What is the purpose of Article Marketing?

If you have a website then your primary goal is to drive traffic to the site….correct?

Article marketing is just one of many ways to drive traffic to your website and it does work. Often times, one article can get picked up and used by many webmasters or simply viewed many times. An effective resource box at the end of the article will get you many clicks.

Brighter minds than mine have argued the reality of duplicate content and it’s supposed effects on either article submission or your website. However, if you have the original article on your website I would edit the following before submitting to any aritcle directory.

-Title
-First sentence of each paragraph
-Last sentence of each paragraph
-resource box if its on your original aritcle, always needed with article marketing

These are really easy edits and will only benefit you if you submit the article to a directory or many directories.

It’s true that submitting one article to ezinearticles.com will or can get you on page one, but typically, it won’t last very long.

If you combine article marketing with social marketing…that is submit your site to some of the social bookmarking sites. Your desired goal of staying on page one will be more likely to be realized.

Jack Humphrey runs a site call Authority Site Center and has put out a FREE book called “The Authority Black Book”….you can download the book if you visit my blog post and go to the bottom of the post and visit the link:

The Authority Black Book
Also it was a common practice with article marketers to mass submit articles to article directories and once again….there is argument amongst the guru’s as to the effectiveness of such techniques. I’m not sure those guys would really tell you what works, but I tried and am using a service called Unique Article Wizard which submits unique versions of your article to over 1000 directories and will submit on a time released schedule if desired.

Anyway, I’ve been getting excellent results with article marketing when combining Unique Article Wizard and Social Bookmarking. In fact I just did a campaign for 4 keyword phrases and have the first 2 pages of google for each phrase. I know I’ll make that claim and most of the readers of this post will be hesitant to believe it….I won’t divulge the keywords, only to tell you that the strategy works and I’ve gotten results quicker than ever when article marketing.

Even if you submit your article to only one directory….that’s better than nothing. You can try ezinearticles.com….if it’s your first article it could take about a week for it to show up if its approved. Also try goarticles.com and articledashboard.com….be sure to try some social bookmarking with your article marketing, you will be amazed!

Go to www.socialmarker.com for more info on a site that will allow you to submit to more than 1 bookmarking site.

Combining article marketing and social bookmarking creates a powerful punch, but be careful about submitting your own sites. If you get carried away, you’ll be banned and lose all your bookmarks.

Good luck,

Scott

Tags: article marketing, Jack Humphrey, authority black blook, social bookmarking, articles, authority site center

I was cruising around the xsitepro forum and noticed a poor fellow had gotten himself in a pickle.

He had hired a friend, who was a website designer, to build a website for him. He had a very nice site, but before they could wrap things up the web designer died. So….this guy was looking for a way to rebuild and/or edit his website.

He was concerned because his friend was a mac user and used his mac to build the site. He thought he would have to purchase a mac to edit his website.

He wanted to use Xsitepro, and felt it would be easier to manage his site. But the existing site would have to be converted into an Xsitepro template. One of the guys, named Websight (knows his stuff) commented that the conversion shouldn’t be a problem. The only problem I see is finding someone to take his new existing site and convert it into Xsitepro.

I had some other ideas, trying to say this poor fellow some cash. See what you think?

Hi Peter…..really nice looking site. Sorry to hear about your friend, hope he knows what you do

Looks like a job for version 2.0, and as usual websight1 really knows the capabilities of xsite and I’ve come to respect his advice.

A couple of things to consider.

First, I don’t think it matters that your friend used a Mac to build your site. Maybe someone knows more than me, but I wouldn’t let that bother you at this point.

Second, Do you have access to your server? If you do, you might want to consider doing a backup of your entire site. It could save you one big headache in the future. Also, you can use the Get and Put feature in Dreamweaver and get the site to your local computer, and do any necessary edits until you can make a decision on whether or not you want to reproduce the site using Xsite.

Third, there is a free program called HTTrack that will allow you to download the entire site to your hard drive. I would consider doing this even if you make a backup. You can then use Dreamweaver to work on the files that were downloaded with HTTrack which will allow you to maintain your website until you decide what to do.

I use Httrack for a variety of purposes. It’s perfect for grabbing anyones site for the purpose of learning how to do something or recreate a feature that is new to you.

http://www.httrack.com/

Fourth, As long as you own the domain and have access to the server you could install a wordpress blog. Posting weekly or so about the various projects you’re doing, having a category about customers, guitar types, various other products……does wonders for search engine spiders and ranking. If you choose this option you could leave the existing site and put your blog in a new directory http://www.cornerstoneguitar.com/blog but I would use a name that is more relative to the content of the site like http://www.cornerstoneguitar.com/customguitars

Hope that helps a little.

Good luck Brother

Scott

In this series of autoresponder videos you’ll learn some of the basics of using aweber autoresponders. The one tool everyone needs to make money online is an autoresponder like aweber. These videos about autoresponders will help clarify the purpose of an autoresponder and demystify the unknown for a newbie marketer.

After watching these aweber autoresonder videos you’ll have a handle on how to create a simply campaign consisting of 3 messages which are automatically sent to anyone who opts in to your list. I highly recommend Aweber for your autoresponder.

If you are just starting out, please sign up for an Aweber Autoresponder Account. I made the mistake of using a hosted autoresponder to save money. First more than 50% of my email didn’t get through. Second, my server crashed and I lost my list of 5000 good opt ins….. Please don’t make the same mistake I did. Watch these autoresponder videos and get yourself an Aweber Account.

Creating autoresponder lists with aweber

How To Set Up Your Lead Capture Page & Autoresponder Part 1

Setting up your autoresponder

Tags: autoresponder account, aweber, autoresponder videos

I have used the table function in Xsitepro version 1, but the new version of xsitepro…. version 2 has really blossomed into tool that let’s you really create and decorate your tables. You can created dotted borders, multi cells…in general the formatting has 100 times the options in the new version of xsitepro.

Xsitepro Version 2.0 has some great features for working with tables. The ability to enhance and customize a table has been greatly enabled in Xsitepro version 2.

Tables have long been the most popular way to design a website. Although those that command the web would like to see everyone using CSS, it still remains that working with tables is easiest and a great way to put together a quick website ranging from a simple salespage style to more complex forms of websites.

Xsitepro allows you to easily add or customize your site with css and I suggest you learn how to use it. The reason is because that is the direction webdesign is headed and it is most compatible with just about all the popular browsers. Websites load faster when using css, and I’ve been told that they are easier on the search engines.

Still for the newbie creating a webpage with tables is the simplest way to get started and organize a webpage. For instance you can draw out your webpage on a legal pad and visualize the page as a series or boxes or tables. It becomes easy to take your concept to webpage design.

Xsitepro really does make it easy to work with tables. In fact, the templates are all based on a table with a series of cells organized to give you a header, navigation tables, main table, footer tables plus a few extra with xsitepro ver. 2.0

I found a couple of videos that will help you understand the concept of tables and Xsitepro version 2.0, please check them out.

Xsitepro Version 2.0 Video 1

Xsitepro Version 2.0 Video 2

Great table videos…. don’t ya think!

Tags: create tables in xsitepro, xsitepro version 2, xsitepro, tables in xsitepro

I was cruising the Xsitepro forum the other day and some of the people were showing off their websites. Lots of great looking sites when I stumbled on one guys site and it took forever to load…..I’m on a super fast cable line too!

Never upload your images in fullsize you images must be optimized for the web.

I did a little investigation and noticed his images were really huge. It’s an easy thing to overlook if you don’t know about image optimization. Basically the image is reduced in size by removing pixels, you want to degrade the image to the point where the image just starts to look a little fuzzy.

I took the time to explain a little about image optimization…thought some of you readers might like to take a look…..maybe you have some full size images on your site

Ben….checked out your site and it’s loading really slow for me.

So….I checked out some of your images and it looks like you haven’t optimized any of your images….except maybe the header.

Your screenshots and book images are all around or over 1000 KB….you could optimize those…..I think to at least 50% of the current size or more without losing too much quality.

You’ll get even more sales when you page loads faster Laughing

Hope that helps

Scott

Ben….I’m procrastinating on doing my work Very Happy

I said above:

Your screenshots and book images are all around or over 1000 KB….you could optimize those…..I think to at least 50% of the current size or more without losing too much quality.

If you or anyone else doesn’t know what or how to optimize an image, I thought I’d explain it a little.

In photoshop you have the option of saving the file or saving it for web. When you save it for web, you have the option of deciding how much to optimize the image. For instance the image of you book covers is over 1000KB that’s actually over 1 MB which is huge. Some poor guy on a dial up will start cussing you out if he clicks on your link Laughing

When “Saving for Web” you can reduce the file size by reducing the quality of the image. Often times the image will look virtually identical to the naked eye when optimized but will be minus a few pixels Smile

Since most people don’t have photoshop, there are services on the web…just google “image optimizer” and you should find a few services.

I found one service at: http://www.imageoptimizer.net/Pages/?

Just follow the directions to optimize your image.

I saved your book cover image (which is actually all the book covers) on my computer. And for Step 1====> locate the image on your computer

Step 2===> Fill in the image size…in your case 563 x 2326. In case you need to find out how big an image is, you can use your graphics program or just use your browser “right click” the image and you’ll get all kinds of information……You can play around with the next category “Optimize for” I think I used Normal

Step 3===> Use “No Special Effects”

Now click “optimze Now”

I was able to reduce your image down to 202 KB….That’s an image that is 5 times smaller and just might load 5 times faster!

When I first designing websites I made the mistake of not optimizing my images. My site seemed to load fast so I didn’t see a big deal…..Well, what happens is once you load your site through your url in your browser the computer remembers the site and loads it from memory….so you’ll never really see how fast or slow the site loads.

If you google website optimization and image optimization you’ll find some good stuff.

Good Luck,

Scott

Tags: image optimization, optimize image, full-size image, website image

I sell an assortment of clickbank message sets that are designed to be used with an autoresponder. Currently I have a set of a 52 Health Related Messages for any autoresponder that are related to the health niche.

These email messages are designed to promote clickbank products that have good sales and are related to the health niche. All you have to do is copy and paste the message into your autoresponder and then include your clickbank affiliate link.

Included with the package is 2 scripts that can be used to create redirect links or cloaked links for your clickbank affiliate links. I had one of my customers get a little confused so I tried to explain how to use the scripts for creating a redirect link for their clickbank affiliate link. I thought it might be helpful to anyone else who is having problems creating redirect links and stumbles upon this page

Hi Joe

Thanks for the kind words and for your purchase!

Sorry to hear that there is some confusion with redirects.

There is a READ_ME file in the download. It has the instructions for hiding your clickbank links. The process is called a “redirect” or “link cloaking”

You are given 2 files.

hide-hoplink2.html
hide-hoplink-php.php

For the first one, right click the file and open it in notepad or some text editor. Copy the code and open a blank file in notepad…now paste the code into that file.

Next look for all instances of “http://INSERTCBID.REPLACE-PUBID.hop.clickbank.net” and replace http://INSERTCBID.REPLACE-PUBID.hop.clickbank.net with your clickbank link.

Next save the file as anything you’d like…such as joeslink.html and use an ftp program to upload it to your server.

Typically people will create a folder on your directory and call it something like “recommends” and then save the new file in that folder.

So you would have www.joeswebsite.com/recommends/joeslink.html …..which will redirect to your clickbank link.
================================================

I like using the php redirect.

In the file “hide-hoplink-php.php” you’ll find a snippet of php code like below:

<?php
header(’Location: http://INSERTCBID.PUBID.hop.clickbank.net’);
?>

Copy that snippet of code and paste it into a blank or empty notpad file.

Remove the url http://INSERTCBID.PUBID.hop.clickbank.net and insert your clickbank or other url.

Now save the file as “joeslink.php” and upload it to the your website. The same deal applies….you could create a folder called “recommends” and save joeslink.php in that folder.

So your url will look like http://www.JoesWebsite.com/recommends/joeslink.php

Remember by doing redirects or cloaking you maintain control of your links and it isn’t so obvious that it’s an affiliate link….will help keep most visitors from stealing your commissions.

You might want to check out a blog post I did a short while ago at : http://desktop-wealth.com/blog/affiliate-marketing/free-link-cloaker-information/

As far as I know you can’t do redirects through xsitepro. You’ll be able to manage them better if you use a free ftp program like Filezilla to upload the files and manage your links.

If you still end up having problems and not understanding the concept….just go ahead and use your clickbank links in your autoresponder messages. You can change them when you get cloaking and redirects figured out.

If it will help, I could create a quick screen capture tutorial and show you how to do it, but won’t be able to get to it for a week or so.

Hope this helps,

Scott

You can use the 52 Health Related Autoresponder Messages in conjunction with just about any health related product. The great part of owning this message set is that the work is already done for you, the messages are written and include a clickbank affiliate product to promote. The messages are futher categorized in Health subjects so you can use all the messages or just some of them in an autoresponder series.

Tags: redirect links, clickbank, autoresonder messages, message sets, health related messages for autoresponders