I’ve covered article marketing in this make money blog before, but there is another really useful trick I recently picked up that I’d like to share with you.

It involves getting other people to generate your traffic and thereby make money for you without them even realising!

How?

Easy. As with all article marketing, you write a decent article on a popular topic for your niche. But before you go and submit it to your favourite article directory you need to modify it a little. Now this only works for some article directories that will allow you to place a link actually in the body of your article. That rules out the top directory, ezine articles (also my favourite article submission site).

GoArticles.com are the next best choice as they have high page rank and traffic, so your article will get seen by lots of people and gain you the all-important one-way back link to your site.

The trick is in placing an additional link back to your site in the body of the article as well as in your resource box. The reason for this is that often, visitors to article directories will copy your article and put it up on their website. Not a problem as long as they follow the rules and include your resource box. That gets you additional traffic from their site as well as a free one-way back link - and if the site that copied your article has a good page rank, you benefit even more.

But a lot of them don’t!

The steal your article and put it up on their site without your resource box so you don’t get the link or the traffic back to your site.

So by putting an additional link in the body of the article using the anchor tag and you main keywords as the anchor text, you will often (not always) get past that problem and still get your backlink and some traffic from the site that stole your article.

But what about duplicate content?

This is where it gets even better. As you won’t have a copy of the article on your site, because you submitted an original to GoArticles (you did submit an original, unique article, didn’t you?) it is timestamped in their database so that anyone who copies it are the ones with the duplicate content. If they are a rival site, then guess what happens as far as the serch engines are concerned? Yep, they get penalized for putting up duplicate content on their site, whereas you get the bonus of their back link as well as the back link from GoArticles and anyone else who copies your article and publishes it on their site.

Double whammy!

Terry Didcott
Make Money

You can easily make money by advertising your blog and do it for zero cost.

While “free” can often mean some hard work is involved, it doesn’t have to be a chore it you do it right. As with most things, there is a right way and there is a wrong way and a whole spectrum of variations in between! Just because there are free methods of advertising your blog to make money, it doesn’t mean they are sub-standard or will only bring you a trickle of traffic.

Far from it.

One of the free methods of advertising to make money that I’m going to tell you about has been generating a very nice stream of free and highly targeted traffic for some time now. The best part of it is that it’s not a chore but on the contrary, can be treated like a bit of fun!

So here is a great way to advertise your blog for free!

The number one free method that I have found is making full use of several social networking sites like MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, Bumpzee and the like. I’ve personally found that while they start slowly, after a couple of weeks they soon pick up momentum and start sending lots of visitors to my blogs.

The best part is they’re all free to sign-up with. They allow you to create your own personal profile and you can submit your blog or several blogs if you so wish. This way, other members of the social networking sites can see you, read a bit about you and most importantly, get a preview of your blog(s).

If your blogs appear sufficiently interesting, the members will soon get around to contacting you to say hi and to add you to their list of contacts. You can sit around and wait for that to happen (the lazy way), or you can get busy and start making contact with other members who have blogs or interests in the same niche as yours. My advice is not to choose the lazy way!
Much better is if you make a point of not only visiting the other members’ profile pages, but also their blog(s). Sure it’s time consuming, but also interesting in that you get to view many different blogs and you’ll pick up some tips, ideas and information along the way! This is the quickest way to jump-start your own blogging empire as by nature people are curious to see who has visited their profile AND their blogs and will quickly visit your profile page and your blogs in return.

You’ll be as surprised as I was initially when, after only a few days of getting busy making new friends in these sites, you’ll see a huge increase in traffic to your blog. That’s assuming your blog is worthy of attracting lots of visitors and being interesting enough to make them want to return as regular readers.

That’s not too hard to do by making sure your blog is well written, informative, interesting and updated regularly. But you already knew that from reading earlier posts right here in this blog.

You have been reading all my posts here, haven’t you?

Of course you have! That’s why you came back to read this one. And if your own blog can do that for people, then you’ll do well in the social networking sites.

So get out there and make some blogging friends!

Terry Didcott
Make Money

Make Money has noticed that there is rather a hoo-ha going on at the moment with the recent page rank changes. Lots of high PR sites were demoted and in some cases quite drastically. The conjecturing has been widespread and lots of points of view been aired.

My very good friend Grizzly Brears posted an extremely in-depth article on this subject on his blog, Make Money For Beginners. Here’s the gist of it, although I highly recommend you follow that link and go read his post for yourself.

The most popular theory for the PR drop is that the sites and blogs that suffered the worst were those that were selling links. Ok, but it doesn’t stop with the obvious programs like Text Link Ads. It also seems that Google was sending out a warning to all bloggers to refrain from selling links AND from writing paid reviews to make money, which if you read between the lines is just another way of selling links.

That has been made all the more clear by the restrictions placed on bloggers by sites like PayPerPost who enforce the rule that links required to be placed in the review must not be altered in any way. That prevents the blogger from adding things like Target=”_blank” to force the link to open in a new window or tab, and more importantly rel=”_nofollow” to stop the search engine spiders from following the link to the site and endowing it with link juice.

Here’s my take on this.

I was already writing paid reviews to make money for PPP on my older and more established blog, The Honest Way when Google gave it a PR3. One could conjecture that if the big G wanted to stamp on blogs writing paid reviews to make money, it wouldn’t have been given the PR3 in the first place.

Another thought is that PPP don’t just accept high PR blogs for reviews. The Honest Way was PR0 when it was accepted and there were always paid reviews to write. Why would PPP bother with low PR minnows if it only wanted to see high ranking link juice?

Curiouser and curiouser!

Another thing. PR is absolutely useless unless you’re going to use it to make money.

Traffic is king for selling affiliate products. It’s a numbers game - the more visitors you get through the door the better chance a fair percentage of them will buy the product and you make money that way.

Losing ground in Google’s SERPs may be a blow, but not a fatal one, as there is still Yahoo and other search engines who make up the other 50% of searches and they don’t have a page ranking system as such. Meaning they don’t penalize you for selling text links or writing paid reviews to make money!
I get a lot of traffic from Yahoo especially to some of my niche squidoo lenses which do make money, so there will always be “life after Google” - assuming that Google will go for the jugular and try to kill off the likes of PPP by tightening the thumb screws around the blogs who write for them.

But will they?

What’s the difference (in the search engine’s eyes) between writing a 200 word review of a website (and including a link) in your blog to make money and writing a 400 word article (with your link) and posting it in an article directory?

One you make money from and the other brings you traffic and link juice to your own site. But Google doesn’t have the ability to see the difference! At least not yet.

The way around the apparent problem of text links for money is to add the rel=”_nofollow” to the anchor tag for paid links and take a chance that the paid review sites will let it go. Maybe you should wait until they’ve approved the post, but there is always the chance they will find out that you’ve altered the link and throw you out of the program.

Is losing a great deal of money worth the risk just on the conjecture that Google MIGHT be penalizing sites for writing paid reviews?

I wonder?

It gets worse. Apparently, there is also a scheme (I’m reliably informed) that the big G has introduced where it asks you to report sites that are writing paid reviews.

WHAT THE???

Now that is going too far. Big Brother at it’s worst. Snitch on your rivals to get them booted down a few rungs of the ladder and make yourself look good.

How disgraceful!

That’s pretty low and well below the belt. I sincerely hope it backfires spectacularly.

Terry Didcott
Make Money