SEO Discussion Blog

Make Money Online By Being Helpful To Others

I get asked about this all the time. People I know offline and people I know online ask me, What is the best way to make money on the web? My answer is very simple, but always requires more explanation.

BE HELPFUL

Be helpful? What does that mean? I don’t get it. Hunh? are a few of the responses to my answer, so of course I will explain.

Let’s say you want to establish yourself as an expert in your field. One great way to do so is to join forums that are related to your field. Introduce yourself and give a little history when you first join so people know a little about you.

Then browse through the forum and look for questions people are asking. Answer their questions as fully as you can. If you do not know the answer, use the search engines and find out what the answer is. Be courteous when answering. Provide links to where they can find out more information and confirm your answer.

This accomplishes five things. 1. You were helpful. 2. You may have learned something new by looking up the answer. 3. You now have a bookmark for a website you may need later. 4. You have established yourself as someone who can provide answers. and 5. Other people saw how helpful you were.

#5 is probably the most important of all. Some people read your answer, saw how helpful you were, and probably visited the website in your signature and are now a potential customer.

Whenever someone calls you, emails you, or comments on your blog with a question, take the time, make the time, to answer them even when it doesn’t make you any money. Once people start taking your advice, most will help you in return and won’t mind helping you make money later.

Sign up for affiliate programs that pay well. Things you know the people you deal with might need, like web hosting, web design, seo, etc. When people are asking your advice, ask them if they need hosting or whatever. If they say yes, ask them to use your affiliate link to sign up. It costs them nothing. It makes you money. And since you have been so helpful, they do not mind helping you make a little money.

Make sure the places you refer them to are actually good companies. Again, you are being helpful by referring them to something worthwhile and you make money doing it.

Learn how to search the web. I don’t mean just going to Google and typing something in. Learn advanced search methods and other sources besides just search engines to find what you are looking for.

Once you know how to really search the web, you can be even more helpful. You will be able to find things other people cannot find. This valuable skill can make you more helpful to others and make you more money.

If you provide a service or product, provide free consultations and offer free information for your potential customers. Find non-competing services, products, free coupons, and other things that you know your target audience will also be interested in.

Take a little time and find these things for the people you wish to do business with and you will soon learn how much they appreciate you and want to do business with you.

So many of us get busy and view some of these things as a waste of our time. I could be talking to a paying client right now instead of this person. I can’t believe this person keeps asking me questions and they haven’t even bought anything.

Yes, you do have to find the right balance, because you do have a business to run. But taking a little time each day or each week to just be helpful to others or adopting an overall philosophy of being helpful will make you more money in the long run than only focusing on “What’s in it for me”.

Some people you help won’t appreciate it at all. They may turn out to be a total jerk after you have given freely of your time and expertise. But that is their problem, not yours, and they will wish they still had you to help them later. Most people you help will respond in kind and appreciate your efforts.

They will refer their friends to you and whenever possible, they will choose your services over another provider, even if the other provider offers it at a better price.

So, how do you make more money on the net?

BE HELPFUL

Google Broadband Very Popular

Google is getting into everything. We had generation X, the baby Boomers, etc. etc. Are we now in the generation Google phase? Will our children and grand children just automatically be connected to Google somehow in the future?

Anyway, found this at CircleID.com and thought I’d sahre it here.

Over 1,100 Communities Request for Google’s High-Speed Broadband Program

Google has received over 1,100 community requests in response to their up coming experimental, “ultra high-speed broadband networks,” according to the company. Google plans to announce their target communities by the end of the year. “Of course, we’re not going to be able to build in every interested community—our plan is to reach a total of at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people with this experiment,” says Google’s Product Manager, James Kelly, in a blog post.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google sheds new light on broadband plans (v3.co.uk)
• Boomers to Millennials: Generational Attitudes (youngmoney.com)
• Make your pitch for Google to test ultra-high speed broadband here (phinneywood.com)

How Many Links Should I Put Into My Author Bio Section?

By Allen Taylor

I’ve heard all kinds of responses to this question. Some people say use the maximum number of links possible in your author resource box. Others say use just one. I think it really depends.

The first rule of thumb with article author resource boxes is to only include information that is relevant to your article. For instance, if you run a dog kennel, an IRS tax preparation service, and a day spa and you write an article about how to save money on your taxes then you want to include the fact that you are the owner of an IRS tax preparation service.

You don’t want to mention that you own a dog kennel or a day spa. On the other hand, if your article is about how to groom your poodle for show then you would want to mention that you own a dog kennel but you should leave out the IRS tax preparation service and the day spa.

I think the reason for this is obvious. People interested in one service won’t necessarily be interested in the other and it could actually ruin your credibility with your target audience to mention non-relevant interests. But that tells us nothing about links.

Based on the above principle, of course, you can reason that unrelated links should be left out of your author resource box. Don’t link to your dog kennel website in an author resource box attached to an article about the health benefits of a day spa. But what if you own a day spa and a massage parlor, two related businesses?

You could provide a link to both business websites in an article about general health and wellness tips. But should you? I’d say you shouldn’t IF the two businesses are separate businesses and not related to each other by legal status.

On the other hand, if you have a business website and a blog that represents the same business entity then you probably do want to include a link to both websites. The reason is because some people will be threatened by the website, which they know will have a strong sales pitch, but they might be interested in reading what you have to say on your blog because it is viewed as less threatening.

Ultimately, the decision is yours. But the principles that I use in determining how many links should go into my article author resource box are these:

• Are the links related to the article content?
• Are the links related to each other?
• How much space is alloted for the author resource box at the directory or website it is being submitted to?
• Which website am I more interested in driving traffic to?
• What is my target audience and how will they perceive each link?

These are all important considerations and very important when deciding what links to put into your author resource box. Generally speaking, though, fewer links is better because people are less likely to click through to any website if they have trouble deciding which link is most attractive.

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Articles or Press Releases, Which is Better?

This is one of the most frequently asked questions I get from clients. It isn’t that one is better than the other. Both have their purpose. However, the purpose for each is far different and you should not get article marketing confused with press releases.

Of course good copywriting is essential to both a press release and article marketing. And both are optimized to contain your keywords for seo purposes. But the relationship between article marketing and press releases ends there.

Article Marketing is the distribution of well-written, informative articles to article directories in the hopes that they will get syndicated by or reprinted on other websites and blogs. Article marketing helps with link popularity for this reason.

Article Marketing helps with branding you as an expert in your field and can drive traffic directly to your website if readers like the article.

Press Releases are written to announce a newsworthy event. They are distributed to news websites, news agencies, news blogs, newsletters, etc. They are not the same as an article.

Most press releases I see submitted aren’t newsworthy at all however. People are using press release distribution to send out articles. They have article marketing and press releases all mixed up.

I read press releases that sound like sales letters all the time. Pure self-promotion is not a press release at all. It’s a sales letter sent out through a press release distribution center.

People who see these know the difference. News agencies who could be printing or redistributing your press release to a wider audience can see the difference at a glance.

If you do not know how to write news, you do not know how to write a press release. Unfortunately, many of the people on the web who offer to write press releases for money don’t really know how to write press releases either. They know you don’t know the difference between a press release and an article or sales letter either, so they get away with charging money for the service.

Go to any press release website. read the press releases. You’ll see more than 50% are self-promotion or just articles. If it doesn’t read like something you would read in a newspaper, it isn’t a press release.

You can do a press release in the first person or from the company perspective, but you have to be announcing something that is newsworthy. Something new happening. Something that people will want to know about. A merger, an acquisition, a partnership, a new website launched, (Can only be done once!), a new blog launched, are all things that can be newsworthy and must be presented as a news item, not as a “Come Visit MY Website Please!” article.

Press releases do even better if written as a reporter would write about your announcement. The Reporter, (press release writer), can even interview you and others at your company for quotes to use in the press release.

People are hungry for news. A press release should only be distributed if there is news to announce. Yes you want to optimize your press release for the search engines but seo is not the number one purpose for distributing a press release.

Announcing something newsworthy is the first reason. You only optimize it because it is being distributed on the web and that is the secondary purpose for the press release, not the first.

If you want good results for the money you spend on a press release, do them sparingly and only when you have something newsworthy to announce. You’ll get more bang for your buck, more traffic, more people reading about you, and you’ll make back your investment every time.

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What Are The Best Ways To Promote An Online Dating Website?

This is an SEO Discussion about online dating websites. I plan to have several SEO discussions on particular niches and hope you will respond so we can get a discussion going that will help others learn how to promote their niche websites.

I’ll start by saying that Social Networking has to be involved with any online dating site, but how should they work places like Facebook, Twitter, Digg and others? What are some specific tips for a social networking campaign that promotes online dating?

What are some other things the person that asks about the best ways to promote an online dating website should know?

There will be people who are running or starting an online dating site reading this, so I don’t mind if you promote your own services that apply to their needs. Don’t be spammy is all.

Article Marketing Myths – True or False?

By now everyone has heard of article marketing and so many people out define it in so many different ways there that it has become hard for people new to article marketing to understand.

First of all, most of the SEO Gurus caught on to article marketing late in the game, then scrambled to create their own definitions of it at the last minute so it didn’t appear they were ever not aware of the power of article marketing.

In general, article marketing is where you write an article on a topic that is related to your website topic. Not a promotional article for your website, but an article about something that is informative to the reader.

In the article you use keywords and phrases that relate to your topic as well, much like you would optimize a webpage. Your article when reprinted will be the text of a webpage or webpages.

In the author bio section at the bottom is some info about you and links to your website. It is suggested that you put in one link to your main page and one to an interior page that fits the article you are writing.

If your article is submitted to websites that take article submissions and offers free content to webmasters, then webmasters choose to repost your article on their websites, the links in the author bio section become links from their websites to your website.

Now lets go on to the myths and facts about article marketing

FALSE: Article marketing doesn’t really help you all that much.

TRUTH: Article Marketing can help you increase your link popularity and be a source of some of the most targeted traffic you can get.

FALSE: Reprinted Articles only get indexed as supplemental pages, therefore it doesn’t help enough to make it worthwhile.

TRUTH: Depending on where the article gets submitted to, the article itself can get a top 10 listing in major search engines and not as a supplemental page.

FALSE: Submitting your article everywhere creates duplicate content and the search engines will punish or discount those pages as a result.

TRUTH: If search engines punished duplicate content in the way that myth suggests then all rss feeds that cause a post in a blog to be reproduced to be discounted or published and they are not. The New York Times articles and CNN stuff is blasted all over the web and are not punished or discounted.

Duplicate content is two webpages that are around 90% similar, not two webpages that have similar text on them. If you would like to compare how similar two webpages are Click Here.

FALSE: The only way article marketing works is you write an article then submit it to thousands of article submission websites.

TRUTH: There is more than one way to make article marketing work for you. The way mentioned above works okay if you are looking to get a lot of links back to your website whether they are related or not and can be effective if you currently have very little or no link popularity at all.

Another way is to hand submit your article to article submission websitesthat only accept articles related to your topic. This is more difficult but the links help you more just through the submissions and it’s more likely that the websites that pick up and repost your article will be also related to your topic which can help you with better links and targeted traffic.

Yet another way is to write a very high quality article that you really take your time on and research. You then choose a very high traffic website related to your topic. One that has great PR and a lot of visitors.

Email them your article and offer them an exclusive if they will print your article with your links included in the bio. If your article is of good quality and they get an exclusive you have a good chance they will post your article there.

This one posting of your article can be more powerful than the mass submitted article method if you choose the website you submit it to carefully.

Last but not least, posting your article exclusively on your own website is a great way to add fresh content and if the article is good, people will link directly to the article increasing both traffic and PR for your webpage where you posted the article. But for this to work you need to already have some traffic to work with.

FALSE: You should always post your article in your website first, then wait to get crawled by the search engines before submitting the article elsewhere.

TRUTH: Adding articles to your own website is called adding content. Submitting those articles to other websites is called article marketing. With article marketing you don’t want the article indexed on your website first.

Yes you read that right. You do not want the article indexed on your website first. You are or should already be doing SEO on your website and adding fresh content to your website for the search engines to get traffic from them.

Submitting articles to other websites and having the search engines find it there first gives another gateway that people can find your website through. If the websites that you submitted your articles to get crawled often, then having your article appear there with the links intact will get your website crawled as well.

If the websites you submitted your article to are getting indexed well by the search engines, then your article being found on their website first might get it in the top 10 results. Placing it into your own website with no or low PR might not have gotten the article indexed at all.

I hope this article will clear up some of the myths about article marketing and that it has helped you understand how and why it works.

Google Adds New Way To Verify You Are The Owner Of Your Website

From the Google Webmaster’s Blog

DNS Verification FTW Posted: 31 Mar 2010 01:28 PM PDT Webmaster Level: Advanced A few weeks ago, we introduced a new way of verifying site ownership, making it easy to share verified ownership of a site with another person. This week, we bring you another new way to verify. Verification by DNS record allows you to become a verified owner of an entire domain (and all of the sites within that domain) at once. It also provides an alternative way to verify for folks who struggle with the existing HTML file or meta tag methods. I like to explain things by walking through an example, so let’s try using the new verification method right now. For the sake of this example, we’ll say I own the domain example.com. I have several websites under example.com, including http://www.example.com/, http://blog.example.com/ and http://beta.example.com/. I could individually verify ownership of each of those sites using the meta tag or HTML file method. But that means I’d need to go through the verification process three times, and if I wanted to add http://customers.example.com/, I’d need to do it a fourth time. DNS record verification gives me a better way! First I’ll add example.com to my account, either in Webmaster Tools or directly on the Verification Home page.

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• Google Webmaster Tools makes giving access to accounts easier (blogstorm.co.uk)
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A Good SEO Strategy Includes Article Marketing

SEO, or search engine optimization, is a term that covers a lot of ground. It involves link building strategies, branding, blogging, onsite optimization, ppc, and much more.

Under link building and branding, article marketing comes into play. You can write articles or have them written for you by a ghostwriter. Once you have the article content, you can submit them to thousands of article directories.

Many people think article marketing stops there. It doesn’t. Article directories that accept and reprint your articles are not where your link popularity comes from.

These article directories provide free content to webmasters and bloggers for their website. When these people use your article, the links in your author bio section lead to your website. The websites or blogs they are reprinted on are ususlly going to be relevant to your website and the links from there are valuable in most cases.

That is where good link popularity comes from article marketing. This also means that your articles need to be something someone would want to post on their website. That means that all the garbage articles that contain bad grammar and are just stuffed with keywords have absolutely no value at all.

This especially applies to spinning articles. If you are using an article spinner for your article marketing, then you just don’t get it. The temporary benefits that you get now will bite you in the $%& later. That’s a promise, not a prediction.

You can go to a freelance website and find people who say they will write seo articles for you for $5, $3, and even $1.50 per article. They usually live someplace where a dollar goes a long way and they know nothing about article writing or article marketing whatsoever.

The articles they write for you are worth nothing. Whatever you paid for them is money thrown away. The links you get from article directories are not going to help you that much due to the content being so poor.

Article Directories are not there to give you link popularity. They are there to provide good quality free content to webmasters and bloggers who need reprint material.

Webmasters and Bloggers with high-quality sites are not going to reprint garbage articles on their website.

You have to pay more for quality content. That is the bottom line. Article Marketing, when done correctly can get you a lot of traffic and help you build link popularity. Done improperly, it’s a waste of your time and money.

One well-written, informative article can bring you more traffic and link popularity than 100 garbage articles.

In addition to the benefits of having a professional write the articles for you is that the content might get picked up by websites with a high Google page rank and websites with a lot of targeted traffic.

People will read a good article all the way to the bottom where your links are and click on those links. They will stop reading a garbage article before they even see your links at the bottom.

Think of your own reading habits. Do you finish an article that is poorly written or one that bores you to tears? Of course not and neither will your potential customers.

And article marketing can help you with branding your name or your company name. People want to deal with people they perceive as an expert in their field.

By having quality articles with your byline and company name in them that can be found through searches for your name helps build your reputation as an expert.

Hiring a professional ghostwriter is the key to getting quality articles that will bring you more traffic, help build your brand, and help you build link popularity.