Choosing the right domain name is key when starting a new venture. There are a number of ways you can look at a domain but I think there are 3 main points you should think about:

• Domain Branding
• Domain Keywords
• Domain Credentials

Each of these is a big factor when choosing your domain but sometimes its hard to find a domain that’s for sale/not taken that has all these benefits. In fact it can be impossible. I look at having just one of these factors as a plus. If it has two great. All three, your on to a winner! It also depends on what your going to use the domain for. Lets have a look at what each of these factors means.

Domain Branding, in my eyes, is how the domain looks to a prospective visitor. Is it a pretty domain? Is it short? Is it catchy? Does it have brand-ability? Domains that are long, have numbers or dashes in, or don’t make sense are great examples of domains with no brand-ability. They look poor and do not create the good first impression you want.

Domain Keywords. Is your domain keyword rich? Is it a phrase that someone would search for? This can clash with branding sometimes. www.google.com has brand-ability but doesn’t really mean anything to the user, its not something the user would search for in keywords. Where as something like www.dogtraining.com isn’t exactly a brand name but its keyword rich and there for would be more likely to do well in search rankings.

Domain Credentials are all the extra factors that come with ’second hand’ domains. Page Rank, Age, Back links are all big pluses when searching for a domain. Of course a domain with all of these factors is A. likely to be harder to find than a new domain and B. a lot more expensive. The reason for this is obvious though – having any of these is really going to help boost a new websites popularity in the search engines.

You can probably see now why I say finding a domain with all of the above is almost impossible to do and if you find one that you think has all three then grab it with both hands! It takes good judgement to decide which of these factors is most important for your project and of course it does depend on exactly what sort of website your building.

Domain Extensions are also another important factor when looking to buy. I always go for a .com if its available but if your looking for authority in the county you live in your national extension may be a better idea. A plumbing website in the uk for example should probably go for the .co.uk extension. The second best (in my opinion) is .net with .org coming a close third. .asia seems to be the next up and coming extension but for obvious reasons I avoid these along with .eu (they may be good for investment options though).

If your stuck for domain ideas then you have a few options. One of my favourite places to look is the Godaddy Auction site. You can input your keyword and search through a tonne of second hand domains, a lot of which are aged and some have page rank. I’ve bought a lot of my domains here and its good fun searching through the auctions! Another place I like is ‘Just Dropped’ (Google it), you can search here by keyword and the site will list a load of domains that have just expired. There are few other sites like this.

My personal chain of thought when looking for a new domain is this. Older domains are always a must for search engine optimization. I usually look for a domain name that is at least 3 years old. Google puts a lot more ‘trust’ on older domain names. For this reason I only usually buy new domains if the name is really good. Next I decide if I want a domain for brand-ability or a domain thats keyword rich. For niche websites, comparison websites, affiliate websites etc, I usually go for keyword rich domains (www.dogtraining.com is a good example of this.) Remember that long tail key phrases are a lot easier to rank for than shorter phrases. Www.trainingyourdogtosit.com would be a lot easier to rank for that www.dog.com.

If im starting work on something a but special – this blog for example! Or a website with an original idea that will cater to a large mass of people – I may think more about brand-ability. Getting a brand name established and recognizable will do wonders for an online business. I hope my own domain here is a good example of this! (Although, you may not agree!). Let me know!

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Hopefully by this point you understand the key concepts behind article marketing – writing short articles based around a certain keyword with a link back to your website, and submitting them to various article directories in the hope that they pick up traffic.

In my opinion article marketing is one of the greatest tools at the internet marketers disposal – whether your a beginner or a ‘guru’. I have never stopped using articles as a promotional tool, in fact they are still one of my favourites. Building links AND traffic with one method is what makes article marketing so attractive but I do do things a little differently that I used to.

Writing Yourself vs. Hiring A Writer.

If your a little tight for money then you have no choice but to write yourself. If this is true for you then bare a few things in mind;

• Keep your articles short (I used to write 250-300 words per article), this will allow you to write more articles, which equals more chances of good rankings.

• Make keyword research count. Writing articles can be very time consuming so make sure your not wasting time and research your keywords well. As a beginner, id stick to the ‘under 10,000 competition’ rule, although it varies for everyone. Starting off low allows you to make sure you understand the basics, once your comfortable with this – start on phrases with higher competition.
• Make each article count. If an articles bringing in traffic – milk it. Link to it in as many ways as you can, write more articles under the same keyword and submit to other directories. If a certain key phrase is working for you, try and dominate that phrase in the search engines. Stick to what works.

If you have reached the stage where you have money to spare the first thing I would always suggest is outsourcing an article writer. This can free up a lot of your time to work on other aspects of your promotions and can speed up the process of getting new articles and back links pointing to your site.

How much should you spend? It always depends on where you look and how lucky you are. If you find a good writer that’s cheap, hold on to him! They can be hard to come by. I generally pay between $2-4 for an article of around 300 words, a lot of writers offer discount if you order in bulk. I usually build up a key phrase list of around 80 keywords (2 x 80 = $160 per batch) and send them to my writer. He will then send the articles back to me when he’s done and I will send payment. Then its just a case of submitting them.

Places to look for writers include:

www.elance.com

www.guru.com

www.getafreelancer.com

Knowing where to submit your content is key to your strategy. This differs from person to person so there’s no solid rule – just learn what works for you. I always use Ezinearticles first and foremost but I also submit to Buzzle as much as I can. They only allow you to submit five articles at a time so it can be a bit tedious but I get great results there. After that I wait and watch. If an article picks up traffic i’ll start linking to it. Sometimes A good technique can be to use the articles that arn’t picking up much traffic to link to the ones that are. You can do this by resubmitting the article to other directories pointing to the article your targeting. If a key phrase seems to be generating a decent amount of traffic I will create more articles using this phrase, submitting a couple to the same directories and a few more to others (Articles Base, Go Articles etc). Remember, if some things working – stick to it. Dominate that key phrase as much as you can!

There is a list of article directories you can use here:
(directories are listed by Page Rank and Alexa Rank)

http://www.vretoolbar.com/articles/directories.php

What makes a good article? Think Link Bait! Top ten lists, humour, controversy and just plain engaging information all make good articles. One thing to bare in mind is that people usually SURF the internet. The keyword being surf. People jump from page to page and more often than not will not read through a long article. For this reason keep your paragraphs short and make your Bio box stand out. Bulletin Points are great for articles, they attract the readers eye and short chunks of information are a lot easier to digest than large paragraphs.

Always remember to use your keyword in the title, first paragraph and throughout the rest of the article (without over doing it). Stick to around 2% keyword density (Ezinearticles doesn’t allow any more than that these days anyway). Remember to think about your Title! Just using the key phrase won’t entice people to click. People like ‘How To’s’ and ‘Best Ways To’ – you need to stand out from the crowd. What’s more attractive?

Train A Dog To Sit.

or

How To Train A Dog To Sit In 24 Hours.

Easiest Way To Train A Dog To Sit.

Top 10 Ways To Train A Dog To Sit.

Making the bio box attractive and engaging is a must! This is where you need people to be drawn to and its the place that links to your site, so make it count. If I have a batch of 50 articles ready to submit i’ll write 4 bio boxes and alternate between them. Whatever your sales point is, use it in the bio box. Avoid phrases like ‘for more information’ and ‘to find out more’. This is boring and doesn’t attract the readers eye. Instead think of something along the lines of:

Training your dog to sit can be time consuming and tedious if you don’t have the right advice. We’ve compared the top techniques side by side so you can find out exactly what will work for you and your dog. To see which technique is the most popular head over to http://www.yoursite.com

Finally I’d like to re-make this point again; If you have the money, outsource. Its one of the best decisions you can make for your business. If you spend $100 on articles the least you get out of it is 50 fresh back links to your site. If after a couple of weeks you resubmit them to another directory thats 100 back links. I think even this is worth the money but when you combine it with at least a small amount of traffic (which from 50 articles, with proper keyword research, your guaranteed to get) your bound to make that $100 investment back.

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As you may know there are a lot of sites on the net that revolve around people asking questions on any subject and anyone being able to answer them. The most famous of these sites is probably Yahoo Answers. Anyone can search for a question that they may be knowledgeable about and supply an answer.

This can be hugely beneficial to marketers for obvious reasons. Especially if you have real quality answers to give. Avoiding spamming is a must when adding these sites to your marketing efforts. You should only link back to your site if it really does add quality to the answer. This works better for larger niches, where more people will be asking questions. Taking dieting as an example. A quick search on Yahoo Answers for the keyword dieting will provide a lot of results. If you have a website that compares well known diets side by side there may be a lot of answers you can answer, including a link back to your site.

Lets take a look at a real life example. I have a website that focuses on the ‘data recovery’ niche. I use my favourite method with this site – the comparison website. On the site I compare 10 of the best known programs. There are usually a lot of questions on the ‘answer’ sites that go along the lines of:

I have accidentally deleted photos off my SD Card, can I retrieve them?

And…

I accidentally deleted files out of the recycle bin but realized there was something I need in there! Can I recover the files?

My answers would usually look something like this:

The quicker you try and recover the files the better chance you have of finding them. A lot of paid data recovery programs offer a free scan to check they can find your deleted file before you buy the software. There’s also a lot of free software if you do a quick search on google but sometimes the commercial programs do a better job. I would suggest having a look through the software on this site: http://mywebsite.com

Remember, provide a quality answer! This is even more important on Yahoo because the person who asks the question gets to choose a best answer, this answer is then listed above the other answers. (Also the questions and answers don’t get deleted once its been answered and Yahoo Answers gets great rankings in google and other search engines – this is why its so good for exposure!)

Yahoo Answers is a ‘no follow’ site but this doesn’t discourage me – I’ve had a great deal of traffic come from them before and If you answer a relevant question well it can be very profitable.

Of course a site without the ‘no follow’ tag is even better. That’s why I love www.help.com. It gets great rankings in Google AND it allows ‘followable links’. Take a look now and search for a question in your niche.

Here’s a few more similar sites that are all worth time. Experiment with them and see what happens!

http://www.answerbag.com

http://www.answers.com (Doesn’t allow links but still great for exposure)

http://www.blurtit.com

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If there was one piece of advise I had to give to any web marketer who was just starting off (whether your an affiliate marketer, a website designer or someone trying to create a successful website) it would be this; Content, Content, Content. From the very beginning you should be making your content interesting, appealing and helpful. Make it better than the rest and everything else will follow. You can do all the link building and site promotion in the world but without ‘worthy’ content your success is going to be short term.

I have a formula I like to use when working and its this:

Exceptional Quality Content + Huge Exposure = Long Term Success.

The reason for this is self explanatory but a lot of people fail to realise it. We all know the internet is huge. And the amount of competition in any area is growing and growing more and more everyday. If we provide timeless, quality information you are FAR more likely to succeed.

Image by: Thomas Shahan

Is this a problem though? Creating content that’s better than everyone else’s isn’t as easy as that? Is it? Well the great thing about the internet is that everything you need to succeed is right in front of you. Including your competition. Take the time to visit all the high profile websites in your niche. See what they offer and decide how you can improve on it.

Information is free! Take the best of all your competitors and put it together, then go one further, adding more! It excites me building a website, especially if you are working towards building something great. And this excitement can drive you into really pushing the boundaries.

Lets get one thing straight though, when I say exceptional quality content, I don’t necessarily mean the flashiest content or the largest amount of content. Quality can come in small doses. So dont worry if your not the technical type. This can come later, if at all. A quality website can come in many forms. For some its great writing. For others great research. For some, it is the flashy graphics. The way you do it doesn’t matter.

Remember to put yourself in the viewers shoes. Take yourself out of the marketers mind set! What would THEY want? What exactly would they be looking for? And if if was YOU, what would you want to be told or shown?

The possibilities in quality are endless. And anyone has it in them to provide a certain type of quality – what can you provide?

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The world of affiliate marketing on the internet has grown and grown over the years to become the giant it is today. The possibilities of affiliate marketing are endless, and the real beauty of it all is the ability to work from anywhere in the world, promoting any product or niche that interests you. The freedom of affiliate marketing is what draws people to the field, but what you have to remember is that whatever your doing, wherever your doing it, there will be a lot of work involved. I think this is the main reason people fail when trying to build an internet based business. A lot of people come into this field for a ‘quick fix’ or an easy life style. It doesn’t happen! The number one rule – TAKE ACTION! Learning by trial and error is the only way to get anywhere. So get dug in.

Affiliate marketing, in principle, is simple. You are the middle man between the business and the consumer. Promoting a certain product and sending prospective buyers to a companies website. The Company will the pay you in one of 3 ways;

Pay Per Sale: Each time a customer is sent to a website, by you and in turn buys a product you get credited. The amount you earn varies greatly from product to product. Digital products are attractive to affiliate marketers because you can usually earn a large percentage of the cost because there are no reproduction costs for the seller. For Example, an E-book about ‘Training Your Dog’ That costs $40 has no other cost (no printing costs, packaging costs or posting costs) and because of that sellers offer up to 75% of the final sale. That, of course, means that every time you send someone to the ‘Dog Training’ Website and that person purchases, you get paid $30. Great!

Pay Per Click: A lot of companies offer pay per click incentives. Google Adsense, for example, is a big player in this field. You put adverts on your website that are supplied by the seller and every time someone clicks on the advert, you get paid. The Price per Click is usually very small (around 5 cents) but this can add up to large amounts if the advert gets a lot of clicks.

Pay Per Action: The other way you as an affiliate can get paid is per Lead or Action. This is probably the least used form of affiliate marketing. Every time you send someone to the sellers websites and that person performs a specified action (for example, enters their e-mail address or signs up for a free trial) you then get paid. Again the amount you receive varies greatly but you could expect anywhere between 10 cents and 100 dollars.

So, so far we have You (The Affiliate) sending customers to an online business. But how do you get those prospective buyers in the first place? Where to we find people that may be interested in buying that product?

The life line of any website/online business/internet marketer is traffic. If your not sure, traffic is the term for the amount of people viewing your website (also known as hits or visits). So you want LOTS of traffic – nothing can be done without it. Lets put this into context. You could have to most beautiful, informative and valuable website in the world – this website could sell gold bullion for a dollar per tonne! But without anyone to view your offer, the offer is worthless. This is why traffic is the most important aspect of any online business. And this is also why it should be your number one priority.

This may sound like a simple concept but the reality of traffic generation is very tough. In fact its the hardest part of building an online business (whether it be an online shop or an affiliates website) and is the number one reason why people give up. In fact research shows that 94% of people who start trying to earn money online fail and lack of traffic is definitely why. But don’t let this put you off! Use this fact to your advantage – more people failing equals less competition for the rest of us and I will guarantee you that if you keep working at this business (a business that can seem impossible at times) you WILL succeed in the end. And like many things that involve hard work – the rewards are great. The Ability to control how and when you work, not to mention where. The ability to work at home surrounded by your family. The freedom to make your own decisions without a boss to answer to. And finally the knowledge that the sky really is the limit, you can choose to work in whichever niche area you want and the earning potential is limitless.

So with this little inspirational talk out the way, lets get back to the basics! Where were we?! Oh yeh – Traffic Generation.

Lets go back to our early example of ‘Dog Training’. And lets also say that you have a website up and ready to go (don’t worry we’ll get to this later). Your Website promotes a product that helps train dogs – its a great product and your promotional website includes a review of the product and a couple of other related products. When a visitor clicks through from your website to the Dog training website and makes a purchase, you get paid a percentage. Nice.

But now, of course, we want people who are interested in dog training to see our website. In fact Ideally, we want people who are LOOKING for dog training courses to see our website. And Ideally, we want lots and lots of them – we want lots of traffic!

Marketers go about getting traffic in a number of ways and the places you can get traffic are limitless. You should always be researching new traffic generation techniques as this is, as we said, the life line of your business. For the purposes of this article though we are going to concentrate on a few of the more popular traffic techniques (and the ones that work for affiliate marketers like ourselves.)

Image by: Nrbelex

S.E.O (Search Engine Optimization) – Optimizing your pages for search engines rankings.

SEO is the practice of working towards higher rankings in search engines such as google. This is a huge topic to cover so for the purposes of this article I will give it a very quick overview. When a search engine looks at a webpage it will take the most common keywords and rank the page accordingly. There are many factors to achieving high search listings, including the age of the site, the content and the keyword density. But the main way search engines determine rankings is the links pointing to the site/page. The more links you have pointing to you (these links act as a sort of voting system) the higher you can rank. Most traffic you will get will revolve around this principle.

Paid Search Listings (Adwords etc)

Paid Search Engine Listings (Google Adwords for example) allow you to place an advert for a certain keyword. You will pay for your advert when someone clicks on it (eg 10 cents per click). So, going back to our dog training example, you may want your advert to appear when someone searches for the term ‘dog training videos’. You would write a small advert (these are the adverts that appear on google at the top and to the right of the other listings) and set what the highest amount is you are willing to pay per click. Google will then display your advert according to how much your highest bid is compared to other advertisers (eg if you set your highest bid to 10 cents per click, you will place below someone whos sets their highest bid to 11 cents per click). Once again there is way to much to cover in this topic for this article but I will get back to it later.

Article Marketing

Article marketing is the act of writing short articles in your niche and submitting them to article directories for exposure, links and traffic. This is probably the most commonly used method of generating traffic for start up affiliate marketers because its cheap, easy to learn and highly effective. Once again we will go into this in more detail later on. Article directories allow you to submit your short articles to them with a link back to your website. Because these directories already have high listings in the search engines, your articles can also achieve high rankings and the traffic that comes with it. You can base your articles around a certain keyword (eg ‘Dog Training Videos’) and the more articles you write the more chances of high listings and traffic you can expect. There is an art to article marketing and a number of sites you can submit to but we will get to this later. You can also pay others to write articles for you (writers generally charge around $5 per 500 word articles) if you don’t see yourself as the writing type.

Blogging

Blogging is another great way of achieving a huge amount of traffic over time. Although this is more of a long term technique hopefully you know what a blog is. Blogs can be set up quickly and easily, and adding good content and getting links to your blog can get you great traffic and a lot of readers. Blogging uses the same techniques as article marketing and search engine marketing. Again this is a huge topic and a long term goal. More later.

NOTE:

All of these traffic generation techniques are ONLY techniques. Good marketers adapt them and use them together in a way that suits their goals. Bear in mind that they all take work to achieve results and anything that offers you quick riches can be guaranteed to be absolute rubbish. That being said, keep an open mind and be open to new ideas and techniques.

If you find any of this confusing, DONT WORRY! Take one step at a time and soon enough everything will make sense. Perseverance is a key quality in any start up affiliate marketer and although quick success is achievable, a good working attitude will get you a long way!

Image by: jonrawlinson

So lets back on track. So far you know that there are a number of ways of generating traffic that’s targeted to your niche (lets stick to dog training for this example) and you also know that you need to eventually send your traffic/customers to a products website to hopefully get paid.

So far I’ve missed two things out. First, how do you get a web page up that promotes the product? (the site you send all your traffic to), And second, where do you find products to promote?

Well the first thing you’ll need to do whenever you start a project is find a product to promote (or a niche to work in). There are many websites that offer a gateway between you (the affiliate) and business that need affiliates to promote their products. These websites handle all the transactions and make sure you get credited where your due. They also offer marketplaces full of products to promote, usually organised into categories. A couple of the big ones are:

www.clickbank.com

www.commisionjunction.com

Clickbank is usually regarded as a good place for beginner affiliates to start. All the products are digital products (e-books, software, videos etc) so they are fairly straight forward to start promoting. You can browse though the Clickbank marketplace or search by keyword and visit websites to have a look at the products you could promote. Once your happy with a product you can generate a hoplink. A hoplink is a link to the products websites that has your personal tracking code in it. This means that whenever you send someone to the website through that link and they in turn make a purchase, you will automatically get credited within your Clickbank account.

You should take the time to familiarise you self with Clickbank. Sign up for an account and have a look around. Read the FAQs and search through the marketplace. (If your stuck for ideas search for our example of dog training).

NOTE: Dog Training is just an example of a niche for the purposes of this article! I wouldn’t suggest using this niche when your starting off as it is swamped with affiliates and highly competitive.

Of course Clickbank & Commission Junction are not the only places you can find products to promote. In fact these days most big websites will have an affiliate program and even a lot of the smaller ones. Amazon.com is another example that will allow you to promote any of the products on their site (that’s a lot!) and will pay you a commission percentage.

Another way to find products to promote is to simply do a google search. You can search for any product or niche you can think of followed by ‘affiliates’ to do a bit of research. Go to Google now and search for ‘dog training affiliate program’ to see what comes up! This is a great way to search for products to promote and will also familiarise you with the niche you are researching.

A word about choosing niches to work in: The beauty of affiliate marketing is that you can work in whatever area you wish. If your interested in basket ball you could look for products to promote in the ‘basket ball clothes’ area. Or if your interested in Spicy Food you could look for ’spicy food cookbooks’ to promote. These two examples are good examples of ’small niches’ compared to something along the lines of ‘losing weight’ or ‘credit cards’ which are HUGE and very profitable niches – this is not necessarily a good thing for us! Big niches tend to have a lot of competition which can make things hard for affiliate marketers – especially beginners. When your starting off, start with smaller niches. It will probably also take you a few tries to find a niche that’s profitable so don’t get discouraged if something isn’t working. Start again and try something new. The key for beginners is to find a profitable niche that hasn’t got much competition. (more on competition later).

So you’ve found a product to promote that looks pretty solid, what’s next? Well, you need a way to promote that product – a central page that you can send all your traffic to. There are a few options at this point. Some people write a review of the product with their affiliate links at the end. Some people compare it against other products of its type. Some people make a site all about the niche the products in, trying to sell the product at some point on the site. Either way you will need to create some sort of page to publish to the intenet.

Don’t panic if your thinking ‘I don’t know how to make a webpage!‘ – this is fine! Although its something you’ll what to learn at some point in the future (and it can be surprisingly easy), for now there’s a number of ways of getting around this. There are a number of website’s that offer you a place to create content for free. Blogging is a great example of this. You can easily set up a blog on www.blogger.com (googles blogging platform) which is very user friendly. You can choose the address you want (if it hasn’t already been taken), the titles you want to use and all the content you want to add. You can then improve and add to this at any later point. Blogger is not the only way of doing this. Squidoo is a similar site that allows you to create a page very easily that you can use to promote your product. Heres a list of a number of sites you will do well to familiarise yourself with. These are all sites that you can use to promote a product. Look around them and have a play! Don’t worry about what your doing – try and write something about something your interested in:

www.Squidoo.com

www.Hubpages.com

www.Blogger.com

www.Weebly.com

www.Wordpress.com

Once your familiar with the sort of things these sites do, you can proceed to start promoting your product. Lets once again go back to our dog training example and imagine that we have found an e-book all about dog training. Your happy with what the product offers and have created a hoplink to send your traffic through (assuming the products on clickbank).

Image by: chrisL_AK

For this example we’ll stick to the review style page. You could write a short article (around 500 words) summarizing the product and telling people about the good points of the product. Remember that your trying to sell this product but also remember that you are trying to provide quality to the reader. You can then insert your link to the product at the end of your review (this is called pre-selling). You could use any of the above sites to do all this but I would recommend Squidoo for beginners, you can also add photos and a few other extras like a comment section for your review article.

Hopefully by now you understand the principles behind promoting a product and creating a page that you can promote it from. You hopefully also understand that once you’ve created that page there’s a number of techniques you can use to generate traffic.

For the purposes of this article i’m going to stick to what I believe is the easiest way for beginners to learn about traffic generation – Article Marketing. As well as being a great way to get some traffic, article marketing can teach you a lot about how the internet works (specifically how google works). The premise is simple, you write a short article about a topic in your niche with a link pointing to your promotion, you can then submit your article to a couple of directories and hopefully see it getting picked up by google, which in turn should hopefully bring in readers and clicks through to your site. To do all this we need to learn about keywords and keyphrases on the internet.

Keywords & Keyphrases.

Google & Other search engines trawl the internet looking at all the content on different websites. When they find new content they analyse it, and determine how it should be listed in one very important way – Keyword Density. Lets go back to our favourite example; If your write an article about dog training, the term ‘dog training’ is likely to appear in the article more than any other phrase. Google will see this and determine that your article is about Dog Training, it will then add it to their search results accordingly – Great! Well, sort of – The trouble is that ‘Dog Training’ is probably included in millions of other web pages! Hmmm – competition.

This is where keyword research comes in. When writing an article or creating a new webpage, the first thing you need to do is keyword research to decide exactly what term you want to try and get a good listing for. For this exercise head to googles keyword research tool here:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

This is a great free tool, which you will end up using a lot! So its time to familiarise yourself with it! Enter the term ‘dog training’ in the first box and enter the ‘capcha’ details, click ‘Get Keyword Ideas’ and your away!

As you can see, a huge list of keywords related to ‘dog training’ appear. What’s really exciting is the fact that we can see how many times each term gets searched for every month. You can use this list to decide which keyword you are going to use for your article.

The Long Tail

When your choosing a keyword to write for bare in mind that shorter keyphrases are going to be more competitive because they are going to appear in more sites. This is not good for us. Think about it like this: The word ‘Dog’ which is very generic is going to appear in more pages that the phrase ‘Dog training videos’. ‘Dog’ is the short tail and ‘Dog training videos’ is the long tail. This makes shorter keyphrases a lot more competitive.

When starting off, i’d stick to key phrases that have under 10,000 targeted results in Google. Targeted results are pages that have the EXACT search query you are searching for. To do this we search with quotation marks. Eg “best way to train a puppy to sit”. If you type this into Google right now you will see that it returns a very low amount of pages. At the time of writing its 2! This is a perfect example of a key phrase we could write an article for. Try and build a list of 10-20 key phrases that have under 10,000 competition – the lower the better, as long as its something you think people would actually search for.

Once you have a list of keyphrases you can begin to write an article or two. Don’t panic! Keep the articles short (around 300 words) and simple. Don’t worry if you think your terrible at writing – a lot of us did at the start. Your articles will get better. Keep the paragraphs short and do a little bit of research into what your writing about. Use google to find a few key points about training puppies (sticking to our example) and just re-write what you find. Re-writing good information is great but make sure you never ’steal’ peoples work. Plagiarism is illegal and wont get you anywhere! Also google has a ‘duplicate content’ rule that means that content thats exactly the same as it is on another page won’t get listed!

Image by: tnarik

To make sure Google and the other search engines see your article as relevant to the key phrase you are writing for be sure to use the phrase:

A. In the title

B. In the first paragraph

C. few more times throughout the article

We call this keyword density and its a key point to think about whenever you create a new content on the internet. A good rule of thumb is to keep the keyword density to around 2% for the phrase you are targeting. You can check the keyword density of any text here:

http://www.markhorrell.com/tools/density.asp

Remember, the whole point of writing an article is to get people to click the link to your promotional page. You can link to your page at the bottom of your article in whats called a ‘bio box’. This is the place that you can use to promote what your trying to sell. Here is an example of a bio box:

Training a puppy to sit can take a long time if you follow the wrong advice! To find out about popular techniques that are guaranteed to work head over to http://www.yoursitehere.com

Here’s a few examples of articles that have been written in the Dog training niche, have a read through them and see if you could write an article in a similar fashion:

http://ezinearticles.com/?Do-You-Make-These-7-Common-Dog-or-Puppy-Training-Mistakes?&id=242440

http://ezinearticles.com/?Secrets-of-Dog-Training—How-to-Train-Your-Dog-at-Home&id=2472296

https://www.ezinearticles.com/?5-Tips-For-Potty-Training-a-Puppy&id=1413083

Once you’ve written your article its time to submit them to an article directory. They will then hopefully be picked up by the search engines! There are many article directories that you can submit to but the most popular is Ezine articles. Head over to their website at http://www.ezinearticles.com and sign up for a free account. You get 25 article submissions with your account after which your articles will be reviewed and you will usually get upgraded to a premium account, with unlimited submissions. Once you’ve signed up submit your article (or articles if you’ve written more than one) and wait! Once its been reviewed it will either go live or they will get back to you with a problem that needs to be addressed. Ezine articles has a few rules which you will get used to as you submit articles. The main rule to remember though is not to be overly promotional. They definitely don’t like this and only allow you to promote your page/site in the bio box.

Travis Sago is, in my opinion, the leading expert on article marketing (he calls his method ‘bum marketing’) and he has a completely free course which would be good for any beginner to read through. His website is at http://www.bummarketingmethod.com

My advice here, is to write as many articles as you can for your chosen niche and hopefully you’ll start getting a steady amount of traffic to your promotional page. As you write articles you will start to learn how to write to promote. You will learn what works and what doesn’t and with a bit of persistence you will start making a small amount of money. If you don’t, don’t panic – keep at it and change your tactics.

There are many other ways of generating traffic other than article marketing but for beginners I believe this is by far the best way to learn how the internet works and to get a feel for what will work for you.



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