Article Marketing SEO Strategies

I am currently making some money through the micro niche blogging approach where I find small niches, make blogs and websites about of them, optimize them for search engines and then monetize. So far, I’ve been seeing good results with one niche which has made it possible for this business to pay for itself (and then some) and has given me the opportunity to pay for tools and services that I believe to be very essential in every internet marketer’s tool box.

The main search engine optimization (SEO) strategy that I’ve found success in making money on the internet so far is article marketing. I believe the principle behind this method is sound and will never ever go obsolete as long as contextual search algorithms are around. The internet, after all, is information-driven and as long as people use it to find information, marketers who understand and take advantage of this fact will never go out of business.

This blog has two main objectives: 1) To help me focus on my efforts (more on this later) and 2) To help fellow noobs focus theirs.

Let me first be clear that I will never claim that the methods you will find on this blog are the only ways to make money online or to do search engine optimization. There are a bunch of other roads that you can take but I believe that a beginner’s best chances will be in developing their SEO skills to get their online projects ranking well in search results.

This is what it’s all about: increasing your chances of success. Yes, you can go around chasing for social traffic (Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.) rather than search engine traffic but simple logic will dictate that social traffic will not get you the targeted exposure you will need to sell your products or let the information you have find its way to those who truly need it.

This is not to say that you can’t make money with social traffic. You certainly can and will as long as you get tons of them. Most of the traffic you get from social sources will be useless in terms of conversion (visitors who actually buy a product). A visitor on your Facebook page who clicks on a link to your “oil filter” blog will most likely not have the profile of someone who’s more likely to buy than a visitor who clicks on your link found at the top of search results of, say, Google while searching for information on where to buy oil filters!

The Article Marketing SEO Strategy

The method that this blog espouses is based upon two very simple concepts: relevant content and relevant backlinks. You need lots of both.

You need to produce articles not only for your blogs but also for third party sites like article directories and blogs. The more relevant articles that contain backlinks to your sites there are, the more love you get from the search engines.

There are two ways to get those backlinks: 1) Network with other webmasters and bloggers and hope that they give you all the relevant backlinks you need and 2) Create your own network of sites so you can create your own third-party backlinks!

My suggestion is to do them both. There are various ways to accomplish both of them but mostly it will involve some form of article marketing to propagate those links pointing to your sites. This basically involves producing articles (self-written or outsourced) that are relevant to your sites’ or products’ main themes or niches and getting those articles spread around the internet. Now, since the articles will contain backlinks to your sites, it means the more you spread your articles around, the more links you propagate which the search engines love to eat for breakfast.

Article Marketing for Small Niches

The success I’ve had in optimizing my small niche blogs for search engines (e.g. Google) so far involves manual submissions to article directories (EzineArticles, Hubpages, Squidoo, ArticleDashboard, Buzzle, your own network blogs, etc.) only. Yes, it is possible to do a small-scale article submission campaign and get some really positive results. The key here is to find those low-competition niches and target the search engine users using articles for some link juice.

I’m moving up the ladder however and have acquired some tools to help me with my methods and perhaps facilitate a faster means to discover or develop new strategies. The objective is to be able to conduct larger scale campaigns to see how it does with more competitive niches to try and get me some of the bigger bucks. This blog will help me document the experiments I do with those tools.

Focusing your SEO efforts where they count

I have to admit that I am pretty much a lazy internet marketer right now because I am usually pretty slow with my campaigns and am unable to churn out as many web properties (articles, websites, etc.) out there as I would like. I am hoping to change this from here on.

The problem is analysis paralysis. You get so much information out there, a lot of them conflicting in so many levels, that you tend to freeze your ass off trying to make sense of them all. But honestly, while there are a lot of useful and helpful stuff you could read out there (including those of people I consider my mentors), the more you find yourself reading them the less productive you become.

One thing you and I need to learn in this business is that you need to spend most of your time working on your own damn sites and campaigns rather than commenting and posting in other people’s blogs and lurking in forums. Yes, I need to tell this to myself more and I’m hoping that this blog will help me become more productive by becoming my marketing campaigns diary of sorts where I can put my plans and report on my accomplishments relating to those plans.

Now, since one of my objectives is to make some money off of this blog, it will do me good to deliver on those plans and actually deliver something that is of value to the noobs and to fellow internet marketers who may be reading this blog. Be informed though that this blog will not be one of my main priorities as most of my time will be spent on my campaigns and that this blog will mainly serve as a report card of my successes and failures. Please don’t expect any frequent updates on these pages. My priorities must and should lie with my actual marketing efforts.

Develop my own internet marketing methods

The ultimate prize for all these is to develop a marketing plan that I can call my own. You can always find a guru method detailed in step-by-step fashion but I’m finding that it’s pretty difficult to adopt something that isn’t a product of your very own unique personality. The plan is to learn the fundamentals and the logical ideas behind this MMO gig and use those learnings to create my own system.

Note that the operative word here is “system”. I do have to be systematic and I have failed to do do so for the longest time (8 months to be exact since I started dabbling seriously into this). But I am determined, for my own sake, to come up with my own methods that can increase the chances of my marketing efforts and which I can replicate an infinite number of times (at least in theory).

The journey starts with the following general action plans (arranged in no particular order):

• The ultimate objective for every niche that I get into is to become an authority for that niche. Keyword research is essential here and I will always spend some quality time on this. In the coming weeks, I will be enrolling in Courtney Tuttle and Mark Butler’s Keyword Academy’s internet marketing course to help me learn how the pros do it.
• I will need to become more productive at churning out my own articles so I can create more of my own internet real estate which can very useful especially when it comes to providing those valuable backlinks. This is actually one of the toughest assignments of an internet marketing beginner especially if you don’t have the seed money to help you outsource this aspect of your marketing efforts. I’ve bought some really neat tools to help me with article rewriting to help me double my productivity with this. I’m aiming for that time when I can outsource hundreds of my monthly article needs. Although my current earnings can afford me some outsourced articles, I will choose to toil for this for now because I need to learn what works first before I go about outsourcing stuff.
• Will need to ramp up my Web 2.0 campaigns. Not so much as to make money but more so for keyword research and for some good support mini-sites. You can buy one of those fancy keyword tools or you can use a little Web 2.0 (Squidoo, Hubpages and Infobarrels) for your keyword research needs. If you’ve been in this business for some time, you’d know that those keyword tools are nowhere near accurate. It’s not uncommon that you find more traffic coming from a key phrase different from what you are trying to rank for which keyword tools indicate should bring in the top searches every month. Grizzly of Make Money Online for Beginners has indicated that most of his traffic are coming from another keyphrase which no keyword tools are catching. I have also seen this at work with my own projects. Not even Google’s keyword research tool is nowhere near accurate. I currently use Hubpages to tell me which low-competition key phrases to shoot for at the beginning. I need to ramp up my efforts with creating these mini-sites which can also be used to support your sites in terms of backlinks.
• I will try to detail the useful stuff here and try to apply it in making this blog rank for its main keywords. This blog will be a pretty good venue to pay it forward and I will try to share with fellow marketers, especially noobs, what I learn. This blog will not be like most “how to make money” A-list followers out there that doesn’t really share anything of use to MMO beginners. Guys, if you wish to put up your own make money blog, you will no not be providing any real value if you fill your pages with positive reviews after positive reviews of affiliate products that you have not even used! Well, theoretically, you can do that and still make a killing but judging from the sites that are at the top of this niche, you need to be more creative and not just promote worthless stuff that only aims to part noobs from their hard-earned cash. Providing real value is the name of the game and I hope to accomplish that with this blog with real world experiments and theory applications.

My Current SEO Campaigns

I’m currently actively marketing in three relatively small niches. I will not reveal exactly what they are but I am going to say in what general fields they belong to. They are in the electronics, sports and hobby niches. The last two are new efforts and I’m still only seeing trickle in organic traffic (search engine visitors).

I may have made a mistake in evaluating the competition in my sports niche thinking that it’s low competition. It’s actually quite competitive and I’m unsure how long it will take me to start climbing the ranks. I will keep at it though and see how article marketing will help me do just that. Right now, I’m going about things slowly by manually submitting articles to the top directories (will share my personal list here soon for the beginners’ reference) and letting the domain age a bit. I’m noticing that using automated article submission (even at a very cautious pace) at an early point of your site’s life may be turning off the search engines so I’ve stopped the campaign for now. I will continue develop it some more while I let it age for a couple of months or so. And after I get some legitimate, authority links, I might resume my automated article campaigns using various strategies (more details about this in future posts as well).

The hobby niche is something I’m doing for fun with a friend. It’s not a very serious endeavor but I’m seeing some potential in it (I might go the for some eBay monetization with this using a tool that Ben of Make Money Online with SEO is recommending (more on this in future posts, too). First objective is to determine how easy it is to rank for the main keywords. Initial findings look promising as I’m seeing trickles of SE traffic even without linking efforts yet.

My electronics niche is doing well and is my main source of inspiration in making money on the internet. I’m currently in the process of expanding my efforts into other related sub-niches in the hope of coming up with a huge authority super site that I hope could cover a lot of areas. Tall order for a beginner like me but I’m taking baby steps which I hope will count towards that end.

Immediate need right now is to produce articles, articles, articles. I’m off to do just that.

Later.