions of your post
Don’t go mad and post all 750 links to 1 site in one go. It looks reall spammy
Don’t repeat the exact same links 3 times in your post. You’ll just be wasting some of the link juice.

If you’d like more information about the linking system, just visit 1WayLinks

Protected: Bum Marketing Part 6

Amin — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 14:51:42 +0000

Protected: Bum Marketing Part 2

Amin — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 11:58:39 +0000

Protected: Bum Marketing Part 1

Amin — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:21:05 +0000