Why Websites Work

Profiting from Articles - A Step-by-step Guide

2005-08-31T20:36:00.000+01:00

"Content is King" - that's a given, there's no debate. But how do you get content? Like most projects, breaking it into bite-size, easily digestible chunks makes the process realistically achievable. By creating articles, you build and develop that content.

So how do you profit from articles?
I, personally, find the best way to approach the 'process' of making mony from articles is to work backwards! That is, to determine what your ultimate goal is and then figure out each preceding step that leads to it.

Example:
Ultimate goal - sell an ebook
preceding step - subscriber reads recommendation in 5-part mini series
preceding step - article reader visits name squeeze page and signs up for mini series
preceding step - prosepct reads your article on someone elses website/blog/ezine
preceding step - publisher picks up your article from directory
preceding step - article submitted to directory
preceding step - you produce article

And try to keep a single focus for each step. For example, you want people to sign up for the mini series -- then the email capture/name squeeze page should only give them that option! Don't put tons of other links on that webpage which would give the visitor alternatives to signing up for the mini series. Keep it tightly focused -- keep the objective in mind.

So the tasks would be (for the above example), in this order:
1] Create the ebook - research and write - or outsource it through elance.com, guru.com, etc. - your product to make money on. If you're not sure of how to write an ebook, just write it in MSWord or your wp of choice and convert it to a .pdf document with a password protection. Upload that to your web server.
2] Create a single webpage introducing, recommending and soliciting orders for your ebook. Include a PayPal, StormPay or some other shopping cart link to order the book.
3] Write 5 short emails as a mini series (which include a link to your ebook order page) and put them into an autoresponder.
4] Create the single webpage with a compelling copy for why the visitor should sign up for your 5-part mini series and include the webform which links to your autoresponder.
5] Having got those 3 things above in place, now you need to write the article(s) that include a link in the resource box to your name capture webpage.
6] Finally, use ArticleAnnouncer to submit your article to the directories.

Important note: You do NOT need big, flashy, complex websites to profit from articles! A simple compelling page that directs them to an autoresponder. From the email messages in the a/r, you can send them to a simple order page for your own ebook or you can send them to an affiliate product page. Bottom line - Keep it simple!

If you're sending them straight to an affiliate page (I think capturing their email first is better but I include this as an option) from the article resource box, you won't need to do step 1, 2, 3 or 4 above.

If you're sending the reader to an affiliate page after capturing their email, miss out step 1 and 2. Step 3 could be a 5-part mini series, or you might just want to send them to an ezine you publish (which recommends your affiliate product) or send them to another great article (or part 2 of the article) stored in an autoresponder. But you'll need to give them some reason for them to give you their email address!

Articles are a very powerful method of attracting visitors to a webpage and ultimately to generating 'sales'. Readers of your article have already established a 'know, like and trust' relationship with you and are therefore much more predisposed to buying from you. They are the ultimate targetted traffic - and therefore the most profitable visitor! Get your articles out there and let them silently, effortlessly do their work.

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Article written by Rudi Ashdown and first posted at
http://www.whywebsiteswork.com.
Quickly and easily submit your article to dozens of
directories and ezine publishers - go to this
article submission information webpage.
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Zero-cost quality traffic! Impossible... or is it?

2005-06-30T21:30:00.000+01:00

Like most things in life - you get what you pay for. And the internet, generally speaking, is no different.

Take ebooks for an example. There are more free ebooks whirling around cyberspace than there are papparazzi and rumours buzzing around Katie and Tom! Every other website seems to offer one, and there are plenty of websites dedicated to nothing else but pushing these 'virtual scribblings'.
Now don't get me wrong... there are a few excellent free ebooks out there with some extremely insightful and useful information - but lets face it, most of them suck. Right? Quality advice usually has a price tag, and rightly so.

So what about traffic?
Getting traffic to our websites, as we all know, is the life-blood of our online ventures (whether it's for profit or pleasure). And there are a whole stack of ways to get it.
Unless you are very wet behind the ears, most people can generate some traffic - search engine submission, ezine advert, ppc's, banners, articles with a link back, heck even just telling all their friends! But traffic for traffic's sake is of very little value - and in some cases can be a mistake. For example, if your pay-per-click campaign pulls in a tidy 200 visitors a day but none of them buy because you chose the wrong keywords, that would start to hit your bottom line big time. Even a thousand visitors a day are useless, which ever way you get them, if they are simply not interested. Quality is the key, and in this instance quality means targeted - people who are genuinely interested in the subject of your website content and come predisposed to making a purchase.
To get this type of visitor to your webpages usually means spending one of two things - either money or time. Taking several days to optimise the webpage to get better natural search engine rankings and not to mention, before the advent of 'blog & ping', the 3 months it could take before the SE robot paid you a visit, it was for most people too much. Or you could write articles and send them to ezine publishers (or submit them one by one to article directories) in the hope their readers would click through to find your offer. The alternative would be to run banner ads on other websites (Tip: the quality of click thru's is not good because it is perceived as an advert to sell which means buying resistance on arrival at your site) or to run Google AdWords & Overture ppc campaigns but those generally involve a decent sized pot of gold you don't mind throwing away.

So can you get quality visitors for free? (free being both cost and time)
Well, if you have a substantial list of enthusiastic ezine/newsletter readers it certainly doesn't take hardly any time at all to blast a broadcast email out to them. And there's no cost involved once you have the software on your pc. But not all of us have masses of eager eyes watching their email inbox, at least not to start with! Mega blasting an ad to the free ad listing sites is generally a waste of time (albeit very little) as no-one really goes there to read them.

What else is there?
There's a new piece of technology that takes advantage of something we all do everyday - Surfing! We can now rack up substantial traffic to our website just by clicking on different webpages. "WHOAOA!" I hear you say "... you're not suggesting one of those 'homepage rotator programs' or visiting websites I have no interest in, are you?"
Absolutely not, although some people have acheived some good results with programs such as 'NoMoreHits' and 'Clicksilo'.
No, this is even better because you earn ad credits for every page you visit, not just the first page on connecting to the internet. And it is any page... the ones you want to go to. I heartily recommend this new technology for generating good quality traffic - good quality because the ad appears as an unobtrusive text link at the top of other peoples' browsers and the surfer clicks only when they are interested. It's totally free, takes less than 5 minutes to set up and then just let it work it's magic.
Zero-cost quality traffic for your website has never been easier - so it is possible!

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Article written by Rudi Ashdown and first posted at
www.whywebsiteswork.com.
To get a flood of free quality traffic to your website,
check out this free traffic generation technique.
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Easy... create webpage, blog and ping, collect the money!

2005-06-29T00:16:00.000+01:00

When I first came across the 'blog and ping' technique a few months ago, I have to say I was a bit unsure of how useful it would be. After all, the very words 'blog' and 'ping' sound more like something my 5 yr old son would get up to in his school playground! Not a serious business marketing concept, surely?
Of course, I've since seen the light and have started using the practice - but not to the same degree as I read some others have. 100's of pages here getting indexed... thousands of pages elsewhere visited by the search engine robots.

About the same time I started to read about the fascination with such programs as Directory Generator, Traffic Equaliser and other mass-producing template software. Now, I have huge respect for the likes of Armand Morin who produced DG and other top marketers like John Reese who extol the benefits of TE, but like so many of these new web techniques, I have my reservations. Here's my take...

Google, Yahoo, MSN et al are not blind. Nor are they philanthropic!
People search online for information. Period. Yes some then get their wallets out and make a purchase but the initial activity is to seek out information to solve the surfers’ problems, desires and curiosities. 'Information is king' is still true.

So if what people get when they click on the links in these search engines is a mass produced site with just a whole load more listings and the occasional rss-feed that's appeared on more sites than Anna Kournikova, surely surfers (searchers) are going to get hacked off and look for the information elsewhere. Which will eventually mean lost revenue for the SE.A page with yet more links isn't information! And most of the rss feeds are not unique and in some cases are not even relevant to the original search query.
But the thing that worries me most about these new 'AdSense-laden' copycat sites is that they leave footprints - that is because they are a template, the html code is identical in layout for all of them.

Surely, the big SE's are going to start wising up. If you produce 5,000 webpages and blast them into the search engines using the blog and ping method (or any other submission technique) - isn't that akin to spamming? No one doubts that Google and the rest of the SE's have the technology to detect if a page is made with one of these programs. My guess is when enough of their customers (the web-searching general public) start complaining that all their results return are pages of identical listings and the odd out-dated snippet if they're lucky, these DR and TE generated sites are going to get dropped quicker than a bandicoot on nandrolone!

What ever happened to the 'information super-highway'?
Sadly, I think this highlights a sign of our times - something for nothing (enter a few keywords, click & send, then wait for the checks to arrive) - the quick buck mentality.

Again, don't get me wrong... most of these programs and techniques are good and useful - but I think they are being used inappropriately.
I come back to the point I made about the real reason for people coming online in the first place - they want data, facts, advice, knowledge. It's no coincidence that the internet is often referred to as the 'information super-highway'!

So let's get back to giving our customers - our website visitors - what they came for. By all means use Directory Generator or Traffic Equaliser if you must, and - yes - I highly endorse the 'blog and ping' principal, but use them for the creation and submission of
content-rich sites people are going to come back to again and again.
That way we will all get what we want - searchers get their information, search engines get relevant listings, AdWords advertisers get quality click-thru's, and webmasters get genuine visitors who'll be more predisposed to opening their wallet!

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Article written by Rudi Ashdown and first posted at
www.whywebsiteswork.com.
To learn more about the 'blog and ping' technique,
check out these blog & ping video tutorials.
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