According to some publications, article marketing expert Timothy Gorman makes 5 figures monthly using the method on his own niche websites, but I haven’t gotten to the interesting part yet. He has been doing so in his spare time while working full time as a Captain in the US ARMY!

Mr. Gorman is not the only one making a killing in article marketing. Many others have reaped similar benefits from this no frills method of online marketing. But don’t be fooled, making big bucks in online marketing requires lot’s of hard work. So if you’re serious and you’re willing to put in the hours there is money to be made.

The web is filled with article submission sites or article directories are they are sometimes called. Some of these directories are bad, some good, and some are AWESOME! The top quality article submission sites have the deadly combination of high PageRank combined with lots of traffic.

These sites provide a two-pronged method of generating traffic to your site. The first and most important comes from there enormous value they provide in terms of search engine optimization. Most article directories allow a single backlink to be included at the end of every article that you post. These backlinks are of high value not only because of their PageRank but due to the fact that the “referring page” (article) contains relevant content. The search engines pay attention to not only the anchor text of the link but also how closely related the referring page is to the landing page.

The second, bonus method of traffic are the unique visitors who come directly to your site by following your links. Please keep in mind that it is not just the links at the bottom of your articles that provide traffic. Many article directories have an author bio-page for each author and this page can be an excellent source of traffic to your site.

Please keep in mind that when it comes to author bio pages, you have to SELL IT. People will click on your bio page based on the quality of your articles. Once they get on the bio page they will decide whether to click through to your webpage based on how tantalizing you can make yourself and your site seem.

If you are interested in the subject of backlinks, check out our article, “Backlink Building”. Your choice in anchor text is extremely important when building backlinks, for more information on this topic be sure to look out for our upcoming post, “The Anatomy of a Text Link”.

As far as figuring out the number one article directory on the planet, the gold star goes to EzineArticles.com If you want to submit to several directories that’s fine, but make sure to focus the bulk of your effort towards Ezine Articles.

Mr. Gorman has a free ebook out that outlines his method of using article marketing to drive website traffic, to check out this free ebook, click here.

Tags: Article Marketing, Article Submission, Article Directories, Online Marketing, Backlink Building

A backlink is a one-way inbound link from another website to your own.  The algorithms that determine the search rankings for the major search engines are in a constant state of change and therefore the value of each attribute of a website as it relates to the rankings is also in flux. In recent history however backlinks have been one of the most important factors to the algorithms and to this day they continue to be an essential part of search engine optimization.

Article Marketing is perhaps one of the potent methods of backlink building available to the online entrepreneur  just starting out. The way this works is that the sight owner either writes his own articles or pays someone to write articles for him. These articles then get posted on Article Directory sites.  The standard practice is for the Article Directory site to allow a single backlink to be included, usually at the bottom of each article. There many Article Directories out there, but I would suggest that you start with EzineArticles.com.

Blog Commenting is another way for you to build backlinks to your site. Most blogs allow comments to be left by readers on a portion of their posts. It’s usually the case that the comment form allows you to submit a URL (web address) with your comment. In addition to a URL the comment form usually also asks for a name. Chances are that whatever you put in for a name will become a hyperlink for the URL that you entered. More…

Let’s start with some facts and figures… According the “Executive Summary” Blog, Facebook.com has been valued at lest as high as 1.6 billion dollars. In August of 2007 Facebook had 69,296,915 unique visitors according to an article by Max Freiert on Compete.com.  Now let’s consider Facebook’s rival MySpace, the article “Was MySpace Sold on the Cheap?” by Olga Kharif from BusinessWeek.com reports that MySpace.com was sold for 560 million in 2005. According to the same Compete.com article mentioned above, MySpace.com had 26,224,486 unique visitors in August of 2007.

We don’t need to restrict ourselves to examining social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. We can look at companies like Digg.com and YouTube.com. Both of these sites get tons of traffic (YouTube gets more) and both are highly valued.

You might be asking yourself, “What do these juggernauts of online business have to do with me?” Surprisingly the answer might be, a lot. More…

We here at Feedback Secrets will be taking a Blogging Break until Monday. Have a great weekend, see you next week.

In our post, “How to Make a Dollar Online”, we mentioned using “article marketing and SEO” as a technique to drive traffic to a website. That post was all about Squidoo Lenses however the above mentioned technique would work for any type of website regardless of it was a blog, static page, mini-page, “lens” etc.

The first step in using article marketing to improve your search engine optimization is to find a profitable niche. If your main method of monetizing traffic is some form of Pay-Per-Click advertising, such as Google AdSense then the first factor you should consider is how much each keyword pays per-click on average.

The problem is that there is usually a good deal of search engine competition for the highest paying keywords. If you are using a method such as blog commenting, then competition on the search engines doesn’t really affect you. If however you are planning to use SEO to drive traffic to your site, then search engine competition is a huge factor. More…

Let me start by saying that there are many ways to make a dollar online; this post will outline one such method. I am not sure who this quote belongs to, but I have heard it said that if you drop a entrepreneur off in New York City with nothing but the clothes on his back and a 100 dollar bill, you could find him a year latter running his own fleet of hot dog stands. I believe that one of the skills of a good entrepreneur is that, if necessary, they can make money without spending it.

Robert Kiyosaki, in his book Rich Dad, Poor Dad advises his readers never to take a job for the money, but rather, for the experience. Every now and again, I will suggest an experiment for the readers of this blog to conduct. If you decide to try any of these experiments, PLEASE don’t do it for the money… it won’t be worth it. What you will learn from these experiments on the other hand, that’s another story.

But I digress, back to the subject of how to make a dollar online without spending any money. For this experiment you will need at least the following, a PayPal.com Account and a Squidoo.com Account. Your mission, if you choose to accept it is to create a “lens” on Squidoo and bring the “lensmaster” revenue on your account from $0.00 to $1.00. One of the cool things about Squidoo is that they allow you to set your own payment threshold, so for purposes of this experiment you may well want to set the threshold to $1.00.

Squidoo hosts what I would call mini-webpages, what they call “lenses” for free. Lenses on Squidoo are made up of “modules”. You could have a module for text, one for pictures, one for recommended books, and so on. A lens can generate revenue by Google AdSense ads plus other possible revenue streams such as revenue from sponsors like Amazon and eBay. Squidoo shares 50% of all revenue from a lens with that lens’s lensmaster.

So the question becomes how to generate enough traffic, to filter through your conversion piece… I mean lens, to make it to the $1.00 threshold in a reasonable amount of time. Let’s consider some options.

You could make an awesome lens that ranked in the top 100 lenses on Squidoo. This should garner you a good amount of traffic from those searching the top 100 list as well as those conducting searches on Squidoo.com. You could sign up for a forum related to your lens topic and write posts that include a link to your lens in the signature file. You might use the “FREE keyword suggestion tool” at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ to find some good keywords and attempt to use article marketing and SEO to gain some traffic for your site.                                                                                                                                                                                 

If that last suggestion threw you for a loop, don’t worry, a post on that topic will be coming out very soon.

Since I would like you to complete this experiment well before you qualify for social security, let me give you a big hint. You are probably best off sticking to one of the following topics: insurance, mortgages, or pharmaceuticals.

 If you complete this experiment, let us know by posting a comment on this post. You can even include a link to your lens as the URL. That link alone should be good for some more traffic, and who knows we may even feature your lens in a future post.

If you enjoyed this post you might like our post on monetizing web traffic.

                                                                                                                                                                            In our article, “How to Get Indexed Fast” we talked about placing Google AdSense ads on your website in order to potentially increase the speed with which Google would find and index your site. In this post we will examine yet another potent method for increasing the speed with which your site get’s indexed.

If you are just concerned with Google, then the previously mentioned Google AdSense method is still my number one pick. This next method will most likely help you to get indexed by more than one engine. Please keep in mind that combining different methods to encourage indexing is usually a good idea, so you don’t need to stick to just one technique.

So the second step that I would advise after placing Google AdSense ads on your site is for you to submit a page from your website to Digg.com. In order to submit a page you will have to register for Digg. The registration process is quick, painless, and free. Once you register, you can log into your account and then click on the tab at the top of the page that says “Submit New”. More…

SEO Snooping is the practice of “spying” (doing research) on the off-site optimization of your online competitors. If you have any questions regarding the difference between off-site and on-site optimization feel free to check out our article on the subject.

There are several great web-based tools for doing research regarding the status of a website’s off-site optimization. In this article we will look at one of my favorites, MarketLeap.com. MarketLeap.com provides three excellent free tools to aid you in your research.

The first of these tools is their “Link Popularity Check”. If you enter a domain name then this tool will tell you how many inbound links a site has. Please keep in mind that different search engines have their own “spiders” which “crawl” the web searching for links between sites. For this reason it is possible that MSN will report that your chosen site has more or less inbound links then say Google. More…

No, this is not the formula to turn lead into gold… then again maybe it is. There is a simple formula that everyone in internet marketing should know regarding how to monetize web traffic. Making money online all starts with web traffic. If you have any questions regarding how important web traffic is to your online business check out Myth #1 of our free ebook, “The eBay Myth”.

The traffic that you direct to your site is usually filtered through a “conversion piece” that exists on your website. This conversion piece could be “buy now” button on your site that allows them to purchase your own product or an affiliate product that you market. This product could be a physical product that gets shipped to your customer or it could be an electronic product such as an ebook that requires no physical shipping.

As an alternative to a physical or electronic product your chosen monetization channel might be ad-based. While there are many advertising networks as well as self managed web ads, Google AdSense is by far the most popular of the advertising networks. If you choose to go the ad-based route then a simple click on of your ads is a successful conversion. More…
                                                                                                                                                                  

In any kind of direct marketing campaign there are several important numbers that are essentials to the success of your campaign. The numbers that we will discuss can easily be applied to internet marketing but in an attempt to keep things simple we will focus on direct mail for the moment.

The first of these numbers is the cost per-lead, this cost relates to the cost of obtaining a prequalified physical address. Here we use the term “prequalified” to simply mean, someone who is interested in your niche.

Once you know what your cost per-lead is, it would be valuable to know how much a single lead is worth to you in terms of dollars and cents. Determining your value per-lead lets you know for certain how much you can spend on each lead and continue to make a profit. Here is where things get a little bit tricky, a lead you obtain today could in theory pay out: a month from now, three months from now, or never. More…