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