This is another post to complete my Quick Start Money Making Guide.

What Is Article Marketing?

Article marketing is a type of advertising in which businesses write short articles related to their respective industry.

These articles are made available for distribution and publication in the marketplace. Each article contains a bio box and byline that include references and contact information for the author’s business. Well-written content articles released for free distribution have the potential of increasing the authoring business’ credibility within its market as well as attracting new clients.

Article directories are basically article farms. You can take the articles from the directory to post on your blog, but the condition is that you have to leave the author’s bio intact. Alternatively, you can rewrite the articles and make it your own. A simple reason why you submit to article directories is that article directories tend to rank higher in search engines. Therefore, increasing the chances of getting your article rank high and get free traffic from the Article Directories to your website.

Well, submitting to Article Directories not only gets you Free Traffic, but is also considered a backlink to your website. Remember, a link is a link, no matter Do-follow, No-Follow or whatever, you want as much links as possible to your money making sites.

Its also less intimidating for your potential customer as well, that they have a choice to click on your link to find out information on the topic. It is not too difficult to see that those who clicked on your link are your targeted audience and it would make sense to do some hardsell in your website/landing page.

List of Article Directories as of 29 Jan 2008

Well, I have 3 Simple Tips On Writing Good Enough Articles that gets approved easily (especially true in Ezine Articles):

1. Read more news articles, magazines, blogs that have a good command of English (or French, German, Chinese, Tamil, whatever)
2. Learn the technique of copywriting.
   This skill will help greatly in your sales letter and in article writing too.
3. Just reference to articles of your niche and rewrite it in your very own style!

Update (2010 Jul 03): I have released a free Scuttle/ScuttlePlus/Pligg/PHPDug searcher.

I am pleased to announce a sneak preview of my first software: Kitty’s BMD Search Buddy !

Basically, this software is tailored for BMD users to search for social bookmarking sites to add on to Bookmarking Demon. Currently, my Search Buddy software only supports ScuttlePlus sites. This software helps you to search for Scuttle Plus sites and enables you to copy and paste the urls of the Scuttle Plus sites into Bookmarking Demon.

Here’s a screenshot of the software:

What has NOT been finalised:

• The Name of the software – most probably will stay as “Kitty’s BMD Search Buddy”, till I find a better name perhaps?
• User Interface will be modified to include a bigger image of my Kitty mascot.
• Color scheme may change as well.
• Future versions may include Scuttle and Pligg sites but definitely not confirmed as of now.

Who Should Get It? :p

• Those who have bought BMD through my link and have remained a customer of BMD for more than 60 days will get it for FREE.
• All other BMD users can get it at a price but I have not finalised any other details yet.

Even as this post goes out, the look and feel of my very own Kitty’s BMD Search Buddy is changing every now and then. There’s so many details to look into.

Enough said, once more, those who have bought BMD from my link please kindly contact me when you are a customer for 60 days and more. I will keep your name in my list for this software.

So How Do You Get Started?

I had a post on the 3 main types of income that we can earn via online means.
Basically, you need to find something that you want to sell!

Below is basically a summarized guide to get you started, the complexities are sometimes better left unsaid… so here you go.

If you study Marketing in school, you should have come across the Marketing Mix, which is more commonly known as the 4 P’s of Marketing: Product, Price, Place, Promotion.

All of these revolve around the Target Market (your desired customer base).

Remember, its all about providing a solution to your customers.

Step 1. Determine what PRODUCT you want to sell

• Generally, like what most Internet Marketing Gurus say, find something that you like. Either you sell your own product, or sell other’s products.

• Its easier to start by selling other’s products.

• Conduct market research by using various tools like Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool to find out the approx. search volume of your desired keyword.

• Conduct competitor research as well. There should be some competitors in your chosen niche, its also an indication that it’s a profitable niche.

Step 2. PLACE: Set up a Blog(s) or Website

• Be it a free one or getting your own domain name & hosting. I prefer having own domain and paid hosting though. If you are selling your own product, having your own website looks more professional.

Step 3. PROMOTION: Article Marketing

• Article marketing by far seems one of the tried and true methods to get free traffic. But it is also a method that demands lots and lots of your time.

Step 4. Determine the Right PRICE for your product

• If you are selling your product, a general guideline is to look at how much your competitors are selling their product, and price around that range, depending on your strategy and stickiness of your target market.

• Also look at what you are offering against your competitors, and work on the differences, the VALUE they will get by buying from you.

• If you are promoting other’s product, you will not have to worry about this. But you may need to work on providing more value to your customers, persuading them to buy from your link.

Here’s some good news for those who have bought BMD through me.

I am in the midst of finalising a Scuttle Plus Search Software to complement Bookmarking Demon.

And I will be giving them FREE to those who have bought through me. 

Do check back. I should be able to post some screenshots soon.

Disclaimer

Before I start, I shall make it clear that this might not be 100% accurate. However, it is one of the ways that worked for me and I believe will aid in boosting your bookmarking efforts and see your site raise up the page ranks. If there is any part of it that you are unclear and would like to leave a comment, please do so. I would like to hear more about it.

Are You Bookmarking it Right?

“Social Bookmarking does not work for me….”

“Social Bookmarking’s Dying….”

Does this sound familiar?

I have been reading up a fair bit and testing out some stuff and would like to share what I thought would work great for internet marketers like you and me, using social bookmarking as one of your marketing tools.

Many of us have been trying to gain that fair bit when it comes to SERP (search engine results page). Appearing on page 1 for a particular keyword, or even a set of keywords. I have seen many frustrated people wondering why they are not seeing results. Just why it didn’t work?

So I thought I might as well make a post on this. Ask yourself the following questions if your bookmarking efforts ain’t paying off:

1. Am I bookmarking the right content?
2. Have I been too “Sales-Oriented”? (i.e. bookmarking my sales page)
3. Have I made enough efforts to keep my Bounce Rate as low as it can be for my money making site?

Content Is Still King

Ask yourself, if you are searching for “where can i buy good peanuts”, and you are brought to a bookmarking site, that links to your 1 paged sales page that seem to extend endlessly, would you close and move on to the next site? Honestly, for me, that’s what I would do. I believe there are people who feel disgusted if they see such a page. Naturally you would want to leave good impression to your visitors. So how do You go about doing that?

The answer is pretty straightforward.

Good quality content!

With good quality content, you can ensure that your bounce rate can be kept low. There are several techniques you can do to achieve that. While most people do well with plain text content, others are more inclined to Visually Appealing content, some are Audio freaks. Besides writing great content, you can also stick some:

• Videos
• Audio clips
• Pictures

on the page that you intend to promote.

Once you are done with the above, the next logical thing to do will be to bookmark this page. But wait! You don’t want to really bookmark this page. Instead, you should be posting a summarized writeup of this page and submit it to article/video/audio directories.

Article/Video/Audio Submission

• Create quality back links by making a page at Squidoo, Hubpages etc.
• Submit your quality articles to Article Directories like Ezine Articles.
• Likewise for Video and Audio, submit them to relevant sites as well.

This page that you setup in the directories is really the one that you want to bookmark. We call this indirect bookmarking.

Indirect Bookmarking Method

• Bookmark your pages in e.g. Squidoo, Hubpages, Wetpaint, Scribd, Youtube & Article Directories E.g. Ezine, instead of your website/ webpages.
• Indirect bookmarking seems less sales oriented & less irritating.

Google Analytics

On top of the above, if your web site is whitehat based, you could always install Google Analytics. Why? You might ask. Here’s the reason:

• You can’t deny the fact that there are people coming to your main site by entering the URL directly into their browser. This is what we call Direct Traffic.
• Make use of this pool of visitors to aid in your page rank by installing Google Analytics. There is no way Google will know that your web site is popular if certain % of the traffic comes from direct hits, neither will Google know if your site is referred by the directories.
• Analyze your traffic and tailor-made your content towards maximizing their stay.

Bounce Rate (BR) – is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the visitor left your site from the landing page. It is used to measure impressions. Higher bounce rates usually mean the pages aren’t relevant to your visitors or it can also mean you’ve got poor quality content.

Here is a short summary of the above specially created for you:

Steps to Maximize Your Bookmarking Efforts

1. Ensure that the page you want to promote has good and quality content.
2. You will want to keep the bounce rate of this page low. Besides writing some quality content, you can insert some videos (Youtube), audios or pictures that will captivate your reader’s attention.
3. Submit a brief writeup of your page into article directories such as Ezine, Squidoo Lens, Hubpages.
4. Link your article back to the page you want to promote.
5. Bookmark your articles to get indirect link.

With the above, I believe you will see better results from bookmarking.

Okay, my effort to lower bounce rate for this page. Hope you enjoy this video.

One more thing. Remember this, a link is still a link. Someone somehow will click on it from somewhere. Regardless if its a do-follow, no-follow link.

We love blogging. Many of us use it as a money making tool. We get delighted when we see people commenting on our blogs. However, do you know that not all comments are with good intentions?

When I started out with a blog (not demonfanclub) 3 months ago, the first time I received a pingback was when I linked to my own posts.

But I was so green then, that I began to search “What Is A Pingback?” to understand it and what does it do. For benefit of those who have asked the same question as I did:

1. Pingbacks are also called Trackbacks.
2. They only appear when you link to your
   own posts, or 
3. When others link to your posts

(However, you will only get this if you enabled the pingback feature, generally, they are enabled).

Not too long after, I began to receive spam comments that looks legit, but when I look closer enough, the skeleton is revealed when I saw that both comments had the same ip address, with 2 different names and urls, commenting on different posts on my blog. This one is still okay. I mean blog commenting is one of the strategies to get more readership. Especially on popular blogs.

Sometime later, my blog began to receive pingbacks from other sites. The pingbacks got landed in the Akismet Spam filter. Once in a while, I will check out the “spams” that landed there. I would copy the URL and open it in a new window or tab to check out the site.

Sometimes… my browser will send me a warning stating

MALWARE DETECTED on the site! Are you sure you want to proceed?

This one is the killer. I was glad that I made the effort to check out the site. If I had been lax, I could be subjecting my readers to virus or malware injections if they do not have any kind of protection!

Let me ask you:

If your blog is infested with such pingbacks, do you think your readers or customers will return if they found out that their PC is infected becos of a malicious pingback or comment on your blog?

I don’t think so…

Protect your money making blogs by being more vigilant in moderating the comments and pingbacks.