Building a second income stream: 12/31/06

Thursday, January 04, 2007

Linking Campaigns: Consistency Is The Key To Success

Copyright © 2006-2007 Trey Pennewell

Many webmasters understand the importance of creating back links to their site. They understand that creating back links is one of the most important things they can do to increase the search engine results placement (SERPs) for their website. However, what most webmasters fail to understand is that they need to create back links needs on a consistent and regular basis.

Pro's & Con's of Using Reprint Articles as a Back Linking Method

One popular and efficient method of creating back links is to submit original, good quality articles to publishers and webmasters. Most serious internet marketers utilize the services of a number of article distribution services to help them get their articles to people interested in using reprint articles. Creating original articles, and adding an authors box with a link back to your site, has become one of the preferred methods of generating back links for many webmasters.

The problem that arises from this link building strategy is that a webmaster will write, or hire a writer, to create a large number of articles. The webmaster will then insist that all of these newly created articles be sent out immediately. Submitting all of these articles at one time, say within a week, will devalue the links that you are creating with the articles.

Imagine submitting 100 or 1,000 articles in a single week to a variety of sources. What do you think the response will be from the websites and newsletters that accept free reprint articles? Often times the results are quite poor and leave the webmaster disappointed with the low number of back links that are created from this link building campaign.

Why Bombardment Does Not Work

I actually operate a website that accepts free reprint articles and many webmasters submit to it in hopes of getting their articles published on it. If one source submits a ridiculously large amount of articles at once, I generally delete all of these articles and publish none of them! The reason for this? Mainly, I do not want my website to appear to be a website for the submitter. In other words, I do not want my website to appear to be overly-associated with the submitter's website.

Now let's say that a submitter tells the article distributor to submit 10 articles a week over the course of two and a half months. This will often result in a much higher publication rate and, consequently, a larger number of back links to the submitter's site.

Imagine being the publisher of a newsletter or ezine and opening your inbox to find that the same person has submitted 1,000 articles to you in one week. What do you think your reaction would be? Would your reaction be to block this author from your inbox? Would you try to publish 100 of the articles in your weekly newsletter? As you can see, overwhelming the sources that accept your free reprint articles will often backfire for you as a internet marketer.

Building a First-Class Reputation

Spreading out the distribution of your articles actually creates a positive impression with the sources to whom you are submitting articles. With the website that I operate, I have come to know who my regular submitters are and the quality of their work. It is common for me to publish the articles submitted by a writer or webmaster that has consistently shown that he or she submits quality work. This person has shown me in the past that he or she is not only a good writer, but is also submitting relevant articles.

The Rule of 7 in marketing suggests that after a person has seen your name 7 times, that they will come to recognize your name as an authority and a trusted source. What this means to you, as you distribute free reprint articles, is that a publisher becomes more likely to use your articles after he or she sees your name on a consistent basis and comes to recognize you as a person that submits quality articles.

Consistency Is The Key

There has also been a good deal of discussion that search engines prefer seeing submission of content and links on a regular, consistent basis. Following this thought, it is better to get one link to your site, once a week, rather than 52 links to your site in one week. While you will enjoy a surge in rankings temporarily if you create a number of links at once, you will likely not get the full benefit of those links in the long run.

If you were to get 52 links in a week, a search engine might think that you are going to create 52 links a week every week. When they see that you are not creating any more links for the rest of the year, you will penalized by your search engine results placement.

You should determine how frequently you can develop content, and then set your distribution schedule accordingly. If you can only create one article per month, then you should only distribute one article per month. One per week, one per month, your frequency is not important. What is important is your consistency.

Matt Cutts Proves The Importance of Consistency In A Case Study

Creating links is much the same as creating content for your website. Consistent updates to your website will increase your search engine results placement, whereas simply sticking hundreds of pages on your site at once and never updating it will hurt your rankings.

Matt Cutts recently made mention in a video on his blog about one such case here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3583760678227172395 . He gives an example of a website that launched with millions of pages, and he shows how this attracts the scrutiny of the Google team. He recommends that it would have been much better to submit a few thousand pages at a time, instead of rolling out millions of pages on launch.

This thought process should be applied to creating links as well. The bottom line is that consistency is the key to success, when it comes to creating back links to your website. Create a consistent back linking pattern and you will see better results from the search engine ranking algorithms.

About The Author:

Trey Pennewell is the lead writer at the Links And Traffic Link Building Service (http://www.LinksAndTraffic.com), owned by Bill Platt. Trey and Bill practice what they preach... They generally distribute only one article per week for the purpose of promoting their own websites. Consistency is always best. Trey also owns and manages the http://www.InvisibleMBA.com website, which only accepts informational articles related to getting an education. Feel free to reprint this article, so long as all links are made clickable.

Article Source: thePhantomWriters Article Submission Service

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Understanding Inbound Links --- The Good, Bad And The Ugly

Copyright © 2006-2007 Bill Platt

All links are not created equal. There are worthless, good and great links. So, what is the difference between each one? I can sum it up in one word, "clicks".

The most worthless links are those that appear on pages that will never be read by a set of human eyes.

Some pages may be "seen" by human eyes, but they will not "read" by anyone. Bad formatting, no formatting, hard-to-read text, unorganized content, unorganized links, scraped search engine results, and pages with more keywords than content, are a few of the factors that prevent a webpage from being read by real people. You know the kinds of webpages I am talking about... You don't read them either. And, you can bet no one else will want to read at those pages either.

Google is getting pretty good at identifying these trash websites and removing them from its database, so your link on this kind of website will not provide any real value to you at all. They will not give you human visitors, and they will not give you search engine placement value.

There are two criteria necessary to define a good link. A good link is on a page that has content that people might want to read, and it is on a page that real human beings will be reading.

A great link is the same as a good link, but it could have hundreds or thousands of people looking at it in a single month.

THE EVOLUTION OF ARTICLE MARKETING AS A LINKING STRATEGY

Article marketing has evolved dramatically since the early days of 2005.

Prior to March of 2005, the only people who really participated in article marketing were those who understood the value of providing good quality content in order to get their articles published.

With the combined introduction of article submission software, dirt cheap services and the Adsense revenue generation system, the quality of article content collapsed.

Suddenly, people who were engaged in hiring $5 an hour ghost writers to write keyword-dense articles for their website, decided that those same keyword-dense articles that they had constructed for their websites, could also be used as a tool in article marketing.

Within just about three months, the publishers and webmasters who utilized third-party reprint articles in their publications went from having to pick through 200-300 good quality articles per month, to having to sort through 2,000 questionable articles per month to find the 200-300 articles that they would actually want to consider for use.

For someone like me who was entrenched in the article marketing industry, this would have seemed to be a good thing. But, with the introduction of the "Adsense article marketing mentality", the quality of content just about disappeared.

I still believe that a good article marketing campaign is predicated by good quality content. I might be stupid, but I still make good money selling several products and services through the use of quality content in my own article marketing endeavors.

One of my friends operates an article directory. He told me that for every seven articles sent to his site, he must delete six of them to maintain his website's quality standards! He is feeling the pinch of poor quality articles, because 86% of the articles he is moderating must be deleted, creating an environment where he wastes more time than should be necessary to maintain his commitment to a good quality website.

ARTICLE MARKETING ONLY WORKS WHEN IT IS A DEMOCRACY

The Adsense article marketers want to believe that they can send any piece of carp, keyword-optimized article through the distribution systems, and hundreds of websites will reprint their article.

But, it does not quite work that way.

Websites that will post absolutely anything sent to them do not survive. Some of you may think I am full of it when I say that. You might think that I just have an axe to grind. You are entitled to your own opinion. But, I could actually give you supporting examples, if I wanted to fill this article with links to websites that are no longer operational.

Here is how it comes down. Websites that have no standards, cannot keep their readers happy. If they cannot keep their visitors happy, then they will not make any money. If they cannot make any money, they will not renew their website for the second year. Sometimes they will do a second year, but they will seldom if ever do a third year.

The websites that have standards will survive, because they do have "content standards".

Think about the highest quality websites you visit regularly. Then think about the kind of content that they use on their sites. Great websites do not print articles that are glorified keyword-optimized articles.

Think about sites like:

* http://www.SiteProNews.com - PR6

* http://www.Publish101.com - PR6

* http://www.Site-Reference.com - PR6

* http://www.NationalBusiness.org - PR6

* http://www.HardwareHell.com - PR5

* http://www.AddMe.com/nlpast.htm - PR6

What do each of these websites have in common?

1. They are great websites that develop good and great links.

2. They all have an excellent reputation for providing great quality content.

3. They all have good PageRank.

4. They do not publish keyword-optimized articles that focus more on keyword density, than on quality information.

5. They have all published articles I have distributed.

6. NationalBusiness.org has published articles written by members of my writing team. The other five sites have published articles that I have written myself... Many of them have published my own articles more than once.

Quality content delivers quality results.

QUALITY MATTERS

No one wants to put your keyword-directed articles on their site, unless they have no standards of their own. And, if they have no standards, why would you want your link on their website?

Personally, I am thrilled not to get those worthless links to my websites, because the website giving me that worthless link is considered by Google as a "bad neighborhood" or "spammy neighborhood".

If you have never heard of Matt Cutts, he is a Google employee who shares some of the Google inner-workings with interested webmasters. Take a look at this post and pay close attention to his comments about "spammy neighborhoods" under the section subtitled "Bigdaddy: Done by March".

If you want to get a good feel for Matt's take on "bad neighborhoods", do a search at Google for: neighborhoods site:http://www.mattcutts.com .

IN CONCLUSION...

All links are not created equal.

Personally, I strive hard to generate good and great links to my websites.

That sometimes means that I spend several hours writing an article like this one. When I hire writers to work for me, I don't pay them $5 an hour. Good writers don't work for $5 an hour or article. It just doesn't happen.

Remember, my goal is to educate my reader and to provide good quality information to my readers.

The very nature of putting your reader first, will enable you to begin finding your articles placed on better quality websites. The better the website your article appears on, the better the quality link you will find from that website.

If your purpose in using article marketing to build links to your website is being done in the "great PageRank chase", then you really should know that Google only cares about the placement of your link on sites that have good PageRank --- sites that reside in "good neighborhoods".

If your purpose in using article marketing to build links to your website is so that human beings will use them to find your website, then getting your article placed on good websites will best serve your purpose.

When all is said and done, if your links appear on good pages, on good websites, in good neighborhoods, then you have done well. You will see traffic from those links, and you will see better link popularity and search engine placement as a result of your good links. And finally, worthless links are just that... worthless.

About The Author:

Bill Platt has been providing article distribution services to his clients through thePhantomWriters.com, since 2001. If you like the idea of using well-written, good quality informational articles to build links to your websites, but you do not have the time to do-it-yourself, then Bill's Link Building Services may be the best option for you. Bill is so confident in his ability to build links to your website using quality article content that he is willing to Guarantee his results. To learn more, visit: http://www.LinksAndTraffic.com . Free 7-page linking tutorial.