Why Should I Put Links in My Blog Posts?

You should try to write at least one link inside your blog post back to your own blog, a site linking to your blog, or some other location which eventually can lead back to your site or a product associated with your site. Why should you put links in your blog posts? It's simple... websites that rip your content and paste it on their own sites will take credit for your work no matter what measures you take to prevent it. Therefore, why not allow these sites which steal your content to become billboards? Why not turn this around and use those sites to drive traffic to your own?

Sounds simple and easy, but it actually takes some thought as you don't want to annoy your regular readers with links to your home page, so try to spice things up by linking back to old articles or sites which in turn link to your own. You can also put the name of your site in there without using a link, and I highly encourage this so that people will google and find you. The reason you should do this is because many of the sites which steal your content and reproduce it word for word will take out your hyperlinks which destroys the whole point of putting links into the posts in the first place. Therefore it would be wise to put your blog's name inside the article for users to search for it.

Best Article Sites for Generating Blog Traffic

There are many sites to choose from when attempting to generate traffic for your blog. I have found from personal experience that the sites with the most restrictions are generally the best ones to use. Sure it takes longer to generate content but they will give you the best results in the long run. While you wait for major article sites to publish your content, it is also wise to use less restrictive ones to publish immediately and get your content out there. Here are the sites I use for generating traffic to my blogs:

http://articoolz.com/

http://www.articlesbase.com/

http://ezinearticles.com/

http://www.3stepads.com/

http://www.squidoo.com/

http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/add.cgi

Every time I create an article on my blog I then modify it and submit to each of the above listed article sites. This guarantees that my content will start generating traffic for my blogs and the longer I've been successfully submitting to each of these sites the better the results. Of these sites, ezinearticles and squidoo are the most restrictive, followed by articlesbase and then the remaining three. Having a healthy mix of restrictions allows for content to be released over time and reach a wider audience.

Online Marketing - The Reverse of Real World Advertising

Whenever new members to the internet marketing community appear you can always see them making the same mistakes over and over again. One of these common but not well known mistakes is the idea of saving your best content for your premium products. Now obviously you will want to save some information for those that are willing to pay you money, but you should always be willing to put large chunks of extremely valuable information out there for free. Why? Because people surfing the internet are always looking for free information, and unless your free information is better than what they can already access, not many people are going to buy your product that costs money after reading your free information.

What you decide to put out there for free has to be enticing, valuable, instantly usable and leave the browsing internet user hungry for more. The information has to be good enough to make them think of it as more valuable than the other free information they've seen so far in their searching endeavors for whatever topic they are researching. Often times newer members of the internet marketing community will promise the best information behind an expensive curtain and not many people are going to be willing to risk their finances (even with refund guarantees) on information that is promised to them. If you instead offer some of your best information and then sell a decent amount of equally valuable data then your sales will increase substantially and your refund rate will go down as well.

You see perception is reality in the marketing world and you also need to deliver on the expectations of your clientele. The only way to do this is to deliver during the sales pitch with the same level of valuable information as you do after the sale. What I've done with this article is practice exactly what I preach, by giving you valuable information and pitching my product: Successful Blogging Story which also contains scores of useful tips that are just as important as this post.

Post Labels: Why are they important?

Post labels are an essential part of blogging. Those are the little categories which you can click on that appear below each post. Some blogs go nuts and will have a dozen labels per post, others (like mine) only use one or two labels per post. The reason I only use one label is that google looks at it for keyword SEO, and spamming too many of the same keyword through links and other uses throughout the website is a terrible idea.

Google hates spammers, and links are the first thing google checks when doing SEO on the body of the page. This goes for all links, not just labels, so be careful and use links to send readers to important information without spamming the links and their keywords all over the page.

Giving Stuff Away for Free

This is a difficult concept for most people who sell products online to wrap their minds around. First off, you want to give away as much stuff as you can for free without reducing the value of your online product. What's more, you want the free stuff to boost the confidence of the person with regards to buying your primary product. How do you do this you ask? Well you want to develop free materials that are 'stand alone' and capable of providing a small measure of success to the person who uses it, just enough to make them wonder how great the real thing must be. You DO NOT want to tease someone with useless information or give them free advertisements with no real knowledge behind them. This will turn them away from your product and make them believe it has no real value either!

Is Blogging a Dead Medium?

It's a sad fact that most blog readers are bloggers themselves, hence why blogs which focus on the blog writing audience do so well. I've had many friends and family members look at me like I have two heads when I show them how much money I make from blogging each week. "Seriously," they say, "... isn't blogging dead though?" The answer is that yes, blogging the way it used to be done is dead.

People who blog just for the sake of blogging are certainly a dead medium. Nowadays you have to compete with a thousand other bloggers in your same niche and the only way to do that is to provide content no one else can or to create a community which will attract even more visitors.

These are changing times but blogging is certainly not a dead medium. You just have to adapt and become a better blogger in the process.

Getting on a Bloglisting Site (Not a Blog Roll!)

Blog directory sites are basically directories for website categories, similar to EzineArticles but for blogs instead of articles. This is not the same thing as say a site roll, which is nothing more than a list of blogs one person in particular reads. Often you'll find site rolls on the right hand side of a blog and it will contain the title of the site in question as well as the latest post by that author.

Blog listing sites usually require that you leave a small rectangle on your site with a piece of code which allows them to track your website. This will help them when they show people using their site and searching through a category to find your blog.

To find a directory site, simply Google 'blog listing sites' and look around at what you find. Pick a free website that requires you to put a small bit of code for tracking onto your site and you're ready to go. Add the tracking software somewhere out of sight (I use the very bottom of my website for this purpose) and you will now hopefully start getting more visitors from the listing site you signed up with.

Don't stop at just one site though, be sure to get on as many as you can to improve your readership!

Getting on blog rolls is a great way to get readership, but if you want fresh new visitors who perhaps haven't even heard of your blog yet then you want to get on these blog listing sites. Remember, you can never get enough of this free traffic!

Simple Sales Funnel

Here is an example of a simple sales funnel you can follow when selling your clickbank products:

1. User finds your sales page thanks to an article you wrote that they found on google.
2. User opts to give you their email address in exchange for a free product you are giving away.
3. User receives several emails and eventually is given a link to your main product's sales page.
4. User clicks to buy your product.
5. You offer an additional product during the purchasing procedure. Call it Step 1 to X for purchase.
6. User purchases additional material.
7. After purchases are made, direct the user to a social media site which they can use for free for a month but will have to pay to continue using.

There is a simple sales funnel that will generate real income for you that can last a very long time.

Hello? is Anyone Listening to Me?

Blogging can be frustrating, especially at first, if you see no comments and believe no one is really reading your content which you worked so hard to create.

Getting a program like google analytics goes a long way in helping you grasp just how many people are really visiting your site and reading your content.

The best way to get started generating readership is to simply google around and find sites in your niche. If you've been blessed with google searchers finding your content (which you noticed because you went and got google analytics) then you will know what key words to focus on when looking for blogs with similiar content. Getting those blogs with similiar keywords to link to you is huge for google search engine optimization.

Don't despair, your readers are really out there, you just need to get within ear shot and be ready to impress them when they finally read your content.

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Importance of the Share Feature

You can add a 'share' feature at the bottom of your posts (simply google how to do this as it is really just a cut and paste job) on blogspot.com.

What's the power of this? There's no way to tell just how beneficial this feature can be for your site, unless of course you test it out. The share feature allows people to use any number of social networking sites (over 200 actually) to tell friends about what you've blogged about. This create a mediocre free link to your site which helps boost your rankings on google. What's more, your content gets passed via viral marketing to another person.

What's not to love?

I definately recommend getting a share feature for your blog!

Click Away! vs Catering Mentality

There are two very different ways to deal with comments on your blog, mainly complaints.

The first way to deal with complaints is to say "Click Away if you don't like the content!"

The Second way to deal with complaints is to say "Ok I will change X and modify Y to fit your needs, please don't go away!"

Obviously a happy medium of accepting the validity of complaints is where you will most likely succeed with blog comments. However, for some blogs it is better to simply be a jerk or an appeaser. It really comes down to not only the personality you blog as but also how many people are complaining.

Do some thinking on this concept and iron out for yourself how you will deal with complaints and suggestions on your own blog. Will you be an appeaser, a jerk, or somewhere in between?

Importance of Links Inside Articles

Whenever you write for your blog, website, etc. you should include links somewhere in the article to another page or site that you own. The reason for this is that there are thousands of automaticly generated websites indexed by google who steal content from other sites. These websites are often run by robots so the robot will just take the contents of your article and throw it on the front page of its site. By having a link you will get a backlink to that page eventhough the robot had no intention of siting its source.



When writing the backlink, be sure to give it some good SEO quality, so add alt text, use text instead of the link's url, etc. If your site starts to grow and other people look for content to write about, there is a good chance that they will steal your content and paste it on their own site. Even if your content is very old it can still be found and ripped, so always try to leave atleast one link in your articles to another part of your site, blog, forum, other articles, etc.