This blog is in continuation with the post about Off Page Optimization which can be found here: Off Page Elements: Increasing your Web Visibility and Reach

Article Submission: Article submissions are done basically for two purposes (there might be some more but I submit articles for these two) one for traffic and second one is for one way backlinks. Ideally I like to submit 10 articles for each keyword I am targeting on my website. Many article directories like ezinearticles and articlesbase allow content syndication, which allows website owners to publish content on their websites. In this way you get more backlinks to your websites. If the article is interesting and your resource box is spicy it will get good click through rate sending a lot of visitors to your website.

While submitting article keep some points in mind. Write article with around 300 to 350 words as the article with more than 350 words loose theme and users lose their interest in them. Give a little time to your author’s bio box, use specific call to action words.

For reading more about submitting articles and scaling your article submission campaigns refer to the following posts about article submission.

Maximizing Benefits of Article Submissions

Scaling Article Submission Campaigns

Blogs Posting: For the purpose of link building free blog platforms (the blogs on these website is called hosted blog) are great resource. There are millions of free blog platforms available and you can choose one or several of them. Blogger.com and wordpress.com are most commonly used blog platforms. Here is the list of most common blog websites.

Aeonity.com

Blog.com

blogates.com

blogetery.com

blogger.com

blogr.com

blogsome.com

blogster.com

bravenet.com/webtools/journal/

clearblogs.com

ehow.com

googlepages.com

hubpages.com

iseekblog.com

myspace.com

pbwiki.com

quazen.com

rticlz.com

sampa.com

squarespace.com

squidoo.com

stikipad.com

thoughts.com

tumblr.com

wikispaces.com

wordpress.com

When using free blog websites chose wisely because some hosted blog platforms, wordpress.com for an example does not like blog with commercial intent and they delete such blogs. So in your blog posting provide information to the users and do not make your blog posting as sales pitch. My strategy is to make one blog for each keywords and I post at least 5 blog post on each blog of 250 words

IP Diversity: Try to use different blog platforms. Suppose you want to target 40 keywords, target each keyword using one blog having 5, 250 words articles. Do not make more than two on one website. For an example make 2 blogs on blogger, 2 blogs on wordpress, 2 on typepad, 2 on xanga and so on. In this way you will get backlinks with diverse IPs which would be more beneficial than having links from 10 blogs on a same account from blogger.com.

During your link exchange campaigns also do not exchange more than two links from website on same C Class IP.

Using Squidoo and Hub Pages : Squidoo and Hubpages get a lot of love from Google and I have experienced that they are easily ranked. So use these two in your link and traffic building campaigns. Take two or more long tail keywords for your niche and make lenses on Squidoo and hubs on Hubpages. Use at least 600 words articles for making lenses and hubs.

For reading more about choosing long tail keywords, read my previous posts on keyword research here at :

Keyword Research: Follow the Right Path

Keyword Research: Follow the Right Path Part 2

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Article marketing is a great tool for promoting products and attracting traffic to your website and every internet marketer know the importance of article marketing (commonly known as BUM marketing).

There are few points, if taken care, can maximize the benefit of article marketing.

Purpose of Article Submissions: There are mainly two purpose of article marketing, one is one way backlinks and second is traffic. If your intention is just to get some one way backlinks pointing to your website, you can write article on any keyword related to your website. But if you want backlinks and traffic both then choose your keywords wisely.

Common Mistakes: The most common mistake is writing articles without keeping in mind the goals. Newbie article marketers generally choose broad keywords for writing articles. They get backlinks but not traffic.

Choose long tail keywords for your articles, with low competition, which will rank in the search engines sending good amount of traffic to your website. For an example instead of using “Yoga Mats” use “How to choose best yoga mats” as your keyword. The broad phrase keywords have lot of searches but in turn they also have very stiff competition. So choose your keywords (long tails) wisely to scale your article marketing campaigns.

Using Ezine Articles for scaling your campaigns: Subscribe to the ezinearticles.com newsletter. It sends it on monthly basis about the performance of your articles. It also includes the keywords with which the articles were found. Use those keywords to write more articles and you can bring lot more traffic to your website simultaneously with one way backlinks.

I am a fan of ezinearticles.com because of the linking structure of the article pages. If you view an article on this article directory, just scroll down and you will see a section of related articles. Just imagine on how many pages your article link would be there, giving extra boost to your article rankings, so choose your keywords wisely while submitting to ezinearticles.

Article Directories you must include in your BUM marketing campaigns:

1. Searchwarp.com
2. Ezinearticles.com
3. Articlesbase.com
4. Goarticles.com
5. Amazines.com

For reading more about article marketing, read my previous post here at: Maximizing Benefits of Article Submissions

I hope these tips will improve your article marketing campaigns, if you need any help on this or you haven’t got any point please post in the comment section.

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Are you planning to launch a website? For many of you it might be the first one. The planning process and implementation of a website is tough and easy both, it is easy if you know how to do it right and very tough if you don’t. Do not get dishearten if you are new, with regular updating and sharpening your skills and with “the will power to achieve success”, you can surely become successful in making money online.

Today we will discuss some points about a new website from planning to implementation phase.

Know your audience

First of all know your audience, try to get a feel of the audience and do brainstorming about the problems and need of the niche you are going to enter. For this purpose visit various blogs related to your subject, visit different forums and try to find out what kind of questions people are asking and what the topics of hot discussion on the forums are. Visit yahoo answers and find out the questions related to your topic. In this way you will get and idea about the potential of the niche as well as you will know the topics to concentrate on while preparing the content.

Niche Research and Arranging for content:

I am a strong supporter of ezinearticles. There is a reason behind it, after doing initial research, visit ezinearticles.com and find out the articles people are submitting on your topic, then figure out what type of promotions people are doing. It is very easy to find just click the link in the author’s bio section. There are two possibilities, a lot of ezine marketers just do a simple domain redirect to the merchant’s sales page and others try to attract visitors to their own landing page with preselling content and then funnel them through their affiliate links to the merchant’s website. In this way you can find out either there is potential in the market or not. If there are many authors promoting articles on your topic then the niche must be profitable. An another way to find out the profitability of a niche is, to find out different Adwords ads in Google search results and ads in search result pages of Yahoo, if there are many advertisers, it is a strong signal of the profitability of the niche.

Now back to ezinearticles, find out the keywords on which the writers are publishing their articles, just see the page source and you can easily find out the keywords. Just pick up one author and find all the keywords on which the author is publishing the content, in this way you will get lot of keywords to start with your website.

Organizing content:

Organize content in a way that the flow of the information seems natural, the best way to do this is to arrange the content in a silo structure (a detailed discussion on this topic in coming posts).

The organization of the content must be in a logical way, avoid clumsy language and try to keep it simple, which can be understood by an average reader.

Prepare content in such a way that it interacts with the audience, try to find out that after reading an article what would be the mindset of the reader , whether they need some more information or they just want to buy services or products you are offering. In this way you can easily generate interesting content which not only provide value to the readers but also fetch more rewards for you.

For more information on this topic read testing and dominating a niche using SEO and PPC

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What is a market or niche?

According to wikipedia “A niche market is the subset of the market on which a specific product is focusing on; Therefore the market niche defines the specific product features aimed at satisfying specific market needs, as well as the price range, production quality and the demographics that is intended to impact.”

In short a niche can be defined as a smaller segment of a market which is super targeted around a specific topic.

For an example in the health industry or market “acne” or “anxiety” is niche markets.

There is a lot of confusion when it comes to the definition of niche. Everyone has own understanding and definition.

But I like to call an area as “market” and a specific area in the market as niche.

Niche and micro niche

A niche is a specific are of a market on which product or services are focused, as defined above and micro niche is an another focused area in the specified niche.

For an example “health” is a market and “weight loss” is a niche. Now more specific areas in the niche weight loss is “weight loss using pills”, “weight loss using exercise”, “weight loss using yoga” and more are micro niches.

Hope this would clear the difference.

Finding a Market and Niche

For finding a market for affiliate marketing there are some very good places from where you can collect ideas. Think about your hobbies and problems you or any of your known people has and try to research on the topic. Like someone has problem of “weeds in his lawn” or “pest control” etc.

There are many resources on the internet where you can find different ideas for you niche website.

Dmoz.org

Dmoz is the largest open directory project on the internet, apart from serving as a directory it can also be used for niche research. Delve deeper into the categories and you will find many.

Just open Dmoz and start your research, I am sure you will find several niches; some of them may be even untouched.

Shopping.com

Shopping.com is one of the largest shopping websites over internet. You can just surf it and find the hot keyword ideas.

Amazon
The largest seller of books and nearly every physical item on the internet. This is a very good resource for finding a niche, just browse the best sellers section and you can find gold

Ebay

I think nearly everyone is familiar with ebay.com, you can find out the hottest selling stuff at eBay by visiting pulse.ebay.com

EzineArticles

EzineArticles is the largest article directory on internet, you can use it for your bum marketing campaigns, for finding ideas related to a topic. More than that you can find out different niches using it and in most cases the niches would be profitable because internet marketers and others are already using it for their campaigns

Google Trends and Google Insight Search

Google hot trends and Google insight search are very great places where you can find trends over time and if done properly finding good keywords for CPA and affiliate campaigns is not tough. Just use your mind

Testing a Market and Keyword Research

Before you jump to any conclusion and finalize your keywords, just try to find out the need of your targeted audience. Visit different forums related to your niche, read articles and blogs to delve deeper in your niche. For reading more about this topic, visit my previous posts about keyword research here:

Keyword Research: Follow the Right Path

Keyword Research: Follow the Right Path Part 2

Using PPC to Test a Market

After you have finalized your keywords and ready to shoot your campaigns, build your landing pages and try to test a market using PPC. In this way you will find out whether the market has the potential. Do keywords level tracking and you will find out the keywords which trigger sales. After you have found sales keywords or gold keywords, build more pages; invest in SEO for long term profits.

But be cautious if you are new to the PPC market, because a little mistake can ruin your pockets.

Using SEO for Growth and Long Term Business

You cannot solely depend on PPC on a long term, so invest in SEO for long term profits. Build more pages using your gold keywords, use variations and always try to test new keywords. Rinse and repeat your action and you can have long term profits.

What do you all think in this regard. Have i missed something, please provide your feedback.

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This post is the second part of my post related to keyword research, you can read the first post here at: Keyword Research: Follow the Right Path

When it comes to keyword research and selection, there are numerous points which should always be kept in mind during the process because keyword research is the most important part of developing an online business and choosing wrong keywords might ruin all your efforts. So always invest reasonable amount of time for finding the right keywords to start with. 

Long Tail Vs Short Tail Keywords:

Short tail keywords are those keywords, which represent a niche (If you are new to internet marketing, read as “market” for the sake of simplicity). While long tails are those which specify a little deeper in the concerned niche or market. For an example, if we talk about digital camera niche then keyword like “Digital camera” is a broad keyword (read as short tail) and “Kodak digital camera 9 MP” or “Cannon digital camera DX665” are long tail keywords.

Hope you got it.

If we consider commerciability in our research there are two types of keywords.

1. Research Keywords
2. Buying keywords or Money Keywords

For an example, if someone is searching for “digital camera”, might be the surfer is doing some research on digital cameras and not in buying mood, so the probability of sales is low, on the other hand if someone searches for “Cannon digital camera 9 MP DXS-635”, as we can see, this search is for a particular product and the probability of sale is much higher than the previous one. So knowing about right keywords is must because optimizing or doing PPC for wrong keywords will not return anything. Keeping track of your campaigns is also necessary both for SEO and PPC.

But this doesn’t conclude that one should not target broad keywords. Actually the whole game depends upon the budget and goals. If you have a handsome budget you can easily go for keywords like “credit cards”, but if you do not have much to spend , start with long tails(like “HSBC bank credit card London”) and then as time passes , invest more to gain results for short tails

Wide Vs Deep Keywords

Wide keywords refer to all the keywords related to a niche just like, if we talk about “dog training”, keywords like:

dogs training
dog training course
dog obedience training
dog training courses
dog training schools
dog training classes
dog training equipment
dog training class
dog training information
dog training collars
dog training collar
dog agility training

are called as wide keywords as it specifies the keywords related to dog training..

Now for finding deep keywords we need to do some brainstorming. Not only in dog training niche, this is true for all niches, just find different characteristics of the situation or problem. For our dog training example, just try to find out the problems your dog has for which you want to get it trained.

Some common problems are biting, excessive jumping and barking, digging. Apart from this we can also find out different dog breeds like Doberman, Alsatian, German shepherd, pug etc and then prepare our deep keyword list.

Stop dog digging
Stop dog jumping
Stop dog biting
Stop my dog from biting

————————————

Stop Doberman from digging
Stop German shepherd from biting

————————————

German shepherd agility training
Doberman obedience training

————————————

And many more.

Are Keyword Tools Helpful?

The answer is YES and NO. They are indeed helpful if you really know how to use them properly and extract the most from it. If you don’t know to use them properly, you might end up with a wrong keyword list. In my opinion Google keyword research tool and search based keyword tool are best. In addition you can also use Traffic Travis (It has both free and paid versions, but free version is capable enough to extract optimum results).

OK OK I got it all, now tell me, Where to start?

Good now you are ready to find your keywords and start your online business.

Ok I am just opening Google keyword tool, I have extracted my keywords…..

Hey Wait… Again you are missing something…

Before you start your keyword research with Keyword Tool External, Traffic Travis or some other tool, I have a suggestion for you.

Visit different forums and blogs in your niche and try to find out what people are talking and searching about and what are the basic problems of the audience you are going to face and attend ?. I think you got the point.

Always keep in mind if you have the solution of a problem and if you can present it to your niche properly then you are going to sustain in the business. So just spy your market and try to find out the problems and the solutions available and then decide to do things in a different way and you will be the boss of the niche.

Using Forums and Yahoo Answers

Just fireup Google and type “your main keyword” forums.

Like “dog training” forums

You now have a list of several forums, just enter them and try to find out the topics which the members are talking about and in this way you will have an idea of the problems related to the niche. After you have noted down all these things, you are ready to prepare your keyword list.

There is one more effective way, use Yahoo Answers. This is a very good platform to know about your niche. I myself use Yahoo Answers extensively for finding keywords for niche I wish to enter and know nothing about.

Using Google Wonder wheel and suggest for finding right keywords

You might have noticed Google’s new tool, wonderwheel. It’s a very good tool for conducting keyword research and SILOING. I would try to post about silo, its effect on SEO and how to SILO a website in coming days. Google is doing a very good job by providing more effective tools for us webmasters. You now have options to search forums, images, timeline which relates to trends (they provide timeline data from 1800 AD, I do not know whether Larry Page or Sergey Brin were there back in 1800 AD   ), shopping results , videos etc at one place.

In my opinion this is the right process from doing keyword research to finally establishing a successful online business

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