List Building Toolkit

To get the maximum benefit from any web marketing effort, you need to pay attention to both the advertising side AND natural search engine traffic. Web advertising is much easier as there are many advertising firms that can create compelling copy for the advertising. An often ignored area, or at least undervalued, is building up natural search engine traffic. The reason is its harder to build up for each desired keyword and takes a lot of effort. Once done properly, you have built in traffic without spending a dime on marketing costs, and this traffic is permanent. Using an article directory can be an important part of this endeavor and should be utilized for maximum impact.

Using an article directory allows users to post content related to their website, and include links in this content back to their site. The search engines love article directories and consider some of them an authority source. Ignoring this source of possible links is not a good idea. While it can seem difficult to write so much content to be submitted to article directories over time, in the longer run it really will pay off.

To get the maximum benefit from using an article directory, you need to be able to spin your content. What the heck is spinning anyway? Its really very simple. It uses a computer program to help dynamically substitute sentences for one another on a random basis, while keeping the read and flow of the work the same. So you might write “The dog is brown”. If you wanted to take this and spin the content, you could easily say “The dogs fur is white” or “The dogs fur is yellow in color”. They all say basically the same thing, just in a slightly different way – all of them talk about the dogs fur color. Doing this with your articles can actually create huge amounts of “new” content from a single article you write. Of course you have to write out the alternative text that gets submitted, but then a computer program does the rest. This will give you maximum impact and protect you from getting penalized by the search engines for duplicate content submitted to article directories.

Altering the content around a main article allows someone to submit the content to many different article directorires and not have to worry that the same exact content is being submitted.

Sure a few of the same article is fine, but you dont want 200 copies of the exact article submitted all over the web.

No matter how good your copy is, and no matter how smart and creative you are, without traffic, you are dead.  The fancy graphics don't matter, the best products don't matter either if you are not getting anyone to see the website.  Traffic is always the end game for anyone trying to publish ads or sell anything on the web.  It seems like its a mystery to most, as most products sold on the web focuses on content, PPC (which is not bad, but also very hard to get right), or management products to help with productivity.Very few really work on the nuts and bolts of where you get traffic from.

The number one source of free traffic will come from natural search engine ranking, and the consistency is hard to beat.  Why?  Once you build your site up on a few keywords that get decent search volume, this traffic will be consistent.PPC and other methods are also fine, but are also subject to other risks ($$$ cost) that really have to be managed.  Basically you need links and content - this is the key to getting higher rankings on Google.

One way to get links is through  submitting niche articles related to your site to an article directory.Once your site topic is decided, you will want to write at least 20 articles that are 300-500 words in length.  Before you write the articles, make sure you have signed up for an adsense and adwords account even if you are not going to use them.  Google has some terrific free tools for researching keywords and how often they are searched.  You don’t need to spend days researching keywords BUT you really need to pick 3 or 4 keywords to focus on for your articles that get decent traffic in the search engines and are related to your topic.  Another tool you can use that is free is PPC Web Spy (just google it) – it allows you to see what keywords people are bidding on for their PPC ads on Google – again, they have probably done extensive work since they are paying for the ad clicks – no reason you cannot just benefit from their work and use some of those keywords.

Once this is done, make sure you write at least 5 articles per keyword grouping (2 for each article) with links to your site using those keyworeds.  Do not try to tackle too many keywords at once - you need about 200-300 links realistically for each keyword to move up - depending on how popular they are it may take more.  This is where any article directory comes in handy.You then sumbit your article which is then redistributed for you by the directory to others looking for content or to learn about a subject.This really does make getting links easier and faster in the long run - it just takes a bit of time to start working.  In addition, you may want a tool to help rewrite your articles so that many different versions are distributed to thousands of sites.  This is a key to quicker ranking on the engines as the same thing distributed over and over just does not do the trick.

In addition to articles, you will want to submit your site on all the major social networks like Facebook, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Digg, etc.The more of that the better.  You will want to create an account on all of them - very time consuming but needs to only be done one time.You can do a search on Google or other engines for a list of the major ones.Once this is done, you can also use tools to automate posting to all of your accounts at once which saves a huge amount of time.

Almost anything you want to do on the web can be found for free, but there are tons of stuff that will save you huge amounts of time for a small fee.  I usually opt for the time saving tools - in the long run its really worth it as there are only so many hours in the day.  Its always a trade off of time and ease of use vs paying for it.  Some stuff I do with free tools, some stuff I pay a monthly fee to use because it saves me so much time I could not achieve any goals without them.

Assuming you write articles and then submit to social networks, you should start to see some results in about a month.  Longer term, even once you get ranking, you need a plan to continually feed articles to directories – not as often as the beginning, but you really want to do at least 1 per month per keyword to keep fresh links coming into the search engines.  Over time, the content you distributed that Google finds links to disappears as sites go offline, content is deleted and replaced etc.  Once you get a stable of articles written, often you can just do a complete rewrite of an older article and then submit that again - its often faster than rewriting a new article.