Writing great content is the key to having your website/blog stand out and attract readers. Content is key – without it, your website is just a template. So many bloggers and webmasters try to get away with writing sub-par content.

This content might be hastily written ramblings stuffed with keywords just to provide some kind of meat to a website and make it attractive to the search engines. Often, software is used to “spin” existing content to make it unique. Usually these articles are confusing and unreadable to an actual human visitor.

Many people try to outsource their content as cheap as possible to writers in India or the Phillipines – while this works okay in some cases, most of time you get what you pay for. These kinds of writers do not always know proper English, and as a result their articles are full of spelling and grammatical errors.

If your website/blog exists solely for backlink juice, this might be all right. But if your goal is to attract and engage an active readership you must be willing to put in the time and effort to produce great, interesting content.

Here are some basic tips and tricks for doing just that!

• Find out the hot topics and talk about them. Try to find an ‘angle’ that other writers have not covered and be the first to provide information / opinions on it.

• Be controversial. Voice an opinion that arouses intrigue and fiery debate. Ask provocative questions and encourage your readers to comment their thoughts and opinions. For example: “Marketers who promote CPA are just glorified spammers! Can CPA and ‘ethics’ be mentioned in the same sentence?” You’ll find that you’ll get a lot of responses and your post may even be featured on forums or other areas where you’ll get tons of traffic.

• Always provide many line breaks in your writing. This will make your blog post easily digestible. Huge blocks of text are difficult to read and readers will have the natural inclination to overlook the content and click off the page to find something easier to read.

• Content doesn’t always have be in written format. Spice up your blog with occasional photographs, videos, and podcasts.

• Read lots of blogs in both your niche and others. Find out what makes the popular blogs so interesting and fun to read, and apply your findings to your own blog.

• Don’t be self-conscious about your writing! So many people have extremely low confidence in their own ability to write. Don’t even think about it. Sure, you might not be the next Shakespeare, but if you write from the heart and genuinely commit to providing your readers with useful information, you’ll do a great job.

That’s it for now. Start using these tips today to provide great content and attract tons of readers!

Step one is to find a long-tail keyword. This is a keyword that is 3-4+ words long. For example “Using article directories to promote your blog”. T his is a really long one, but it gives you the basic idea. Write your post about this topic, and set the keyword in your post title. It works good to have your blog permalinks setup like www.yourblog.com/this-is-the-post-title/. I have noticed the search engine likes it when the keyword is somewhere in the address bar. So now you have your blog post, keyword in title and relevant content in the post body. Don’t forget to use the keyword and similar ones in the post body and make them bold to make sure the search engine knows what keyword your post is about.

Now to rank for this long-tail keyword is pretty easy. Create yourself an eZineArticles.com account, and while you’re at it create yourself a GoArticles.com account. Now write another article with the same article topic, and the same type of content. It is best to re-write a unique article. Write as many articles as you want, two almost guarantees you first page if you have a decent blog authority already, and the keyword isn’t super competitive. (It’s best to choose long-tail keywords that aren’t really competitive.) Post one article to eZineArticles.com, same idea as the blog post put your long-tail keyword in the title. Now in the resource box of eZineArticles.com write your keyword in a link like so: <a href=”http://blog.com/link-to-post-kwhere” title=”kwhere”>Long-tail Keyword Here</a>. And that will be a good quality link to your blog post thus bringing it up in the search engine.

Now if you use GoArticles.com or many other article directories you can post the link right in the article body, use the same technique and make the link text be the actual long-tail keyword.

I hope this helps some of you bring your traffic to your individual posts up a tid-bit.

Simply sitting around and “hoping” that something will happen is not going to have an effect. You need to have clear ideas about what you want and HOW you’re going to accomplish it.

It’s a good idea to sit down with a pen and pencil (or a word processor) and list out all of your goals. They don’t have to be too specific at first. These goals can be anything related to your internet marketing career. Let’s say one of your goals is to “Earn $5,000 in Clickbank commissions”.

The first thing you need to do is take this goal and put a timeframe on it. When I say timeframe I don’t mean, “Sometime in the next year”. Make it specific. “I will earn $5,000 in Clickbank commissions BY JUNE 1ST.” This gives you a specific “window” of time for you to complete the task.

Now how are you going to earn $5K in Clickbank commissions? If you don’t know how you’re going to do it, chances are it’s not going to happen. So figure out your METHODS. Are you going to build a website and use organic SEO to drive traffic? Will you use PPC? Article marketing?

Basically, you need to pinpoint which methods you’ll use, then break down your lofty goal into smaller and smaller chunks. Let’s say you choose article marketing for your main traffic method. Set a goal to achieve 300 visitors a day to your site/landing page by June 1st. Then set a mini-goal to reach 100 visitors per day by April 1st. Then set a mini-goal to reach 50 visitors per day by the end of this month.

How are you going to drive traffic? Set small goals. “I will write 3 articles every day”. Make the goals manageable so that you don’t stress yourself out or set yourself up for disappointment. If you only have time to write one article per day, then keep it to only one.

Now you have a comprehensive plan for driving traffic and making money, and it will be set up in manageable chunks that are very easy to do. So you’re no longer trying desperately to make $5K. All you have to do is write an article today. Then write another article tomorrow. And so on and so on.

Successful internet marketers didn’t find success overnight. They set manageable goals, completed those goals, and through doing so they achieved greatness!

However, this can also be a downside!

Sometimes it can be hard for us to motivate ourselves when we don’t have anyone telling us what to do, how to do it, when to get it done, etc. After all, how much goofing around would you do at work if your boss didn’t care at all how you spent your workday?

This dilemma often holds internet marketers back. They get lazy, distracted, and lose motivation. No one yells at them when they’re caught watching Youtube clips instead of working, so what’s to keep them from simply messing around all day?

This is where internet marketers need to have intrinsic motivation in order to be successful and to get things done. Intrinsic motivation does not rely on outside pressures (that’s called external motivation).

Intrinsic motivation means being driven by your own wishes, hopes, desires, and determination. Developing this kind of motivation can be as simple as wanting something SO BAD that you refuse to acknowledge failure or inability. You get into the mindset where you HAVE to update your blog, write articles, build backlinks, etc., because there is no other option! Failure and being broke is simply not an option. It simply WON’T happen.

Make a list of all of your internet marketing goals. Construct a time-frame around these goals. I would recommend setting realistic goals, but don’t sell yourself short either. A realistic goal is something that can easily be achieved in the foreseeable future if you put forth the proportionate amount of effort. An unrealistic goal is thinking you can make $10K in one month if you’ve never made a penny from internet marketing before.

Be realistic and you will be more likely to reach your goals and less likely to get frustrated and lose motivation. Also, be very specific about your goals, and keep them in a time-frame. Don’t make a goal like “I want to start a niche blog”. Instead, say “I will create a niche blog about dog training and by March 1st I will rank on page 1 for my keyword and be making at least $100/week in affiliate sales”.

Don’t be vague about your goals. Know EXACTLY what you want and HOW you’re going to get it. And then go out and get it! Who cares if it’s a lot of work? It’s still better than working at a “real job” dealing with catty co-workers and a boss breathing down your neck. If you choose to be lazy and mess around instead of work, you’ll only have yourself to blame, and your failure will be reflected by your empty wallet!

Use the mini-site post to build 5-6 mini-sites. These links 5 of these sites won’t link together. All the sites will point to that sixth site to boost it’s ranking high. The main page should promote some kind of product, then you can focus on getting that site converting. In the mean while the other sites would be pushing traffic to your main landing page.

These Mini Sites create a network that is projected towards a defined niche, so it is very easy to dominate product niches etc.

I will go over these in more details in my next post.

Nick

The first step in making money online is finding a niche to market to. This can be anything, I recommend you choose something passionate to you so you don’t mind writing and reading about it daily. Once you have your niche you start building a keyword list. A keyword describes your content. Keywords are used by the search engines to decide where to place your content/website in the search engine rankings. It’s best to choose keywords intentionally, rather than have the search engine choose them for you. So if you’re in the weight loss niche, You’re going to want to generate related keywords such as how to lose weight, lose weight quickly, buy diet pills, akins diet etc. There are some decent tools for doing keyword research a good free one is freekeywords.wordtracker.com. I recommend you generate 5 top goal keywords, these are the keywords you want to be number one on. These will be the first 5 pages for your website!

The website can be a blog, or any other CMS if you prefer. You could use 5 static pages as your main keywords/navigation, and attach a blog to grab long-tail keywords with your posts! Once you have your website up and running it’s on. Start by writing the 5 pages we discussed as your main navigation/landing pages. These can be the wordpress pages. Then write a few good articles related to your niche and submit these to your blog. Don’t forget to ping each time you post an article, use a service such as pingomatic.com

Once you have your website up and you’re posting articles atleast 4 days out of the week, you’re going to want to start building links. I recommend you take 5 articles each week, and on random days you post 1 article to 1 article directory. Use top article directories for the best success. Be sure not to use articles that are on your blog. You want to use unique articles for the article directories, this is where most people mess up by mass posting articles. If you post one quality article to eZineArticles, You can set the title as a long tail keyword and generate an extra 20 or so visits per day with just one article! This builds up quick. Also you leave a link to your blog in the promotion box, this generates a link for your site and pushes it up in rankings.

I like to use SEO, it is a long-term source of traffic. It doesn’t require as much attention as Pay per click campaigns and other traffic sources. I find it also converts the best! So all-in-all it seems to make sense to start projects with Search engine optimization, and move up from there. Using the technique outlined above I have generated mini-sites that get 500-600 visits per day. I recommend you outsource the writing once you start scaling it up to new niches.

Your website can be likened to a slang word, It is a form of energy that  provides some kind of information. Your goal with SEM is to make your information available to the mass market.  The most profitable way to do this is through search engines because the traffic is free. Search engines such as google, yahoo and bing find your website, extract keywords which relate to your content and put you in their results for those keywords. This should be the goal of all internet marketting because it is a long-term, free source of traffic.

I’m going to create a few articles, On managing the various aspects of search engine marketting. So stay tuned.

Step one would be to pick a good domain name for your blog, something with the keyword your trying to target is best. Pick a keyword related to your niche, so you get good links. Then get wordpress installed and theme it with a decent design. Try to pick a design thats easy on the eyes, and is coded correctly for the search engines.

After you have your blog setup, you need to populate it with content. If it’s a topic you are passionate about, then I’d suggest you write the articles yourself. You can be creative and have fun with it. If it’s something you’re just doing to boost up a landing page, then you can hire someone to write articles for you. This is usually fairly innexpensive and can be bought for $10 per 500 words.

Once your blog is populated with content, and updated 2-3 times per week you are ready to go. The next step is to get some links pointed to your blog so it will start getting ranked and spreading accross the web. I suggest writing or having some articles written by your article writer. Get 1-2 articles per week written and post them to different article sites. Make sure to put your link in the authors box pointing to your blog. After a few weeks you will have enough links to start getting ranked and generating a little traffic. This also will make it prime for linking to your main site! Now when you post articles, you can link one of the keywords to your landing page or site you’re trying to promote and bam you have some quality links from quality blogs. And this can be used to sell links or just prmote multiple websites of yours.