Article Writing for Internet Marketing - A Myth
I recently read an interesting article on article writing. It was published in SiteProNews - as far as I am concerned, the 'Google of Newsletters'. It is my ambition one day to get an article into SiteProNews!
Mark Daoust said in this article The Misunderstood Marketing Method, that most people use articles in completely the wrong way to promote their sites. I completely agree with him and in fact, the research that I've done into the success of various of my article submissions is bearing this out.
Since the concept of 'Article writing is the best way to promote your website' became the vogue recently most people think that it is enough to dash off a couple of words and then mass submit these articles to the slew of Article Directories that has recently sprung up all over the place. Even worse, they think that it is enough to string together a bunch of keywords and submit them to the Article Directories.
Being an Article Directory owner myself, I can attest to the amount of garbage that is submitted under the guise of 'articles'. Frankly, I am actually quite happy to see these types of spammy articles since I can press the 'delete' button with a clear conscience. But they just keep on coming regardless. As with all good ideas, article writing has fallen prey to the spammers and scammers of the world.
Let's take a good hard look at article writing as a marketing method.
There are really two reasons to write articles
1. To get as many cheap and easy (or is it cheap and nasty?) links to your website as you can with the least amount of effort.
2. To establish yourself as an authority in your field (with the added benefits of getting more traffic and getting high quality links back to your website).
Unfortunately it IS easier to do the first than to do the second. Writing a good article is hard work. And I suppose that it all depends on what you want to achieve. If your aim is to promote your 'Adsense trap' website then a couple of low quality or Private Label articles might do the trick. But forget about building a reputation. But then, that was never the intent, was it?
So let's look at some guidelines:
If your primary aim is to get more links back to your 'cheap and nasty' Google Adsense website then I recommend that you write the highest standard of article that you can in the shortest timeframe. Do still write proper English, do not string spammy keywords together, do not use all capitals in your title, do not use exclamation marks and words like 'easily' and 'cheaply' anywhere in your title or summary and try not to use Private Label articles. Yes I know it is tempting since they are so readily available (heck, I am sitting with a whole folder full of them that I don't really know what to do with!), but even if you use the software that changes the wording here and there, frankly, they still stand out a mile and often the software that changes the words really messes up the sentence context.
Some article directories have software that checks for the type of duplication that you would get with Private Label Articles (lucky them). Other Article Directory owners just use their eyeballs and common sense and the delete button is always a handy tool.
But wait - IS the first way so much easier to get quick links back to your site? I recently went to do a check on some articles that I submitted in March and April. Sure, the article titles show up when you search for them, however, when you check the links back supposedly generated by those articles, only 4 links out of the 500+ that I would have expected, based on the number of article titles displayed, were showing in the Yahoo link results.
If you check in MSN, the picture is slightly better, but even MSN only shows 11 links out of the potential 500+
What is going on here? There could be a couple of explanations:
1. The various individual pages containing the body of the article and the link back are just not indexed yet. The question is why not? MSN, in particular, seems to be very good with indexing these days, so you would at least expect the links to show up in MSN. These articles were submitted in March and April respectively. Why are the search engines not fully spidering or indexing these articles in the article directories?
2. The other option is that the dreaded 'duplicate content' filter had struck again. I personally do not think that the duplicate content filter is such a big bogeyman as we are lead to believe. There is duplicate content all over the Internet. The argument though is that you might find an article that has been written by someone and submitted to be published on various websites. Now, it is said that the article might either only show up (depending on whose theory you believe) on the site that it was published first, or on a higher PR site offering the article as more 'relevant' content. The problem with this theory in this situation though is that the four articles that did show up as being fully indexed in Yahoo, are published on Article Directories that variously have a PR of 3, 5 0 and 2. Neither of them is the site on which the articles were published first. Scarcely a pattern, I would say.
But based on these results I would say that people are wasting their time writing and submitting their articles to article directories in order to get quick and easy links back to their websites. But then, common sense seems to be singularly uncommon when it comes to snake oil in the SEO and Internet Marketing space.
What I have seen is that some people write a LOT of articles, in other words, they basically spam the article directories with low quality articles. If you write enough of these low quality articles, SOME of the links will start to show up. But the chances that these spammy types of articles are going to be picked up and syndicated on other websites (apart from 'Adsense trap' websites!) are virtually nil; which means that the only links that will be pointing back to the website will be from the actual article in the article directory - and these are not indexed very quickly at the moment .
In summary therefore:
If you want to write articles purely for the sake of getting a lot of low quality links back to your website, you are going to have to play the numbers game - lots of low quality articles submitted through automated tools to the various article directories. Don't expect lots of links back from these articles soon, however. They will also not do anything for building your reputation or really draw traffic to your website.
2. If you are writing articles for the purpose of building a reputation, then I suggest you follow Mark Daoust's (http://www.site-reference.com/articles/Internet-Marketing/The-Misunderstood-Marketing-Method.html) advice and spend time and effort writing your article as well as marketing it (by hand) to some highly respected Article directories (I suggest EzineArticles and GoArticles) as well as to selected partner sites. The amount of effort is much higher but in the long term, so will the rewards.
Christine Anderssen is a custom website designer. You can find her at Tailormade4you Website Design - Custom Web Site Design Services and Internet Web Hosting for South Africa
Static or Dynamic IP`s – The choice is yours.
An IP (Internet Protocol) is the address of your computer when it's on the Internet. It is supplied to you by your ISP. Dial-up connections have them too. Most ordinary dial-up connections are supplied with a dynamic IP - every time you dial in to your ISP, you are given a separate IP.
A virtual location! When logged on to the internet each computer has a unique IP address, that is the internet protocol address. This simply means to identify and locate as to where on the internet protocol is your pc located.
Mostly as and when a computer connects to the internet a dynamic random IP address is generated and dedicated to the PC for as long as it does not get disconnected. The next time the same PC is connected, it would have a different IP address, this holds true in case of both broadband and dial up connections.
When internet was in its nascent stage each computer had a fixed exclusive IP address. Which was in a patter of digitis however dynamic IP's have been fairly popular in the present scenario?
However on demand there are few providers who offer static IP`s to users. Static IP's are like a constant IP address of a computer on the network and is ideal for people using private networks (VPN) for they can be easily located by other members on the network.
However some broadbands are run on private networks mostly for the privacy and safety business communication. Often people also run a server for friends to access for playing games and web serving etc. In such cases they prefer static IP addresses for there might be a domain name linked to their IP address so if the IP address is not fixed it would be tough to locate the server!.
Hence it widely depends on your preference and perception of Internet to choose a static or a dynamic IP address.
The Easy Chair Millionaire - Online Money for Beginners?
Recently a friend of mine approached me and asked if it was truly possible to make money online. I didn't really need to answer the question. Of course it's possible to make money online - very good money - and he knew that as well as I did. You see, my friend suffers from the same problem as many aspiring internet marketers do, namely information overload. The more information he is bombarded with, the more frustrated he gets; the more frustrated he gets, the less he does; the less he does, the more often he has to ask me whether it's possible to make money online in order to restore the faith.
Procrastination in internet marketing is deadly, and I truly believe that it stems from the wealth of information we're subjected to, e.g. money-making strategies, the plethora of "must have" software, computer jargon etc. This can cause the kind of frustration and desperation that leaves many beginners feeling lost and on their own. This is why so many newbies fail from the very start - because they succumb to the information overload and end up taking no action at all.
In order to generate and maintain enthusiasm in the newbie, one must deliver a clear system which shows how to make online profits, the internet equivalet of paint-by-numbers. The Easy Chair Millionaire meets these requirements. A recently released product, The Easy Chair Millionaire takes the newbie by the hand and walks them through a simple method in which to make hard cash online.
The genius of this product is that it throws everything else out of the window. The Easy Chair Millionaire has a simple system that almost anybody could find success with and, brilliantly, it is undoubtedly one of the quickest ways to make cash on the internet. You don't need to build a website, host a domain or dabble in that thing called HTML. All you need is a willingness to learn and the diligence to apply the methods. The techniques are so fast that you should be making money within a few hours of purchasing the product.
Perhaps most appealingly, The Easy Chair Millionaire is user-friendly. There is no assumed knowledge. And the creator of the product admits to being lazy! He certainly comes across as a man we can all identify with. The methods he supplies are meant to be quick to apply and quick to reap from. Overall, this is a terrific product for the beginner. It has a clear step-by-step system for almost anyone to start generating immediate online profits. You read the manual, you follow the rules, and you can do good money almost instantly. The only question is - do you have the discipline to take action today?
