You’ve heard about the Adsense craze and decided that you are going to get your share of Adsense cash cow. You’ve either built a website or purchased one, and now you’re ready to rock! You submit it to every search engine and directory that you can think of, dreaming of thousands of surfers coming in from every engine on the planet. All begging to click your Adsense links and make you rich.
Then you sit back and wait. And wait. And wait some more. Checking your stats daily hoping to see the rush of traffic pouring in. But for some reason it just doesn’t come.
The days of the above business plan working are long over. It might have worked in 1996, but in 2006 you’re going to have to do a lot more to promote your new website. There are still free traffic sources out there, but they want something in return to link to your new site. Content.
This is where article marketing comes in. The concept is simple. You write an article that’s relevant to your sites topic, inserting a link or two within the article or the articles footer, linking back to your website. Then you submit it to article directories. They in turn publish your article, giving you a RELEVANT link back to your site and possibly sending you some of their traffic.
Many of the article directories out there have a lot of good traffic to share. They also can really help your Google Page Rank when it comes time for Google to rank your site. Google wants to see INBOUND links to your site from other sites with similar content. So the links these article directories can give you are crucial to the weight of your website in the long run.
But the article directories are just the first stop for your article. Almost all of the article directories encourage other webmasters to republish your content on their own sites with similar topics. So one article can really turn into literally thousands of inbound links over the months ahead. This snowball effect is exactly what we are looking for with each article we write.
Article marketing is only as powerful as your commitment to it though. To really build your site’s traffic and page rank you are going to need thousands, if not ten’s of thousands of inbound links. One or two articles is not going to do this for you. It’s going to take a daily time commitment on your part. As the owner of two different article directories ( http://www.articles.pn and http://www.articlescience.com/ ) , I can tell you that there are many article marketers out there submitting as many as ten articles a day in an effort to promote their websites. They obviously see the value of article marketing and they don’t intend to do the job halfway.
“But Chuck! I can’t write an article!” I hear this all the time from my customers. Frankly, it’s an easy copout. What you’re really saying to me is that you don’t WANT to write articles. You don’t have to be an ex journalism major to write a short article to promote your website. Heck, you don’t even need to be a high school graduate. All you need to do is to be able to read and write. If you can’t read and write then you probably don’t need to be the owner of a website.
It’s very simple. Sit down and write about the topic of your website. Hopefully when you built or purchased your website you picked a topic that you’re at least interested in. It doesn’t have to be a topic that you’re familiar with, just something that interests you. If you’re website’s topic is something you know nothing about, do some research! Write an article sharing what you learned with other readers. You can start as simply as “I didn’t know this, and you may not either….”
If you’re suffering from severe writer’s block, try using a tape recorder. Dictate things you would like to say about your site or your site’s topic and then transcribe what you recorded later. You can take the recording and edit it in writing and come up with a good article.
The bottom line is this. If you want to promote your new website without spending thousands of dollars, you must integrate article writing into your promotion plan. Without it, your road to success is going to be a lot more bumpy.
Chuck Crawford is an established expert in web design, traffic development and website financial analysis. He has been helping people design and develop their internet business since 1996.
This article may be reprinted freely as long as all links remain active.
Adsense is hot, no doubt about it. So hot in fact that many people are jumping on the bandwagon with the hopes of getting rich without any clue to what they are getting into. Take a quick second and do a search on EBAY for Adsense sites and you’ll see what I mean. The titles of most of these auctions are absolutely ridiculous…. “Make ten thousand dollars a month if you buy a site from me!!!” The list of these cookie cutter Adsense sites goes on and on and on. But can you really make any money by plopping down $50 bucks on one of these ready made sites?
Sadly, the answer in most cases is no.
First of all, if the person that sold you the site was really making hundreds or thousands of dollars a month from ‘similar Adsense sites’ do you really think he or she would be selling them on EBAY for $30??? Probably not. Most likely the seller in these cases is just a web designer shooting out as many cheap websites as they can, trying to cash in on the craze. They build the site, you buy it, and the relationship ends there. You now own a website that has zero traffic. Which translates to zero money. And to make it worse, the person you just bought the site from will most likely relist an exact duplicate the day after your transaction is completed. Causing your site to become even more worthless in the eyes of the search engines.
So what is a person to do that really wants to start an Adsense site business?
Well, there are really two paths that you can choose at this point. If you have the knowledge to build and promote your own website or websites then obviously this is the route you should take. But the majority of the people jumping in on the Adsense craze today are people that have zero knowledge in these areas, so where should they start?
Start with a basic knowledge of what it takes for a site to be successful with surfers and the search engines. By now you’ve certainly heard the phrase ‘Content is KING’. And it’s true. So when considering building or purchasing your first website you should take a look at the content and make a plan to keep the site fresh content wise, for both surfers and search engines. This means that you’re going to probably have to update your site from time to time. But how do you do this if you have no programming skills or html knowledge?
By far, the best method I’ve found to date is by using the new AutoBlogger Pro (www.autobloggerpro.com) script with Wordpress (http://www.wordpress.org) What this script does is absolutely fantastic for those that don’t want to spend all of their time adding to their new website. The concept is pretty simple. It’s a Wordpress blog automatically fed and updated by RSS feeds and unique content posted by the owner of the site. Literally, all of your updates to the site are done by the click of one button. No html knowledge? That’s ok, Autoblogger Pro has got you covered. Once the site is configured, you simply login once a day or once a week and click one button. It in turn pulls in all kinds of new, fresh content, and then blends it smoothly into your site. Here’s an example of an ABP site that I setup for one of my customers: http://www.blogs.pn (You can also get information on where to purchase a site like this there)
The best feature is that you choose the content that feeds your site. It completely optimizes your content for the search engines, allowing you to also focus on the highest paying keywords in Adsense. And it’s going to be completely unique, not at all like the cookie cutter sites mentioned in the first part of this article.
No longer do you have to spend hours each week updating and adding to your content. You are now free to spend all of your time where it should be spent. Promoting. Driving traffic to your website. Which is my favorite subject to discuss. However there’s just too much to cover on website promotion to put into an article or two. That’s why I have setup a forum dedicated to ethical website promotion. If you would like to learn more on this topic, please feel free to visit us and jump right in: http://www.affiliatewebdesign.com
In closing, choose your path for your online business carefully. Make a plan and then put it into action.
Chuck Crawford is an established expert in web design, traffic development and website financial analysis. He has been helping people design and develop their internet business since 1996.
