Caydel’s SEO Blog

This is a the final chapter of the How To Promote Yourself Through Article Marketing series. Please also see Part I and Part II!

Market That Article!

Now that your article is written, you have to market it. There are typically two ways to do this – either by manual submission, or by using a distribution service.

Submitting manually is the process of visiting the various article sites and directories on the Internet, and individually submitting your articles for inclusion.

Distribution services are exactly what they sound like. You can hire a company or individual to submit your articles for you to a set number of directories. Sometimes the articles are submitted by hand, other times the service will use a script to automatically submit the article to hundreds of sites.

Both approaches have their strengths and weaknesses. Submitting manually may take a large amount of time and effort. But it will allow you to customize your article’s formatting and display for each site you submit it too, ensuring that it is presented to the best of it’s ability. Submissions services are quick and easy, but may involve a fee. if you employ a submission service, you will lose the ability to ensure that your articles are displayed properly on every site. Below is a few of the siteswhich offer for article submission.

Article Directories:

• Free-Journal-Articles.com *recommended*
• ArticleOnramp.com
• EzineArticles.com
• GoArticles.com

Article Distribution Services:

• ArticleSender.com *recommended*
• ArticleProbe.com
• ThePhantomWriters.com

Please note that I have not used any of the distribution services listed apart from ArticleSender.com, although I do have articles in the four directories listed above. These lists are not comprehensive - you can find dozens more simply by using Google or searching on the various webmaster forums.

In Conclusion…

Article Marketing has the potential to be one of the most valuable tools you have for promotion of yourself or your website. With everything, what you get out of it will be a reflection of the effort you put into it. If you make a point of ensuring that the article is top quality, and it distribute it well, you will find that it can drive valuable traffic to your site, leading to greater profits, and promotion of your brand. Take it seriously!

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This is the second part of the How To Promote Yourself Through Article Marketing series. Please also see Part I and Part III!

Write Your Articles

The most important part of Article Marketing is the articles. If an article doesn’t catch potential readers immediately and entice them to continue reading, none of the readers will feel compelled to visit your site.

Now, the scope of this post does not include lessons or tutorials on how to write an article. If you would like to know more about that, read Copyblogger. Still, I would like to make a few relevant points to help you maximize your success.

Write Something Unique

Do you want people to remember you? Than write something they haven’t read before. Take a new angle to a controversial issue, or discuss something that hasn’t been discussed before. You need to offer your potential readers something they can’t get anywhere else. You need to provide a reason for them to remember you, and this can be done successfully with unique views, opinions and content.

Headlines Are Your Best Friend!

On an article directory, your article will be mixed in with hundred or thousands of others, with only your headline to differentiate yourself from the rest. Write something that will grab the reader’s attention and steer them towards yours!

Make sure to include some keywords in your title for search purposes – a potential reader searching for a specific subject will be more likely to click on your article if they see exactly what they want in the title.

Headings Are Your Second Best…

Many writers do not use headings and subheadings in their articles. This is a mistake. Readers will often scan an article, and read the headings as a ‘Table of Contents’. It makes sense – what better way to get a feel for the contents of the article?

By breaking up your article into sections, you are providing some structure to it, and making it more comprehendable for the reader. Be careful – too many headings may be just as overwhelming as a large block of small text.

Make Your Author Bio Box Compelling!

Most article sites have an author bio box which you can use to write a bit about yourself, and perhaps include a link to your site. Think carefully about what you want to include in this. Of the following two examples, which is more compelling?

“Brian Vuyk is a blogger who writes about SEO stuff at http://www.caydel.com”

or

“Get the most from your websites! Learn how to promote yourself by reading Brian’s blog at http://www.caydel.com”

Obviously, the second is far more compelling. It contains a call to action, and should grab the reader’s interest. Seriously – would you really click on the first?

Look the Part in Your Author’s Photo

Another thing to consider is a photo. Many article sites will publish a photo of the author along with the article. It is a proven fact that people will remember and recognize the photos long before they will recognize the name. The photo draws people’s eyes, and creates an impression on them. I have often read an article, and recognized the author without recognizing the name or the site. I simply recognized the photo.

Take your photo seriously. Consider the image you are trying to present of yourself in the article you are writing, and the site you are linking to. For instance, a high-powered stock trader writing articles on stock tips will want to present a different photo of himself than the outdoorsman writing about techniques in bowhunting.

Link Back to Yourself Cautiously

In addition to linking to yourself in the Author Bio box, try to link back to your website once or twice within the body of the article. Be careful with this! Make sure that it fits within the flow of the article, and ensure that it is relevant to the specific context of the paragraph you include the link in. If the link sticks out too much, or points to an irrelevant page, you may risk rejection by some of the sites you submit it to. Use anchor text that fits into the sentence you are writing, but try to include some keywords for SEO purposes!

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This is a the first chapter of the How To Promote Yourself Through Article Marketing series. Please also see Part II and Part III!

Introduction

As a webmaster or marketer, you need to use every tool at your disposal to drive visitors and traffic to your website. Without visitors, you have no chance at branding or revenue, like a store with no customers.

One tool often overlooked by many webmasters is Article Marketing. Article Marketing is the process of writing an engaging, informative article, submitting it to article directories on the Internet, and collecting traffic and backlinks through it.

What Can it Do for Me?

Article Marketing has three major benefits:

It is very beneficial from a SEO perspective. When performed properly, it will create a large amount of backlinks on the Internet, with anchor text you control. The links will be on pages relevant to your site’s content. Without getting off-topic here, we know that the more relevant backlinks your site has, the higher it can rank within the major search engines.

From a traffic perspective, you could get hundreds of visitors to your website via the articles you write. These visitors will be interested in your site and subject, and will be receptive to your message and/or products. This will result in increased revenue and sales.

From a branding perspective, Article Marketing can help you increase your mind share. When people think of a subject within your niche, or planning to purchase an item you sell, you want them to think of you first.

If your article is well written, and appeals to readers, you may find it republished on hundreds of websites across the Internet, resulting in an increase of traffic and links. It is not uncommon for a well written article to be republished hundreds or thousands of times on different websites!

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Update: the mystery is finally solved

Setting

This yesterday, I mistyped the URL as I was visiting Google this morning; I accidentally typed http://www.google.cm. This redirected me to a page on the domain of http://www.agoga.com, which actually looked like a somewhat convincing, spartan page, very similar in style to what you would often see if your browser. Except that it also contained a search bar, and a few unobtrusive links to subject like ‘Travel’, ‘Cars’ etc., the kind of subjects you would see on a typical parked domain page.

I thought that was kind of interesting, a way of monetizing typos that looked to me at least like it would be somewhat effective way of squatting a typo. At the time, though, it didn’t seem noteworthy enough to me to give it further thought.

A little later, I was trying to get to Paypal, and again I accidentally typed http://www.paypal.cm. Once again I was at the same page. I was intrigued, and began experimenting by checking a variety of other domains with the .cm extension. Many big names in the industry had the .cm TLD pointed to the same page I had viewed earlier.

That also, is not that notable. A squatter could easily have registered a whole variety of company names in that TLD - it’s done all the time, and is considered a valid tactic for making some money off of parked domains.

What made it notable finally is when I started entering random domains, and sequences of characters in the .cm TLD. such as http://sdfjhksd.cm and http://www.oiyt.cm. These also are pointing to a landing page on agoga.com, albeit a different landing page from the ones used on major domain mispellings.

Agoga.com has every unregistered .cm TLD pointed to their landing pages!

While there are a bunch of legitimately registered .cm sites which resolve elsewhere, any other .cm domain, whether nonsense characters or misspellings of ‘real’ domain names resolves to the same IP address which is a cluster at agoga.com. The only way this could be accomplished is to change the default site settings of the master DNS serving the .cm TLD. Agoga must have either hacked the .cm registrar in Cameroon, or paid the registrar off for this. Either way, I suspect something illegal has occurred here; I doubt this type of redirecting is approved by IANA.

Opportunity

How much type-in traffic would you think would be generated by people misspelling .com as .cm? Agoga.com has an Alexa Rank of 6,915 which indicates thousands or tens of thousands of visitors per day by some estimates. Keep in mind that this site has not been running for even three months yet; today’s Alexa rank was 2,913.

Since Alexa ranking is biased towards a technical crowd, I think it is safe to assume that the true numbers are fairly large. Now, it is easily attainable that a proper landing page optimized for Pay-Per-Click advertisements will result in a 30%-40% click-through-rate. Especially if one was to put some effort into ensuring the advertisements were targeted around the domain name or keywords at the similar .com page.

It is obvious that with this type of traffic, Agoga.com could be pulling in some huge advertising revenue - as much a $1000-$2000 per day. They should have it made in the shade, for all intents and purposes. But, they have screwed up royally.

How did they screw up?

Agoga will return you to one of two landing pages, depending on what type of domain you enter. One version, which they seem to use when squatting the domain of a large company or popular website, can be seen at http://www.google.cm. The other, which they seem to use for the domains of smaller websites and nonsense or misspelled domains can be seen at http://www.oeiurt.cm (note the random domain name…) or http://www.caydel.cm (a typo of this domain) or at the Agoga main page at http://www.agoga.com.

The first type of landing page is broken - The first type of landing page is relatively well done - it is minimal, and could easily get the user to click onto their main site. The problem lies in that no ads are served if the user enters certain search queries. While an advertising page is shown if the user enters a query such as ‘digital cameras’, ‘dvd’, ‘knitting’, other queries such as ‘infohatter’, ‘caydel’ or whatever return nothing. Sure, probably nobody is bidding on that term; wouldn’t it be a better plan to grab the first result from a Google query for that term, scrape it for keywords, and return ads based on that? Potentially millions of long-tail opportunities are being missed here, thrown away for no good reason.

The second type of landing page broken - The script that Agoga used to generate the second style of landing page is broken. Any search query or link click redirects you to the same page you just left, with a nice photo of a mountain range, or other scenery visible in place of the advertisements that should be shown. They are making nothing from this type of landing page; in fact, they are losing money due to bandwidth costs.

Opportunity Missed

I would be willing to bet that the majority of the traffic that Agoga.com receives will end up at the second landing page, the broken one. While they probably have their highest traffic domains such as http://www.google.cm pointing to their ‘working’ script, they are missing out on the whole long-tail of domain misspellings. Think about it this way - any mistake made by anyone anywhere when he misspells .com as .cm will send him to the broken script. This could be anyone typing in one of a billion domains.

Additionally, a fair number of people who misspell the the domains of large sites such as Google will make multiple mistakes - they may mispell google.com as google.cm, but how many are prone to make multiple mistakes such as gogle.cm or googel.cm and be sent to the broken page?

What Are You Trying to Tell Us Here?

The point of what I am trying to say should have become clear by this point, but I will write it out nice and neat anyways: an neglect of details can lose you a lot of money. I do not know if this second landing page has ever actually worked for Agoga. Perhaps it has, and only stopped working 15 minutes before I stumbled upon it the first time. Perhaps it has never worked. The fact of the matter is, the person or persons who own Agoga.com (Whois data indicates Nameview, Inc, BTW) are losing thousands of dollars per day. It is probably safe to assume that they don’t even realize this; if they did, they would fix it in realtively short order.
The people responsible for this had an amazing idea, which they ran with 90% of the way to the perfect money-making opportunity. But they have missed a few small details which are costing them perhaps thousands of dollars per day. If they were to fix these small problems, they could probably nearly double their income.

I appreciate your comments and feedback!

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This morning, ReviewMe, a new company run by Andy Hagens and Aaron Wall launched. Similar to some extent to PayPerPost or the upcoming LoudLaunch, ReviewMe is a site that seeks to link companies to bloggers.

The basic idea is this: You log into your account at ReviewMe, and submit your blog. If approved, you will provided a set of products, services or other items to review, with a certain amount of monetary compensation.

It also appears that your blog is listed in a directory on ReviewMe, through which Advertisers can browse. Each blog’s listing contains some statistics about the site, including Alexa Rank, Technorati Rank, an estimated number of RSS subscribers, and an overall ranking out of five stars for the blog. Each blog has a specific price attached to it, for which advertisers may purchase a post on that blog. I hope these rankings are updated often, as this blog seems to fluctuate randomly on each of those statistics. Currently, my Alexa and Technorati rankings are lower than typical.

One slightly disappointing note: While my blog currently carries a price tag of $40 for an advertiser to offer to sponsor a post, the share going to the blogger is only 50%. I would have liked to see ReviewMe follow other programs such as Adbrite or Performancing Partners in that they pay the blogger 70% of the total advertising cost.

Where ReviewMe stands apart from the crowd is it’s focus on full disclosure. In a bid to ethically remain on the white side of the line, they require their bloggers to include a disclosure policy in every post written for ReviewMe. This separates ReviewMe from other services such as PayPerPost where a disclosure is not necessarily required.

Previously, I have spent some time looking at PayPerPost as a way to monetize my blog. Unlike PayPerPost, you are free to express your own opinions about the products and services you mention; there is no pressure for your review to be positive. The view taken by ReviewMe is that the advertiser is paying for a review, not a sponsored praise piece.

ReviewMe seems to hold a lot of potential for the blogosphere. It seems to take on PayPerPost on a higher ethical level. While there no doubt will be some initial resistance by many bloggers on the idea of sponsored posts, this will provide ways both for marketers to get word out about their products, and bloggers to make a little extra money to cover their costs.

P.S. This is a sponsored review. Please note that this post represents my true views on the subject at hand.

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So, now you’ve decided that you want to monetize your blog. Additionally, now you’ve set your goals. You know where you are, and you know where you want to be. Now you have to decide how you want to get there.

There are a variety of different options out there to monetize your traffic, each with lesser or greater amounts of intrusion upon yourself, your visitors and your ethics. I will give a quick rundown of some of the different options available to you.

Google Adsense

Google Adsense is the ‘typical’ text-based ads that you see on most sites. You are generally paid a cost of $0.01 - $5 per click, depending on the keywords on your blog. You can run image or text ads on your site.
Adbrite

Adbrite offers a variety of different methods to monetize your traffic. You can run network ads similar to the Google Adsense program, as well as allow advertisers to purchase ads on your site directly. This type of ad is paid either daily, weekly or monthly. They also offer interstitial ads.

Performancing Partners Network

The Performancing Partners Ad Network is a newer program which allows you to sell 125×125px graphical advertisements on your site. The slots are sold on a monthly basis.

PayPerPost

PayPerPost is a network aimed at bloggers, which gives the bloggers the chance to review or write a post for an advertiser. These offers typically pay $1-$20 per opportunity.

Please note that you should research your options thoroughly prior to choosing your programs. The information given above is merely to give you an idea of what’s out there.

To monetize this blog, I chose to work with Adbrite and the Performancing Partners Ad Network. I made this decision since in my prior experience, i have found that the payouts from Google Adsense are generally fairly small for blogs, with low click prices and click through rates. I rejected PayPerPost because I have no desire to do paid posts; while I am interested in advertising on this blog, I do not want my content influenced by too many outside factors.

The benefit common to Adbrite and Performancing is that both programs allow me to sell ad slots myself. They both allow me to control the prices of the ad spots I sell. Additionally, they are paid on a weekly or monthly basis, rather than by traffic. Because of this I can leverage the fact that since a blog is made up of many repeat readers, even if an ad is not clicked, it still has strong branding potential with the blog readers.

A large factor to consider is how the ads will work within your layout. I found that the Performancing ads work well within my sidebar, and the flexible unit size in Adbrite allowed me to create a large unit on the right side of my screen that may contain a larger number of ads.

Placing Your Ads

Placement of your ads is very important for them to have the maximum effect and monetary return. Rather than cover this (exhausted) topic myself, let me refer you to one of the best resources for ad palcement information. Please see Google’s ‘Blogtimize - Optimize the ads on your blog‘.

Conclusion

Research the programs above, and decide how you want to advertise. For the rest of the series, I will mainly focus on Adbrite and Performancing, since they are the programs I am using, although I will make some reference back to Google Adsense.

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Before starting any project, the first, most important step is to set some goals. Since you are reading this, it is logical to assume that you want to start making some money from your blog. This is a good starting place when developing our goals.

• I want to make some money from my blog.

Now, let’s send some basic questions to define our goal. For example, how much money do you want to make? These numbers should reflect your traffic to a certain amount to ensure that your goals are obtainable. Perhaps an extreme example, but hoping to make $1000 per day on your blog that gets only 20 visitors per day is not easily obtainable. For example, a blog with low traffic (<100 uniques per day) may hold the following goal:

• I want to make $100 per month from my blog.

That’s a good start. But a goal should consist of both a what and a when. So far, we have the what, but we need to set a when. Without a time frame to work in, it may be difficult to reach all your goals within a reasonable time

• I want to make $100 per month from my blog by the end of two months

This is a reasonable goal. But what are you going to do when you get there? Are you just going to rest on your laurel and just let your blog take care of itself? Of course not. Set a few more goals, so you know where you want to go.

• I want to make $100 per month from my blog by the end of two months
• I want to make $300 per month from my blog by the end of four months
• I want to make $600 per month from my blog by the end of six months
• I want to make $1200 per month from my blog by the end of one year

Once again, I want to stress that you should adjust your goals to match your traffic levels, keeping in mind that as you develop your blog, your traffic will only grow. At the same time, don’t be afraid to be optimistic - optimism will just mean you have to work a little harder. As with all things, blogging is all about getting a return on the work you put into it.

Hopefully, you now have a rather complete set of goals to achieve. In the next post in this series, we will look at developing a strategy to conquer those goals.

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