Make Money On Your Articles - Photo Courtesy of iprole
I want to share my favorite article submission sites. I only use two article submission sites right now and they aren’t the traditional places I see most bloggers refer others to such as Ezine Articles.
With these article publishing sites that I recommend, you have a bit more control over what you do with it and they are more like mini sites. You can even add affiliate links to the information you publish to these sites. They also have modules for you to add, so you can refer someone to other resources that you can make a commission from if they purchase something after clicking through.
I have tried others, but I either had to pay to use all the good features, or they made it hard or impossible to add any links to the articles. Squidoo and HubPages both have great communities that are very helpful and supportive. They also have revenue sharing for their members. The royalties that you can earn come from the ads on the site. They will share the revenue from those ads with the publishers, which is way cool.
Those are my referral links that you can use to sign up and start creating articles. I could possibly get a commission if you use those links.
Have you has experience with HubPages and Squidoo?
Ok, great question folks. I’m glad you asked. Article marketing is is the concept of submitting an article (it doesn’t have to be long) to different sites that will either publish the information for you or allow you to publish the article to yourself.
What are Backlinks?
Oooh! Another great question. Backlinks are links on one site that lead back to your blog or website.
Back to the main programming.
Article marketing is another way to get links of your blog or website out there on the great big web directing traffic (hopefully) back to your site. This will help generate traffic for your website in two ways.
People clicking the links.
SEO – search engines ranking your site higher with more links going to your site.
Remember that the more quality and relevant sites that you have your links on, the better Google will rank you and the more likely you will get organic traffic from searches people will do on the search engines looking for information you have.
A Word of Caution!
You shouldn’t go out and post links on as many sites as you can find all at once just to have a bunch of back links. It doesn’t work this way. This is spamming and will get you on the bad side of the search engines. Not to mention it will turnoff any potential visitors.
Again, back to our regular programming.
Do some research and find an article submission site that you would like to use. You do want to use more than one site. That way your information will show up across the web and someone searching for that type of information (and the search engines) will see you as having more authority.
I recommend starting with one site, then when you get familiar with it you can branch out to another. While you are getting familiar with the site, you are also getting familiar with the community on that site. (If you use one that has a community.) When you are involved in the community, you are building relationships with others that will help you along in your journey. They will also visit your site and may keep coming back if they find it interesting.
Since you want the articles to be relevant to your topic, you can talk about your product, service. I write an article about similar information to what I have on my blog. I will write my blog post, and then I go and write a companion piece to the post with a link in the article to my blog. I will choose a small part of the post that I can expand on and instead of maybe writing another post I just create an article. In the article I will add relevant links by choosing words in the article that would be relevant to the blog post and make them a link leading to the post.
In my previous post Components to Increase Website Traffic Generation I said I had planned on doing some follow up posts regarding each of the components I mentioned for getting traffic. So, here is the post on social bookmarking.
The idea behind social bookmarking is to get your links out there for others to come across and visit your site. By having links to your posts or website on these bookmarking sites, you are exposing it for more people to come take a look and see whatcha got. Frankly though you probably won’t get a ton of traffic from these sites. It’s a bit like playing roulette. The odds aren’t in your favor, but you will occasionally get some traffic from those links. Who knows, you may even get lucky and your link makes it to the top of the social bookmarking popularity contest and you do get a ton of traffic.
There is a bigger benefit to having links on some of these social bookmarking sites than what I have mentioned so far. They are great for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) purposes and getting backlinks. Backlinks are links on a site that link back to your site. Part of the calculations that a search engine uses when assigning PageRank to a site is based on how many sites link to your site.
Now, don’t get carried away and start bookmarking all over the place. The search engines like to see natural and genuine links. If all of a sudden you have 100′s of bookmarks that weren’t there 2 days ago, Google and the other search engines will count that against you. You can bookmark to one or two bookmarking sites that you are active on, but don’t go crazy.
You can in-fact find a ton of (looking for a decent word here) poop, when you perform a search for “social bookmarking” or “social bookmarking traffic”. There are many folks out there selling automated bookmarking tools and bookmarking services. Stay away from these! These will get you in trouble with the search engines. It is much better to have links happen naturally than by having 300 of them suddenly appear out of know where. The search engines do know the difference. I don’t know how, but they do. You will see what traffic you do get from the search engines start to fall dramatically if you use these methods.
What you can do, other than bookmarking on the one or two sites you are active on, is to have a tool on your blog or website that allows the visitor to be able to share and bookmark your stuff for you. You know, like that little bookmarking button I have at the bottom of every post. This way they can save it for later if they want to come back to it or send it to his/her sister. Once it’s on the bookmarking site (and assuming he/she didn’t mark it as private) other people that use that bookmarking site can see the link and possibly pick it up.
It helps when you bookmark yourself to carefully select your keywords that you are listing with the bookmark. You want to make them highly relevant to your site and terms that someone would use when searching for your site on the search engines. This is what the search engines will see when looking at the other site to determine which search results your site shows up in.
I found a video on YouTube that I thought was useful and relevant to today’s topic. Have fun! There is more we could cover, but we will have to do that another time. You can find more tips on how to use social bookmarking sites to get traffic on my Squidoo lens.
