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!