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The Work At Home Guide Join the thousands already making money working from home.
Write And Submit Articles
Get free traffic, establish a reputation, increase your websites page rank and generate sales by writing and submitting articles to the article directories. I've put together a list of article directories you can submit to and listed them in order of their Google Page Rank.
Article Directory Submit List
When you write and submit articles you are essentially providing the article directory with free content for their website. The article directories will list these submitted articles in categories where someone searching for information can find and read them.
You will want to write articles on subjects closely related to your website and products you are promoting. The purpose of your article is to give just enough information to make the reader want more but not to look like a sales pitch. You want the reader to click through from your Authors Bio Section (I'll explain that in a moment) to your website or directly to your sponsor depending upon your goal.
I would recommend offering something for free, like an ebook or report in your Bio Box and then letting the surfer click through to a page on your site where you can collect their email address and build your mailing list.
If you don't have anything to offer for free, which is a huge enticement and one of the most responsive methods for generating clicks to your site or sponsor then take a look at Resale Rights Software which gives you 50, high quality Private Label Rights Products. The Private Label Rights gives you the actual source code for the software products and the ebook products come in both .pdf and MS Word format so you can complete change these, add links, sell them, create new products to sell and whatever else you wish.
When they submit their email address, your or.
If promoting a product that is "broad", that is not a niche, you would want to redirect them to a page which can then filter them into the right section of your site.
For example, if you were promoting "work at home opportunities", there are so many types that it would be a mistake to send them directly to a sponsor without narrowing down their interest which you could do by having them go to a page with links like...
I have a product or service I would like to sell
I would like to sell products or services for others
I have no web design experience and would like to see turnkey opportunities
I would like to work from home completing surveys and/or typing ads
I already market online and would like to view all opportunities
The above is just a quick example but hopefully you can see what I mean by filtering. Where if you were promoting satellite TV, you could offer a mini-series on how to easily install one yourself and other information that would make them inclined to provide their information and then redirect them directly to your sponsor after they've supplied their email address.
Because there are a lot of people who do not want to give their email address and who can blame them with so many spammers abusing them, you will want to provide them a way to still get to your sponsor if they choose not to supply their email address.
Underneath the email collection form, you can place a small link like..
No Thanks, Just Let Me Have The "Self Installation" Report.
Link this to a .pdf file you've created so they can download it. You can still give them the entire mini-course. We are really giving the ebook away with the intentions of making sales from the links we've placed inside. The people who choose to download it instead of receiving through your autoresponder just won't have the benefit of receiving any further information you will send out in the future to your list. You can read more on this method in the ebooks and viral marketing sections of these WahGuide.com Tutorials.
Ok, so what if you don't feel you have enough knowledge or the skills necessary to write articles. The first thing I would say to that is, "practice makes perfect". By taking a look through the article directories and reading what is already there will give you an idea of what the finished article should look like and trust me, most of them don't appear to be written by published authors.
If you are still reluctant or you would rather spend your time working on other things, you do still have a few options. You could pay friends and family members to write articles for you. You could pay college students to write articles. You can look on the writers boards like elance.com and pay to have articles written for you.
Personally, I recommend Article Lightning which provides you with hundreds of targeted, niche articles every month. There is a monthly subscription fee involved but ultimately it is the most affordable way when you consider the time and cost of you were to pay someone to write that many articles or if you were to write them yourself. The sales from just one article can easily pay your membership fee. Well worth it in my opinion.
Article Lightning does limit the number of people they supply the articles to and you would probably be fine using them as is but something we haven't talked about yet and that is "Content Spinning". Google does not particularly like duplicate content. This is what happens when your article is posted on several article directories. The way around this is to use a content spinner which can rewrite your articles. You can take one article and turn it into 20 different articles with this software. So, if you were using Article Lightning's article service, you could turn their 250 articles per month into 5000 articles. This is a lot of articles, a lot of readers and a lot of people clicking through to your site or sponsors site.
The PLR Articles and Content Spinners are completely optional but if you are serious about making money online, I want to be honest with you about how it is done. If you don't have the money to utilize these tools for now, then by all means, start out writing and submitting by hand until you've made a few sales then come back and invest in your business. When you get to the point you are fully utilizing PLR Articles, Content Spinners and Automated Article Submitters then you reduce your workload to nearly zero while multiplying your earning capacity by thousands. You can then just enjoy your time if you are happy with the amount of money you are making or you can do like most and start replicating these automation efforts into all the other areas of online marketing until you are basically running a virtually hands free operation.
The Content Spinner I recommend is Content Maestro. It is a very simple to use software. You just copy and paste an article into it, fill in a few checkboxes and blanks and watch as it turns that one article into 20. Very easy to use and very productive tool.
The first most important part of your articles will be your headline. When someone is scrolling through a list of articles you want your headline to jump up off the page, slap them in the face and force their finger to click through to your article.
Scroll through the different categories and see what catches your attention. What types of headlines do that? "Shock factor" headlines? "How to" headlines? "Don't make this mistake" headlines? Write down exactly which headlines make you want to click through and read. When you've finished that, categorize the headlines by types and that should give you an idea of what is successful.
A free tool you can use is the Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer which will score your headline and break down whether it appeals to a persons intellectual, spiritual or empathetic senses. This can knock years off the learning curve by aligning your products or services with the emotional sense that would urge your target audience into taking the next step. It's also a good idea to run three different headlines when spinning your articles, one for each emotional sense so you connect with a greater range of people and personality types.
If you want to jump even further ahead of the learning curve, you can "cheat" a little by using this Giant Headline Swipe File. It's a collection of 1000+ proven, attention grabbing headlines. Use this in combination with the free headline analyzer to tweak these even more.
So now that you have your article, you need to get them in the hands of all the Article Directories. I have compiled an Article Directory Submission List to make doing this by hand easier. Download the free Roboform Autofiller for even faster submissions. You can set Roboform to recognize the form fields on the article directories sites and have it automatically go to each site, log in and fill in the forms for you. Read the tutorial I created to configure Roboform for article submissions. Make sure you do visually inspect each one and preview it when given that option before officially submitting it though. Always best to err on the side of caution.
When you can afford to sign up for Article Marketer's submission service, do it! You just paste your article there and they deliver it to hundreds of article directories, blogs and ezines automatically. Use this along with the plr articles and content spinner for an extremely powerful and virtually hands free article writing and submission solution.
When you start submitting your galleries by hand you will have to register with most article directories as an author the first time. If you've downloaded Roboform, it will automatically store your user name and password for future logins. Roboform also allows you to store notes about each login so that is a good method for keeping track of which article directories allow what.
Some article directories allow links in your actual article, some only allow them in your Authors Bio while others will only allow a link in your Bio like http://www.yoursite.com and not Your Site which is linked anchor text. When I submit articles I always prepare two versions of my Authors Bio, the one with html (anchor text linked) I use in Roboform, the one without, I keep on notepad and paste it in when required. If you are using Article Marketer to submit your articles, you won't need to worry about this because you just enter both there and it knows which bio to submit where.
Now, let's look at the basic structure of an article.
Article Title
We did briefly touch on the article title earlier in this tutorial but now we'll look at it a little closer. Your article title should be in upper and lower case letters with the first letter of each word capitalized and no punctuation at the end. If want to use quotes in your title, limit to one word or a short phrase. Refrain from excessive punctuation. Make your title keyword rich. The first 3 or 4 words should focus on the correct keywords for your Title.
Example of a bad keyword title...
Top 10 Steps To Starting A Home Based Business
Example of a good title...
Start A Home Based Business - 10 Step-By-Step Strategies To Make Money Online
It is natural for people to read from left to right. When people are skimming, their eyes are moving systematically down the page, generally scanning the first few words of each title from left to right, waiting for something to grab their attention. By using the second title, we are able to let the reader see quickly without scanning the entire title what the article is about.
Article Body
An ideal article is between 400-750 words although an article with as little as 200 words may be accepted depending on the article directory as well as the subject matter. To get the greatest exposure of your articles, I would try to keep it in the 400-750 word range. You can bookmark and use our Free Word Counter Tool to help you with this.
Article Keywords
Before submitting your article, get together a list of keywords to put in the keyword field. You will want to find keywords that are related to your article and are commonly searched for. You can use Overtures Keyword Selector Tool to help choose the best ones. By entering your articles main subject, the keyword selector tool will show you a list of related words or phrases and the number of searches for each of those terms. Once you've selected three or four related search terms you can optionally go through and "sprinkle" them throughout your article.
The majority of people go for the most popular terms which are also the most competitive. One strategy is to go after the more "niche" terms. By focusing on lesser searched for terms and "sprinkling" those terms throughout your article, you can often times get much better search engine placement. Because many of the article directories have high google page rank and will rank higher than the average site for the same search term, is can be a good idea to change your "niche keywords" for each article directory if you are doing them by hand. This can give you better search engine exposure for your articles.
You can learn more about keywords in the Search Engine Tutorials but I did want to touch on it here a little since it can help you with your articles. If you are serious about using this technique and want to cash in on the keyword niches, you can download a free tools called Good Keywords which works like Overtures keyword tool except it also builds and saves keyword lists. It will even mix and match your keyword lists to generate completely new ones. If you want the best then try Keyword Elite. You can use this for so many things. Nothing else even comes close and I highly recommend you give it a try if you can. If not now, then definitely get it as soon as you make some money from your articles because you will use it in virtually every aspect of building your online business.
Article Summary
Every article must have a 2-5 sentence article summary. The purpose of the article summary is to give an abstract or summary of the benefits that your article delivers. If you are using plr articles or are unsure what to put in your summary, just use the first paragraph of your article.
Authors Bio
This is really what everything up to this point has been about. By now your reader should be thinking about ways to get more information on the same subject, related information or something you are offering for free.
This is also the place where you can help your websites page rank for particular keywords by linking to your site with the desired keyword as your anchor text. Because not all sites allow this method, it is best to have two bio boxes ready as discussed earlier.
The easiest way to grab the code for this is to type it in your html editor and then view the code and copy directly from there and paste into Roboform in your Bio section. An example of how that code would look...
====================
If you've found this article useful and would like more information on this subject or if you would like to download my free "everything you've ever wanted to know about ______", visit <a href="http://www.yoursite.com">My Awesome Site</a> now!
====================
The anchor text is the clickable part of the code above which I've displayed in red.
You can now start monitoring your response and make adjustments as necessary. You may want to use several different bio boxes during one article run which would allow you to do some split testing. If you are feeling even more resourceful, you can create additional bio boxes to take advantage of the sites which allow more than one link in the bio box as well as rotate your anchor text for different keywords.
Ok, you are ready to get started. Don't worry about trying to get it perfect. The important thing is that you start. It will become easier and easier every time you do it. Remember that this is only one method to make money online so as soon as you are able, take a look at the automated tools in this tutorial so you can get this part of your business as hands free as possible and move on to the next marketing section.
Article Marketing Resources
Roboform Autofiller
Article Marketer
Resale Rights Software
Article Lightning
Content Maestro
Free Word Counter Tool
Keyword Elite
Aweber Autoresponder
Giant Headline Swipe File
Headline Analyzer
Keyword Selector Tool
Instant Article Submitter
30 Minute Article Writing System
PLR Dashboard For Private Label Rights
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