Welcome to the Internet Business Guide.

My name is Steve, and it’s my goal to give you the information and resources that you need to be successful at earning online with your own internet business. There is a lot of information out there on how to make easy money online. 99.99% of it is garbage. They are promises made by people who make their living from trying to sell you stuff.

I do not need to sell you anything to make money. You will find programs and such that I recommend, and most of them will have my affiliate URL, but you DO NOT need to spend any money on any of these things to succeed. I offer these tools because, for those who can afford to invest in this tool or that resource, I believe it will make the journey easier.

None of them are necessary, however, and you can build your business without them.

If you learn nothing else from this website, at least know this: In order for you to be successful, you will need to treat this as a business. Businesses take work and dedication to make them successful.

If you are looking to earn easy money, with little or no effort, I cannot help you. If, on the other hand, you are willing to put some effort into an internet business that will give you years and years of income, read on!

If you read my article on Getting Your First Links, you will know that I recommend not only building links to your home page, but to your internal post pages as well.  This practice is called “deep linking” and it is a great way to get your posts to rank in the SERPs for your cousin keywords.

If you did not read that post, I will quickly explain what I mean.  When I submit a post to an article directory, or someplace else for the purpose of getting backlinks, I will include a keyword anchored link to my home page, and a second one to a post page on my site.  That gives me a “base link” to my site’s home page with a variation of it’s main KW and a “deep link” to the article I am promoting at the time. This helps pass authority to your posts, and gets and keeps them indexed.

There is another form of deep linking, however, that many feel is just as important.  It is building an internal linking structure within your site.  This is a technique that I learned from Mark and Court (you better know who they are by now. lol), and is referred to as a “link net”.  There are two ways to do link nets:

Manual Link Nets

When you post an article to your site, it usually does one of two things: either it targets a keyword or it supports a keyword.  Often, a post can do both.  Let’s say that the main keyword for this site is “Internet Business”.  I will post an article that targets that KW and I will find the first instance of it and make it a link to the home page. I also know that I will be using cousin keywords later, so I will put them in the post, but not link them to anything yet.

The next article I post will be on a cousin keyword – let’s say, “earning online”.  I do the regular linking (internet business links to the home page and earning online to the post permalink) and publish the post.  Now, I will go back to the previous post, find “earning online”, and link that KW in that post to the post I just published.  Later on, as I add more posts to my site, I will be linking instances of keywords from articles back to the articles that I wrote to target them.  Does that make sense?

As you can probably imagine, that’s not too difficult with smaller niche sites, but it can get pretty crazy with bigger sites.  Think about it: you have a site with 30 posts, and you add a new one to target a cousin KW.  You have to figure out what posts had that KW in them, so that you can go and link those posts to the new one.  Now imagine if your site 100 posts!  Don’t worry, there is an easier way!

Automatic Link Nets

Here comes your salvation!  It is a little plug-in called SEO Smart Links.  You can get it there, or search for it in your wordpress admin area.  This is the plugin that will automate your link nets for you.  I have it installed on every single site I own, and it works great.

What SEO Smart Links does is set up your site so that KWs will automatically link to your posts, pages, and even your category and tag pages, if you want.  I will usually set it up to do my posts.  I then use the Custom Keywords feature to point keyword to certain posts.  Let me explain that a bit…

Normally, for a article to be linked to, the text has to be exactly the same as the title of the post.  Let’s say, I want the main keyword of this article to be “internal linking”.  I don’t want to have “Internal Linking and Why it is Important” as my anchor, so I set up the custom keywords like this:

internal linking, http://internetbusinessguide.info/internal-linking-and-why-it-is-important/

That way, every time “internal linking” shows up on my site, it will link to this article.  Pretty cool, huh?  Just make sure you set the options so that you are only linking to the same keyword once per article.  Also, for sites with smaller posts, I set the max links to 3.  sites with longer articles (like this one), I set to a max of 5.

So Why Do All This?

Here is the thing – when you get a link from somewhere, that site passes along some of its “juice” to your site.  Link nets do the exact same thing, but internally.  You can see that for yourself if you have any sites that are PR2 or higher.  Go to your tag cloud and start looking at the PR of some of your tag pages.  Even if you haven’t linked to them from outside sources, some of them will have pagerank.  Why?  because you linked to them internally from within your site.  Every article you post has tags (hopefully), and every post lists it’s tags via anchored links.  That is where they get their authority.

Personally, the way I set up my internal links depends on what I am trying to accomplish.  This site, I have not been concentrating on targeting KWs with my posts (for the most part).  Most of my other sites I have.  This one, I am more looking for “tag” traffic and home page traffic, so I don’t have any custom KWs set up here.  I still do manual linking though, and you can see that I have some tag links set up.

For those of you who have been asking for an example of one of my sites, I took a screen shot of custom links set up on my 10 month old mid-sized site.

As you can see, I have each keyword set to go to a link within my site.  BTW, the site just went to #4 in Google for “solar lights” and “solar lighting” according to my personal searches and #2 if you check scroogle.  It will be #1 within the next couple of months (I hope).  Due, in part, to internal link nets.

There is one other thing that I would encourage you to do as well.  While you are looking for plugins, search for YARPP.  It is a plugin that will list your related posts at the end of each article.  More internal linking.

As you may or may not know, link building is the single most important part of earning online with your own internet business.  You can take the best site, with the best content and great value for your readers.  Without links pointing to your website from external sources, you will get nowhere.

Conversely, you can have little or no content on a terrible looking site that will do really well in the SERPs if you get enough links to it.  At least it will do well all the way until a manual review is done, at which time your site will likely get tanked, but that’s a different story (read my “Earning Online with Thin MFA Sites” for more info).  The point is that backlinks are the lifeblood of your business, and your business cannot grow without them.

So far, if you have been following along, you have a website set up with articles for your main keywords and cousin keywords. You should also have a bunch of links pointing to those articles and your site’s home page from unique articles that you have submitted to article directories.  You should have also built a few backlinks to some of the directories to increase the PR of your articles.  Now we will look at some of the other methods for building links.

The first thing I want to mention here is that most of these techniques are not a good idea for new sites (less than 90 days old).  I would even be cautious using some of these strategies with sites under 6 months old.  The reason is that some of these will get you a lot of links very quickly, which can look a bit fishy to google.  The name of the game here is: “slow and steady wins the race”.  You want to build links naturally – 5 a day, 10 a day, then maybe 20, etc.  The last thing you want is to have a 90-day-old site that has a few backlinks that it has gathered over the course of those 3 months, and all of a sudden, you pick up 450 fresh links.

Okay, keeping these things in mind, here are some of the methods that I use to get more links to my sites (in no particular order).

Link Exchanges

This is one of the most popular ways to get links.  It basically involves offering to link to somebody’s website if they will link to yours.  The easiest way to find the best links for exchanges is to do a google search for your main keywords and contacting the site owners.  You want to look for blogs mostly in the beginning because they are the easiest to get links from.  You can either do a search for your keyword under google blog search, or do the search with an “inurl” string.  For instance, for this website, maybe I would look for “internet business inurl:blog”.  I could also do a search for “internet business ‘leave a comment’”.

• Don’t worry too much about the page rank of the blog.  The fact that they showed up in good position in google tells you that they have some authority for your keyword.  Also you want to keep some things in mind when looking to exchange links with people.

• One-way links are much better than reciprocal links, so try to use three sites to form a triad, if you can (yoursite1 links to theirsite2, which links to yoursite3).

• Blogroll links give you a link from every page of the site, but they are still not nearly as valuable as links from within the site’s content.

• Be very careful of blogroll links from big sites when your site is young. That is an easy way to get too many links, too fast.

• Links from “links” or “resources” pages are barely a step up from garbage and are sometimes not even in google’s index.

• A site’s position in the SERPs is a better indication of their authority than their pagerank.

While looking for link trades, keep in mind that most people you ask will not even answer the email you send them.  That’s okay.  It’s normal.  Out of everyone I ask for link trades, I probably actually get links from about 1 in every 15.

Guest Posting

In my opinion, guest posting is one of the best ways to get good links to your site.  It is easy too.  You just need to find blogs that are related to your niche that accept guest posts and contact them.  How do you find them?  Just do a search for your keyword with “guest post” (keep the quotes).  Before contacting the blog owner, make sure that you are allowed at least one (preferably 2) dofollow backlinks, either in the body of the article or in an author bio.  You should also look at the other guest posts on the blog and make sure that the articles are not riddled with links to other sites.  The more links to other sites on a page, the less your links will be worth.  Internal links are fine. Once you have contacted the site owner, and he/she agrees, write them a good quality, unique article and offer it up for submission.  You can also offer to build a few backlinks to the post.  This helps their site and yours.

If you are a member of The Keyword Academy, you already have a resource that gives you over 700 blogs that are begging for guest posts.  You just need to write your post and decide where you want to send it.  These are some of the strongest links you can get.  If you are not yet a member, i will tell you that just this feature alone is worth the price of admission – especially if you consider the first month is only $1.  Get your $1 trial month HERE. <- useful link

Forum Links

Find forums that relate to your niche that allow a dofollow link in your signature.  Join the forum and make some posts over the span of a week or two.  Make them good posts.  Either answer other people’s questions on their threads, or start your own threads with good questions, opinions, etc.  After a week or so of adding useful content to the forum, go ahead and add your signature link to your profile.  The link will show up on every thread you previously posted to.

Mass Article Submission

This is one to be especially careful with when your site is young.  It involves getting articles out to hundreds, or even thousands, of article directories, blogs, etc.  My favorite tool for this is Unique Article Wizard.  One reason is that, although they are not truly 100% unique, they are more unique than most.  Also, since they read well, they are more likely to be accepted by the directories.  I also like the fact that I can schedule the article submission.  When your site is new (90-180 days) I would set it up to submit 5 per day.  There are other services as well that submit your articles all over the place, but UAW is the best I have found so far.  You can check them out here: Unique Article Wizard

Social Bookmarking

A lot of people claim that social bookmarking is the be all end all of internet marketing.  I have news for them – it is not.  Do not waste a lot of time with this.  I use two services to bookmark my sites – onlywire.com and ping.fm.  Take the time to set up your accounts (some of the accounts overlap, so be careful not to use the same services for both), and when you publish a new post, use the applets for the two sites to send the site details to your bookmark sites and statuses.  It takes about 30 seconds to do.  That is all the time you need to spend with web 2.0 stuff.  These sites don’t provide any valuable backlinks really, and the traffic you MIGHT get from them doesn’t generally buy or click ads.  It is useful to help you get your pages indexed faster though, and can help get the word out.

Technorati

Go to technorati.com and submit your site to them.  Make sure you fill in the spaces that mention sites that link to you.  This will help you to get your technorati score higher, which will help push you higher on more of the tag pages, and maybe even the top 1000 for your niche.  It is easy to do, but takes a while for them to confirm your site.

MyBlogLog

ByBloBlog.com is a yahoo owned site.  It is kind of like a myspace for blogs.  They update your “neighborhood” when you make changes to your blog.  You can choose to follow people or join other neighborhoods, etc.  It can be a good way to find link partners, guest post opportunities, etc.  It also gives you backlinks to your site.

Blog Comments

Finally, we will discuss blog comments.  Honestly, I could do an entire article on this topic.  The fact is that a TON of people use this as their primary source for getting backlinks, and 99% of them do it wrong. Here are some of the major mistakes they make:

• They comment on nofollow blogs.  Most blog comment links are nofollow.  Sure, the link is a link, but being “nofollow”, it tells google that it is not a trusted link, and therefore the recipient site should receive no link juice.  Find blogs that have comment links that are dofollow.

• They use their keyword as their name.  If you can get away with this fine, but make sure that others have approved comments using keywords as names.  Personally, anything other than a name in the name field, and I will delete the comment from the mod panel before it is even published.

• They give generic “nice post I will subscribe” comments.  Provide value in your comments.  Add to the conversation.  Read the post that you are commenting on and say something about the post.

• They leave comments that have nothing to do with the post (or the site, for that matter).  See above.

To me, it is just common sense; do what you can to make sure that the comment is accepted (and even appreciated) and that the link back to your site is dofollow.  You won’t get as many links as the spammers do, but at least the ones you get will be worth something.

Your Mind Set

Look at this way; what kind of links do you thing that the search engines will value the most?  Pretend that you are a googlebot.  You are crawling around the web, looking for quality content to add to your results.  You are alerted to the fact that a new post has been published at purpleferretsweaters.com.  You crawl the content and see that, indeed, the content seems to be relevant to purple ferret sweaters, but is it good quality content?  You don’t know, so you look around the internet for references to the site.  Over the next few days, you see that the same article is posted on 453 article directories.  You have seen this before.  It looks to you like someone posted an article to their site, then mass submitted it all over the place to try to trick you into thinking it is popular.

Now take the same scenario, but with a different linking pattern.  During the few days after you notice the new article, you see the link popping up in different contexts – in dofollow comments on blogs, in blog posts, in a few directories, etc; all of them pointing back to the article on purpleferretsweaters.com.  This should look to you like people found the article, liked it, and mentioned it on their sites and on the sites they follow.

The first scenario looks like spam.  The second one looks like the site contains valuable information that people are talking about.  Which one would you include in the top of your SERPs?

Honestly, I don’t think there is a lot more to cover here in the basic Earning Online Course.  If you follow this course to the letter, you should have pretty much all you need to make money.  In fact, if you keep adding content and backlinks to your site, and you have built the site on good, solid keyword research, you cannot really fail to make money.  I will still add more to this site, of course, but from here on I think I will mostly be concentrating on tips and techniques, rather than on a full step-by-step course.  We will see.  Let me know what you think.  In the meantime, build your internet business, build links to it, and prosper!

Hello again, and welcome to another installment of the Internet Business Guide, Earning Online Blogging series.  This is our 7^th in the series.  If you are not yet up to date, you can find them all of the lessons, in order, listed in the sidebar where is says “Earning Online Blogging Course”.

In our last installment, we discussed getting the first links to your site, and to the fist “real” post that focused on your site’s main keyword.  We also went through some of the strategies that I use and recommend for boosting your links (getting backlinks to the articles you posted to the directories).  In this installment, we will discuss where we go from here.  The two main areas we will be covering are:

1. Using your cousin keywords
2. Getting more backlinks

So, if you remember, in our early post about Earning Online with WordPress, we talked about the main keyword for your site and the cousin keywords.  Your cousin keywords are typically lower valued keywords than your main keyword, but are easier to rank for (easier competing websites in the top 4 SE positions).  You have already created a nice, long post that focused on your main keyword, and got a few backlinks to it and to your site.  Now it is time to work on one of your cousins.

Let’s say your main site is using “internet home business” as the main keyword.  You have the keyword in the URL and in the title of your first post.  You found a few cousin keywords, and decide to first work on “data entry at home” (BTW, that keyword has a $40/month potential and very low difficulty if you want to grab it).  You will want to tie the “data entry at home” keyword to your site’s main keyword and write an article about it.

An example title might be, “Data Entry at Home as an Internet Business”.  “Internet business is very similar to your main site keyword, but not exact.  I could have used the full “internet home business” in the title, but to me it reads a little spammy, and it is really not necessary here.  Now, using that title, it is pretty obvious what I am going to write the article about, right?  Here are some rules you will want to follow:

1. Use your cousin keyword (in this case “data entry from home”) AND your main site keyword within the first 160 characters.  Usually you can do that by simply adding a word to the title in the form of a question – “Is it really possibly to develop a data entry from home job into an internet home business?”
2. Use you cousin KW in the last sentence.
3. Use your cousin a few more times within the article, but no more than read naturally and never more than once per 150 words.
4. Link the first occurrence of your cousin KW to the article permalink.
5. Use your main site keyword once more in the middle of your article somewhere.
6. Link that occurrence of your main site keyword to your home page.

Remember, although we are optimizing these articles for the search engines, we are writing them for our readers!  Do some research and come up with some quality content.  You are in the business of providing information, so do a good job of it.  Here is what I do, that might make it easier for you:

1. Come up with the topic based on the keyword I am looking to write about.
2. Write the first couple of sentences of my article.
3. Take the dog for a walk, or go get some coffee or something, making sure I forget the keyword.
4. Come back and reread what I wrote.
5. Write the best article I can about the topic, while not even thinking about the keywords.
6. Reread the entire article, inserting the keywords where they naturally fit

This will keep the articles you write of a high quality, while still making sure that you are including the keywords in the content.  I learned this trick from some very successful article marketers, and it turns out a lot of the best bloggers do this.

Okay, on to getting more backlinks.

What you want to do after this post is basically the same thing you did with the last post (this article).  The only difference is that you want to widen your available directories.  Look for article directories with high PR that offer at least 2 anchored “dofollow” backlinks back to your site.  If you are not sure if the site offers dofollow or nofollow links, go to a couple of the articles within the directories and check the links.  The SEO for Firefox toolbar has a button you can click that will highlight all of the nofollow links on a page.

Right now, your site is still young, so you should be focusing on getting backlinks from articles pretty much exclusively.  We want to build links slowly at this point, so as to begin to establish some authority with Google, without taking a chance that something might look a little fishy.  Stay away from “blogroll” exchanges for the first 30 days, unless they are with smaller sites.  A blogroll link from a big site can cause you to go from 0-50 or 100 or 1,000 links over night.  That can actually hurt a new site.  Be patient.

Here is what we are looking for with this site.  You started the site with an introductory post.  You followed that up with a post that focused on your main site keyword.  Then you promoted that article (and your site’s home page).  Next, you posted an article based on one of your cousin keywords and promoted it (current lesson).

Your next task is to repeat these steps for another article for your main keyword and another for a cousin keyword.  This will be followed by another post for your main keyword, and another for a cousin.  Keep doing this until you run out of cousins.  Then we are going to let the site age a little and see how we are doing in preparation for the next phase.

Well, that’s about it for this article.  We will discuss additional link building strategies that you will be using to promote your site and articles in our next installment.  Until then, focus, write, and promote.

Remember, if you want better lessons than these, AND in video format, together with the tools I use for keyword research and a lot of my backlinks, you can get it all >>HERE<<

]]> http://internetbusinessguide.info/earning-online-growing-your-site/feed/ 0 http://internetbusinessguide.info/earning-online-growing-your-site/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/internetbusinessguide/aPVj/~3/i4FYTxluQfU/ http://internetbusinessguide.info/online-earning-with-thin-mfa-sites-be-careful/#comments Fri, 07 May 2010 07:02:56 +0000 admin http://internetbusinessguide.info/?p=112 Are you using small “made for Adsense” blogs as you main source of online earning?  You might want to read this article.

The internet changes.  Not only the information contained within it, but the rules for thriving within its structure as well.  As it changes, it forces one to look . . . → Read More:]]>

Are you using small “made for Adsense” blogs as you main source of online earning?  You might want to read this article.

The internet changes.  Not only the information contained within it, but the rules for thriving within its structure as well.  As it changes, it forces one to look at their internet business, over and over again to make sure that all is well.  After the Alan Liew incident a couple of weeks ago, and the consequent discussions surrounding the incident, it forced me to look at my own business with a magnifying glass.

If you don’t know the situation that I am talking about, you should probably read my latest post called “An Internet Business Takes a Fall”.  Now, when Alan’s site was deleted, there was no end to the speculation as to why.  Some said that it was due to SPAM (which was supposedly the “official reason”).  Others claimed that he was using too much duplicate content.  In fact, a commenter on this blog said that Alan was posting PLR articles to his site.  All the possible reasons were discussed and dissected ad nauseum.

Now, I pretty much stayed out of the way and let people give their thoughts, because I tend to learn more by listening than by talking.  I also stayed out of it because, in reality, I have no idea what really happened.  I did learn a lot from the discussions that I read though.  Thanks to those discussions and an excellent post by Griz, from How to Make Money Online for Beginners, some very important things were brought starkly into focus.

Amongst the discussions were several about the strategies that people are using to earn money online.  It’s a model that I have used a bit, and it does work… for a time.  It is using a system (like the methods I teach here) to find keywords that are easy to rank for and have some profit potential, and building small sites to target those keywords specifically for Adsense revenue.  These sights are usually pretty small (5 posts or so).  They are made ugly, so that users are more likely to notice the ads and click them, and usually offer very little actually value to the reader.  The posts are actually not written for the reader, but for the search engines.

The problem in that is when the site gets a manual review.  Someone from Google will actually look at the site, they will see it’s a blog made strictly for earning money with Adsense, and it will quickly fall in the SERPS.  That’s actually the best case scenario.  People with a lot of these types of sites can have them de-indexed completely and have their Adsense accounts closed.  Google wants quality sites at the top of their results, not thin, made for Adsense sites that offer no value to the reader.

So isn’t that what I teach here?  Actually, it’s not.  I do believe that there is value in information, and if I am willing to do the research on a topic and post my findings, so that someone reading learns from the article, I have no problem with getting paid for that.

When you are building your sites, using the methods that you read about here, it is very important that you offer value to your readers.  Write for them.  Give them the information that you think they are looking for when they search for the keyword that you are targeting.  Take information from several different sources and compile it all in one place.  Research your articles.  In doing so, you are providing a place where someone can get all of the information they need pertaining to that topic, without having to search site after site to find it.  That is valuable.

The problem with this strategy is that it actually takes work.  A lot of people recommend diversifying to the point where you have 100 or more blogs in different niches.  I have tried that method, and what I wound up with was a few sites that I really tried to treat as “authority sites” and a bunch of sites that were basically garbage.  A few months ago, I narrowed my focus again and got rid of most of my garbage sites.  I spend most of my work on the authority sites that I have, and the rest of the work on making some of the higher potential “garbage sites” into authority sites.  I also still have a couple of niche article directories that I keep going, and I diversify my monetization amongst Adsense, Amazon, clickbank, infolinks, and others.

I guess the message here is that I try to remember that this is my business, and not some “online earning fast cash gimmick”. If I put garbage into my business, I am going to get garbage back out of it, and garbage doesn’t pay the bills.  You can use the systems I teach on this site to make thin, MFA sites, but one of two things are going to end up happening:  either your MFA sites are going to get Google-slapped, or someone is going to build an authority site in your niche and crush you with it.

Something else to keep in mind is that you should not let this scare you away from using blogging as a main component of your internet business.  An authority site does not have to be huge and fancy with lots of media and flash presentations.  It is, after all, a blog.  It just needs to be quality.

I know I have traveled off the beaten path for the last couple of articles.  I did promise one on more link building strategies, as part of the “Earning Online” course, and I will do that one next – I promise.

An interesting thing happened a couple of days ago that I thought I would share with you.  A well known site in the internet marketing community disappeared.  It didn’t fade off the charts due to lack of activity or anything like that.  Rather, it was suddenly (and permanently) deleted by the blog hosting company.  Here is the story.

As I often do, I try to stay up to date with people that are excelling in the internet business field.  I contacted Alan Liew from moneymakerinfo.blogspot.com requesting to guest post to his blog.  His site was #1 on Google for the term “make money online” for quite a while, so a properly linked article on his site would give this one quite a bit of “authority”.  Alan contacted me to let me know that the post was scheduled to publish in the next couple of days.  I went to his site the following day (as I often do) to read up on the latest posts, when I got the infamous “The blog you were looking for was not found”.

I wrote to Alan to ask him what happened, and he said that Blogger deleted the blog due to “SPAM”.  Now, I know that Alan accepts guest posts, but I also know in his “author guidelines” he forbids submitting duplicate content.  He told me that he does not spam, and I believe him.  Personally, I think that if you already rank #1 in the SERPs for your chosen keyword, you don’t need to spam.  Whether he was falsely accused, or there was some other reason that blogger chose not to share with him, we will likely never know.

So why am I bringing this up?  I am mentioning this because I think there is a lesson to be learned in everything.  I am not sure I know exactly what the lesson is, at this point, but I do what I got from it.  Some of this is due to my own thinking, but most of it is what I got from the other members of TKA, when I brought the news to the members only forum.

A lot of people commented that you should not have your main money site hosted with bloggor.com.  On the other hand, another very popular internet marketer – Griz, from makemoneyforbeginners.blogspot.com, was always quite proud of the fact that he was able to do so well with a blogger blog.  There are quite a few very successful sites out there hosted by blogspot.com.  After seeing what happened to Alan though, I am wondering if it is such a great idea.  I always believed that blogger should be used for starting a new business and later use the authority to support a main money site.  Once your business is growing, creating blogger blogs as support sites to link to your money sites is another great way to use them.  I have done that with a few of my niches and it works well.

Another insight that hit home was a single word – “diversify”.  Spread your eggs around a little.  If you have 100 sites, losing one of them won’t hurt as much.  Sure, if the one you lose is bringing in $3-$4k a month (like I’m sure Alan’s was), it will still hurt, but it won’t kill you.  You can lose a site or two and still have others that are paying your bills every month.

One thing that occurs to me, and it shows up time and time again, is that it does not seem possible to be successful without having a big, red target painted on your forehead.  The more successful you are, the more people try to drag you down.  Do I think that is what happened here?  I think so, yes.  I have read more than a few posts from Alan’s site, and I never saw a problem with them.  Quite a few of the posts were actually very good.  I will admit that I even felt a little nervous sending him my article, although it was a good article in my opinion.

So what do you take from this?  Do you have an opinion?  If so, I would love to hear from you.  Let me know what you think.  In the mean time, Alan, I am sorry man.  I am sure that you’ll start another internet business venture and succeed with it.  When you do, let me know, so I can subscribe to it.

Steve

**Update May 7, 2010 – I have been out of the loop for a few days, while working on an SEO project for one of my clients, but I noticed today that Alan’s site is back up. I went over to his site and found an article about the whole situation.  If you are intersted you can read it here: How I Got My Blog Deleted and Restored by Blogger.com

Hopefully you have been following along with our Earning Online Course, and you have your site set up to target your main green keyword along with your first two posts.  If you are not there yet, you should find the “Earning Online Blogging Course” section in the sidebar and follow the instructions in the course to set up either your free blogger blog or your own self hosted wordpress blog.

GoArticles.com

Great, so we now have a nice long post targeting your main keyword and hopefully with a couple of cousin keywords in there as well.  The first thing you need to do is write a 400 word or so summery of your first long post.  Then you will go to GoArticles.com, sign up for a free account, and post your 400 word article there.  There are a couple things that you want to make sure you do to your article.  The first thing is to take the first occurrence of your keyword in that article (it should be in the first paragraph) and make it into a link pointing back to the post on your blog.

The second thing that you will need to do is create an “author bio”.  The author bio is simply a couple of sentences with a call to action and a link (or two) to your site.  An example would be “Learn how to create extra cash for your business at Steve’s Internet Business Guide”.  In that example, I am targeting the name of my site (a variation on my main keyword) with a link to my site’s home page and one of my green cousin keywords to a post that I wrote targeting that keyword.

For this article, you already have your site’s post targeted at the top of the article, so use your main keyword as a target in your author bio and link it to your home page.  If you don’t know how to create a link, this is the html:

<a href=”http://yoursite.com”>your keyword</a>

Just copy that and replace “yoursite.com” and “your keyword” with the url and keyword.  When the article is published it will come out like this: your keyword

EzineArticles.com

Now that your first submission is done, we want to head over to EzineArticles.com.  We are going to take the article that we wrote for GoArticles and rewrite it.  I have found that the easiest way to do that is to rewrite it 1 paragraph at a time.  Read the first paragraph and then just say the same thing, but worded differently.  Then move on to the next paragraph and do the same thing.  When you are done, you will have a unique version of the same article that you can post to ezinearticles.  This is also good practice for when you move on to the Unique Article Wizard (which will be covered in a separate post much later).

With ezinearticles, your links should be only in your author bio.  In this case your bio should link back to your home page, using the site name as the anchor text.  You can use the name if there are words besides your main keyword in the name, or use the address.  For instance, let’s say your main keywords is “earn cash make money online”, and your site is named “Learn to Earn Cash Make Money Online”.  Use that title as your link to your homepage here.  If the title is the same as your keyword, just use earncashmakemoneyonline.com, and link it back to your home page.  We are varying the anchor text on purpose here.  I was taught in the Keyword Academy that we should vary our anchor text to keep from pissing of Google, and it has worked well for me, so that’s what I am recommending here.

For your second link, take a variation of your keyword and point it towards to your goarticles article.  We will be doing quite a bit of this cross linking to our article submissions.  The reason is that sites like these and the other two we will address today have good page rank.  Page rank is a measure of authority.  The more page rank a site has, the more valuable (in general) the links will be.  Your site, right now will have a PR n/a because it is new.  Google updates pagerank every three months or so.  By the first PR update, your site will either go to a PR0, 1, 2, or possibly even PR3, depending on how much work you put into it.  On the other hand, I have seen articles from ezinearticles or goarticles (or other directories) go to PR2 or PR3 with only a couple of links pointing to them.  That gives me a PR2 or PR3 link back to my site!

Squidoo, Hubpages, and…

You will want to do three more rewrites over the next week or so while you are waiting for your ezine article to be approved.  Once it is approved, you will want to create a hub at hubpages.com and a lens at squidoo.com with two of those articles.  In those articles you will point to your home page, the big post on your site, your ezine article, and your goarticles article.  You can create the links in the body of your hub/lens.  Don’t worry too much about making them pretty or anything.  You can make money from both squidoo and hupages, but you can worry about that later, once you have the site done.

With your third rewrite, you should go to a couple of the other big article directories and post it to them.  Point each of those articles to your lens and your hub to get them some back links.  I like to use articledashboard.com and 3stepads.com.

I know that this seems like a LOT of writing, but trust me, it is worth it.  The trick here is to not get lazy and just submit the same articles to these places.  In many cases, the articles may not even get indexed by Google.  The best case scenario is that they will get indexed, but have very little worth.  If you cannot picture yourself writing that much, there are companies that will write articles for you for as little as $0.01 a word and do rewrites for as little as $0.008 a word.  The one I use most is Content Authority.  It is owned by a member of the Keyword Academy and they produce good content.

Well, this lesson is over, and I hope you got a lot out of it.  In our next lesson we’ll go into other link building strategies to further build your internet business.