Kelli's update:

I waited and waited and waited for some news from the affiliate programs I applied to. I didn't apply for everything and anything related to my niche because I was only interested in products that I've either heard were really good, tried myself, or had friends who tried them. Finally I received word from one of the ones I really wanted to promote, and sadly I was declined. To top it off - with no explanation - just declined. That's just great. Of course I was totally bummed and when couple more days went by and still no word from any of the others, I became devastated. (I know - where's the faith, right?!)

Then I wrote this really cool post, and I don't know what happened but it disappeared into what seemed like thin air. I got up from the computer to get out extra blankets and pillows - there was a major sleepover happening at my home with tons of teens. Came back to my computer - it froze - and then my post was gone! I was typing it in Word, and don't ask me why I didn't save it before I got up - it's something I always (well, I used to anyway, hahaha) do automatically without even thinking. Yes, I had "autosave," but apparently it didn't "autosave" enough.

I must confess I totally threw a mini-fit. I was so angry at myself for not saving it before I got up. I have no idea what the heck happened - I was totally on a roll and it was just flowing. Afterward, for the life of me, I couldn't even string two sentences together to try to re-create what I wrote. I lost all of my momentum. Combine that with no affiliate programs accepting me yet and I was a mess. Boo-freakin-hoo for me.

I got up, started cleaning (it's a stress reliever for me), then went and watched a movie with everyone. I regrouped and came back to my computer and wrote about something completely different. Still haven't managed to re-approach that dang disappearing post. But I am almost finished, or I should say almost satisfied (almost) with my first "newsletter."

Guess what - I set up a Twitter account on Monday! Hooray! Of course it took me forever to come up with a username. Finally I came up with "iFightCellulite." I then began messing around with the backgrounds but thought, you know, until I really get the hang of this Twitter thing, and until I get my web site more to where I want it, I'll just stick with the default background for the moment.

It's now the wee hours on Wednesday, and I sent off my first "tweet" just a few minutes ago. So far I'm following one person - "IMteacher" aka Laura of Affiliate Marketing Schoolbook fame - have you heard of her! I also worked on trying to finish my first newsletter - I'm almost satisfied (almost). I also installed the "Sexy Bookmarks" plugin too!

Now for some good news! I was accepted by 3 - yes, count them, 3 affiliate programs during the writing of this post! I was dancing around like a goofball - all by myself at 2:30 a.m. I was happy. One week later exactly, almost right on the dot.

Oh, and here is something else - I finally took the plunge and made FightTheCellulite.com visible to the search engines. Yikes! I asked Laura her opinion on her private student forum, and she told me to go for it. However, it took me a few days before I actually went for it because I was very nervous. Let the viewing begin! (Outside of Laura's readers and my family!)

Until next time!!
- Kelli

Laura's comments:

Well, this post was a roller coaster of emotions, wasn't it? I think I was holding my breath through the whole thing, wondering how it would all turn out! I'm so glad it has a happy ending (except for that brilliant missing post—but I'm sure it'll start coming back to her).

It can be very discouraging to be denied approval in an affiliate program—believe me, I know—but it certainly doesn't have to spell the end of an affiliate marketing career. There are always other options. It would have been helpful if they had informed her of the reason why she wasn't accepted so she would know what to work on or change, but unfortunately, they often don't. She could e-mail them back and request a reason; I don't know whether they'd respond, but it's worth a try.

The lesson about saving is a good one. With Kelli, it was a fluke that she didn't save this time, so she doesn't need a lecture, but we can all use the reminder. This may be a good opportunity for a reminder about doing backups of your site (or any important files) as well, because another affiliate marketer I work with recently lost 95% of months and months and months of work when her computer went belly-up. She was devastated. Don't let it happen to you!

Anyway, way to go, Kelli—congratulations on being accepted to three affiliate programs!

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Should I only be choosing keywords that are extremely similar to my niche keyword or can I deviate a little?

If a keyword naturally fits your subject, I would use it even if the search numbers aren't great and the competition is high. You wouldn't want to avoid using a certain keyword just because it's not profitable as long as it fits well with your site as a whole. It would be unnatural to exclude it.

Whether you include other related but not quite as relevant keywords or not will depend a little more on whether they're worth the trouble—do they have a decent search count? Do the top ten sites in Google have that keyword sewn up and you couldn't dream of competing? Again, if it's a keyword that naturally fits, use it, but if not, that's where I would get a little pickier and throw it out.

You can definitely deviate from your main keyword quite a bit as long as it's related in some way to your overall theme. If your niche was "wood dining tables," you might include the keywords "oak dining room sets" or "hand-carved wood dining table" (depending on how tightly you want to hold to your subject), but you probably wouldn't use "wood coffee tables" or "wood dining room cabinets."

Feeling real confident about being accepted into the affiliate programs I've applied to through the affiliate networks I signed up for. I have to share with you, I felt a sense of excitement because I could see the doors ahead of me beginning to peek open! I've seen how much I've accomplished so far with the Affiliate Marketing Schoolbook - wow, how the time as flown by to get to this point! Keeping the faith that I'll have some positive news for you all next week!

This past week I added images to all of my posts which was sort of a pain to go back and edit each of the posts (especially since I would re-read them and have to tweak them again - thank goodness I haven't officially launched yet and the "spiders" can't see me!). Finding the images I wanted to go with my posts took up a lot of my time as well as editing them. It definitely will be easier adding images at the same time I do my posts from this point forward. It was something I had put on the back burner before because I was trying to take care of other things with my web site. With my next web site I won't be doing that again! (Can you believe I'm already thinking about my next web site! - actually I have two in mind and I'm already excited.)

I also revisited learning about cPanel (my web site's back end hosting administration I believe - Laura, please correct me if I'm mistaken). I encountered a problem trying to update two plugins and kept receiving error messages. Then I had tried to upload an image and received error messages too. I then remembered I could go into my cPanel to see if I could figure out what the scoop was.

After I opened it up, I saw that my Disk Space Usage was out of space! I "googled" to see how to free up some of the space, but what I did free up didn't add up to much - I was still in the red. So I sent a support ticket through cPanel  and ended up receiving an email from Laura! I had no idea that she was "attached" to that! I have my web hosting through her of course, but I never thought the two were connected. I told her that if I would've known that, I would've emailed her directly or asked her in her Skip the Scams private student forum. I felt silly, of course, but Laura thought nothing of it and told me I couldn't possibly have known - so that eased my embarrassment! I'm glad I had the issue because there are things that I still have to learn and know my way around inside there, and it's one of those things that has been "out of sight, out of mind."

I still have a learning curve ahead of me with all the behind-the-scenes items like cPanel, Google Analytics, Aweber, etc., as well as all the ins-and-outs of the affiliate programs and reports, but I'm embracing it fully!

Oh! One more thing - someone besides Laura and the handful of people who know I'm doing this right now subscribed to "my newsletter"! I'm figuring it's another student of Laura's but I could be wrong. Anyway - that was exciting too! But also at the same time - "gasp!" - now I have to finish the draft of my first newsletter and figure out through Aweber how to implement it! (That learning curve again - scary - hahaha).

Until next week.....
Kelli

Laura's comments:

Kelli's site is looking really good! I've attached a screenshot below. She has worked very hard to get to the point where she can add affiliate products, and I'm looking forward to hearing how that goes for her.

I'm also happy to hear she is planning more sites. It's easy to get hooked once you start affiliate marketing!

As for the problem she ran into using up her disk space: I wondered how on earth her files could be taking up so much space when the site is so new. Even with a lot of photos and articles, I haven't seen other students or clients outgrow the disk space so quickly. I gave her a little extra space as a "quick fix," but after a little research, I learned that the cause of the problem was a bunch of "core dump" files in her wp-admin folder. Each one was about 25 megabytes in size—it's no wonder she was running out of room!

As I understand it, these files are like "snapshots" of WordPress taken when it crashes. They are used to investigate and debug the program. I don't know if Kelli has been experiencing WordPress "crashes," but in doing a little googling, it appears others have found these core dump files too without reporting any problems beforehand, other than the disappearing disk space. Anyway, I've deleted the core dump files, and Kelli is back down to normal disk space usage. (Here's a Wikipedia entry about core dump files if you want to learn more.)

Kelli's apprehension about all the "behind-the-scenes" stuff is normal. I still feel that anxiety too. There are so many things to learn about and understand, and the ones we don't have to deal with every day aren't burned into our memory by constant usage. The best defense against this memory loss for me is to write down everything that you do that you feel there is even a remote chance you will have to do again.

Good work, Kelli—keep it up!

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When I enter a web page into the Google keyword tool to see what keywords they use, it comes up with a very long list of keywords. However, when I went back to the page to see how the web site owner used the keywords, I wasn't able to find any. Am I misunderstanding how this works? I am writing content and I would like to see how other well established site owners incorporate their keywords.

Basically, it is making suggestions based on what it finds on the web site's pages. If you click on Views > Customize Columns on the far right, you can check Extracted from Webpage and it will tell you which page of the site it analyzed in order to find those suggested related keywords. (This is assuming you're using the new interface—if you prefer the old, click on Previous Interface at upper right and you can choose columns to display.)

If you want to easily find exactly what keywords a site is using, you can use an SEO toolbar such as SEO Quake. When you're at the site you're examining, go to Page Info in the toolbar or by using the menu item Tools at the top of your browser: Tools > SEO Quake > Page Info. It will break down all the keywords actually found on the page, and then you can go see how they've incorporated them.

More info on how Google suggests keywords



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When you insert a link in a WordPress blog, when it gives you the "target" choice of whether you want to "Open Link in Same Window" or "Open Link in New Window" - which is better? Would the choice depend upon if you were linking something to your own site versus if you were linking out to another site?

Excellent question. Generally, if I'm linking to somewhere on my own site, I have it open in the same window, and if I'm linking out, I have it open a new window, my reasoning being that I want my site window (or tab, whatever) to remain open as long as possible so they will see it again. This especially applies if the outgoing link is in the middle of one of my articles and I'm afraid they'll forget to come back and read the rest of it.

What do visitors prefer? Well, it's impossible to please everyone, because some people hate it when links open in new windows because they end up with too many windows littering their desktop, but just as many on the other side of the issue hate when everything opens in the same window because they lose track of where they are. I fall into the latter category, so generally I opt toward "new window" most of the time when I'm creating outbound links.

The next lesson I'm approaching in the Affiliate Marketing Schoolbook  is Lesson 46 - Affiliate Networks - where you've finally arrived at the place where you can begin to monetize your site, as well all of your hard efforts. Your site can begin to be a "win-win" situation - for you in addition to your readers.

Laura talks about the importance of bringing your web site to a "reasonable level of completion before you begin to apply to affiliate programs that you're interested in." She mentions in her course that it's a good idea to "have at least 20 to 30 pages of quality content"; not including your About, Contact, Privacy Policy, etc. pages up on your web site before jumping in and applying.

I'd been pondering about what defines an actual page, so I asked her my question on the Skip The Scams private student forum. My question was for clarification on whether or not posts that only show as excerpts on your home page counted as a page, when clicking to "read more" for it to open up another page. I also asked her if archives, recent posts, categories, etc. on your home page sidebars counted as pages when clicking on the links. Her answer to me was as follows:

"Generally, I think of each post as a page, unless they're pretty short. Since a post can be found in more than one place, such as on the home page when they're first put up, and on an archive page, and also under each category, I don't count all those. But you could count each post you put up once, even though you don't have the whole thing showing on the home page.

I would say once you have a combination of posts and Pages (those with long enough articles to fill at least one screen) that total in the 20-30 range (not counting contact, privacy, as you said), you are probably ready to add some advertising. (That doesn't mean if the articles are long enough to have to scroll several times I would count several pages, though. I'd still count just one.)

Be aware that this is sort of a personal guideline, though, and not a hard-and-fast rule. If you could find a little more stuff to add to your sidebars, it wouldn't hurt. I know you may want to put ads there when you can get them, but for now finding even photos or something would probably help make it look just a little more 'happening.' But in looking at your site overall, I'd say if you're at the lessons where you sign up for affiliate networks, go for it!"

This answer was very helpful to me. I've also decided to wait a few more days before applying to any affiliate networks/programs because even though I'm at 14 pages, I would like to get a little to closer to 20. I've also been trying to come up with ideas to spice up my sidebars as well. I'm even messing around with the idea of a double right sidebar instead of just double sidebars, so we'll see.

I've been toying around with the idea of a setting up a Twitter page which was discussed as part of Lesson 45 regarding "Social Media Marketing." So maybe that might be just the something I need too. I just twittered personally for the first time last week when I set up a Twitter account to interact with the happenings of my son's volleyball team when they were in Texas. It took me awhile to get the hang of it, but it was pretty cool. Getting the play-by-plays was awesome.

My 12-year-old daughter is doing some artwork for me so maybe I can implement it into a unique header or logo. I've been checking out an image manipulation/header creation web site - Picnik.com, a resource Laura listed in Affiliate Marketing Resources in the back of her course. Since I don't have Photoshop, maybe I can do something with this once my daughter is finished. Oh, and I have to share this - another thing my daughter has done was change up the colors of my web site. She's sat with me before while I've been in the admin panel, and she's picked up things so quickly it amazes me. One morning she told me to take a shower and not to look at the computer because she wanted to surprise me with something. She also switched up and modified my "Sign Up" form (a tool to build my email list someday with). I absolutely loved the changes she made.

Overall, I was happy with my productivity this past week. The informal work schedule I set up for myself really helped, along with some Bible verses and affirmations; my goal being able to maintain momentum through all the ebbs and flows of this super crazy summer. I'm eager to see how much I will accomplish this upcoming week.

Until next time.....
Kelli

Laura's comments:

Thunder is rolling in and we're under a tornado watch here, so I'm going to have to make this quick.

You actually can make a site as large or as small as you want, but if it's your first time applying to an affiliate network, it seems to work best to have a good-sized site. You won't have to reapply with each site you build, so if you do some kind of a mini-site later on, it won't matter.

I think it's wonderful that Kelli's daughter is getting involved. In fact, she might consider helping her daughter set up her own site at some point. I've been creating sites for each of my nephews who are 10 and 11, and they are really enjoying working on them.

Okay, I'm going to get out now before the power goes ou........

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In what situations would you need to rewrite an article? A couple that come to mind are:

1) You've purchased a PLR article and want to make it your own
2) You want to change up an article from your blog to get it ready for submission to an article directory

Let's look at #1 - rewriting PLR. PLR stands for Private Label Rights, and you can either use it as is (in which case the same article will likely show up unchanged on other sites as well) or you can rewrite it. PLR is generally sold in packs, and the same set of articles can be sold to hundreds of people.

You could just take the first sentence, rewrite it using synonyms, take the second sentence, rewrite it using synonyms, and so on. This may be enough to make it original, but it may not, if others do the same thing with it and happen to think like you. This is a situation where how much time you have measured against how important originality is in a particular instance will determine how deep you get into a rewrite.

As for #2 - rewriting your own content, you may want to take one of your blog posts and rewrite it for submission to Ezine Articles or another article directory. Is this really necessary? No, probably not. There is no duplicate content penalty that will apply in this situation, but you will want to wait until it gets indexed on your blog first. At that point, you could submit it as is.

If you do want to rewrite, though, the above method is probably sufficient, especially if the blog post was an original of yours to begin with.

Total spin

But what if, for whatever reason, you don't want anyone to be able to tell that article #2 is a spun version of article #1?

If this is your goal, taking the article sentence by sentence, or even paragraph by paragraph, and just switching words around isn't going to cut it. It will be obvious it's really the same article because the thoughts will still be in more or less the same order and the grammatical structure probably won't vary much.

What you need to do is read and reread article #1 until you thoroughly understand it. (If you wrote it yourself, this hopefully isn't a problem ) Then pretend you're relating to a friend what you read, without referring to it. Talk about it as naturally as possible from your own, or simply from a different, perspective. Add more of your own thoughts. Delete sections or sentences that you didn't love the first time around.

Start somewhere in the middle. Develop the thoughts in a different order, although of course you still want it to have a coherent flow. If there's an anecdote in the article, come up with a different one. Or rather than using an anecdote at all, find a graphic that illustrates the point instead.

How about some examples?

Compare the following paragraphs:

Article #1 excerpt

You should talk about it as naturally as possible from your own perspective. Pretend you’re chatting to a friend about your topic. You can also use others' articles to inspire you and to help you confirm facts, but you definitely want to stay away from anything that comes close to plagiarism.

Article #2 excerpt

When you discuss your topic, it should be from your own point of view. Just imagine yourself talking to a buddy about the subject. Also, articles other people have written can give you ideas and help you in fact-finding, but it would be a mistake to copy anything from them.

If you read these two in succession, it's pretty obvious that version #2 was rewritten from version #1, isn't it? How much more will you have to change?

Here’s an online tool that you can use to compare two chunks of text: DupeCop. I ran the two paragraphs above through it and got a 75%, meaning the “spun” version is 75% unique. That might be enough for some people to call them completely different paragraphs, but I think it should be higher, like at least 85% or 90%. That could be achieved by not looking at it sentence by sentence but rather by restating the whole article (in this case, just a paragraph) in your own way, like this:

Why is it important to write articles from your own point of view? Well, the only person who can say things the way you say them is YOU. So you shouldn’t simply reword other people’s content, but rather use them as idea springboards and for confirmation, and then write them from scratch yourself. How would you explain your subject to a friend in a nonchalant conversation? Write like that. You'll never get in trouble for stealing content that way.

When I compare that paragraph to the first one and run them through DupeCop, I get an 84%, which is significantly better, but you can see it can still tell that 16% of it is the same! And humans are even better at detecting whether two things came from the same source, so you have to be careful, not only due to copyright issues, but also simply because you want it to be clear that your site is unique and fabulous because it’s YOU writing it! Don’t be afraid to show your personality.

See To spin or not to spin for more information on article spinning, especially when it comes to spinning software.

It was a bad week for sure and totally unproductive. With the beginning of summer and all the craziness that goes along with it, as well as the holiday weekend, I had a difficult time organizing my time, more specifically my "work time." However, today I made myself a little informal work schedule which I hope will prove helpful. An added challenge is we're down to only one computer in my home at the moment, and with five people competing for one computer it has been pretty funny to say the least.

Things I did accomplish were signing up at two skin care forums and one beauty forum. So far I've introduced myself and read some threads,  but haven't put a link in my signature yet. On my site, I added pictures to existing posts as well as a video on one of my pages. There was also something from Lesson 42 which I hadn't gotten around to last week but did this past week. It was watching a short video Laura suggested and gave the link to. It was link-building software that reduces the time you'd spend on finding and commenting on blogs by automating the process for you. Reading posts and writing your comments is still something you have to do, but it does streamline the process for you. It was appealing to me so I went ahead and signed up for the free software and played around with it a bit.

I also searched out other blogs related to my niche to hopefully comment on and/or guest post on, but I have to say it was very overwhelming. Blogs directly related to my niche I visited were complete garbage in my opinion and some were just the same type of articles/posts that I could tell must've been some type of PLR that weren't rewritten or switched up a little. However, there were a few sites that had really well written posts and information, and were, in my opinion, well-put-together sites. There were also some which had good info but way-too-long posts, or difficult to understand, which made me end up "zoning out" and moving on.

You know, on second thought, as I'm writing this post I'm seeing that this week wasn't totally unproductive!

I do wish I hadn't (yet anyway) viewed other [good] sites that were in my niche. Unfortunately I began to compare "my stuff" with "their stuff." Obviously my site is still in its infancy, and I am happy with what I've produced so far; it is my backlog of posts that I have in Word that are still drafts which I haven't put into my admin panel of my site that is making me nervous. Some things I have written I thought sounded halfway "original" really aren't. Some phrases or sentences I've used were exactly like other people's and I was like - but I didn't "copy" anyone else, this came straight from my head. I also couldn't finish up any posts because I couldn't even string two sentences together without second guessing myself or feel like what I was writing was coming from the blogs in my niche I've recently visited.

I definitely need some suggestions from Laura to get me out of this so-called rut I'm in so I can move forward to actually publishing my posts which will allow me to start the process of signing up with some affiliate programs, because as Laura states in Lesson 46 - "it is very important to bring your site to a reasonable level of completion before you implement the steps in this lesson."

Until next time...
Kelli

Laura's comments:

I think Kelli's week was fairly productive in spite of other stuff going on, don't you? Summer is a tough time to get things done indoors, especially on the computer, but that's to be expected. No sense putting life on hold for the sake of something that's far less important than family.

To clarify just a little about the software she mentions in the second paragraph: It's Comment Kahuna, which helps you in your backlinking efforts. I don't want there to be any misunderstanding by anyone regarding the word "automation." It's not for putting automated spam comments on other blogs. It simply helps you find related blogs to participate in.

It doesn't come as a surprise that there are a ton of garbage blogs and sites out there on any given subject; Kelli's subject in particular seems to lend itself to spammers and scrapers. The good news is that it should make it easier for her to stand out in her niche.

It can be discouraging to find that what you thought was original has already been stated by someone else, sometimes even in the exact same way. I've experienced that same sinking feeling—"people are going to think I copied that!" But keep in mind that there are millions and millions of blogs out there, and billions of web pages in general. It's impossible to be 100% original 100% of the time. We write from our personal experience and viewpoint, so we will have original material there, but if you're discussing a product or specific issue, there will be others somewhere who have said it the same way or better.

Just keep in mind that probably no one will notice the similarities. I'm not advocating stealing anyone else's content with the idea that "I'll never get caught"; I'm just saying that if you write using your own brain, it won't matter if on occasion you state something the same way someone else did. It's impossible to avoid sometimes. There are only so many words that will convey a certain idea accurately.

And there's nothing wrong with using other sites as inspiration. You should read a variety of blogs on your topic. It will give you ideas which you can then execute in your own style. One thing I like to do is keep a running list of ideas I get from other sites. Then, if I'm afraid my writing will simply parrot exactly what I read, I let it sit for a few weeks. Later I go back in for a topic idea from that running list, and by that time, I've forgotten what the other site said, but I haven't forgotten the "seed" of the idea. Most likely in the intervening weeks I've learned more about the subject that will help me write something that is completely my own.

I hope that helps Kelli in pushing past her fears and also motivates others who are reading this to not second-guess themselves right out of the picture! You are unique and your writing can be too, even though we're all using the same set of words!

As I wrote about in my last post, something was awry in my sidebar widget with my categories. When I clicked on any of my category links, I received the "404 Page Not Found" error. I racked my brain trying to figure out a solution. I posted my issue for Laura in the Skip The Scams Student Forum. Laura asked me if I had chosen a category for each post before I published it and I replied back to her that I did.

She then went to my site and noticed when she hovered over the category and looked at the bottom of the browser, it showed up as:  http://fightthecellulite.com/ /cellulite-causes/. She pointed out to me that there was an extra slash or a space that was somehow inserted. Oh my gosh! - I never thought to look down at the bottom of my browser to see if there was an issue. This is one of the reasons she is "the teacher" and I'm "her student." Laura then asked me if I wouldn't mind letting her into my admin panel so she could further investigate. I was like - um - heck yes - please do!

So here's the scoop - she told me the problem was in my permalinks settings. Apparently underneath the "Common" settings where it said "Optional," there was a space smack dab in the "Category base" box. I can't believe I missed this; I was inside there too many times to count! Laura told me she wouldn't have noticed it except she clicked in the box because she happens to be an "overactive clicker." Thank goodness for that!

She went on to explain to me that WordPress surmised I wanted to have a "space between the blog title and the category page, and inserted the slashes on each side of it as if it had been a real directory." Now how's that for an explanation! I was in awe of her! She went ahead and removed it for me and everything worked perfectly - a really cool side benefit of being her mentee not to mention being a student at her forum!

So, when you buy her Affiliate Marketing Schoolbook course (which you're going to do, right!) there's also the added plus of having access to her private forum! Laura doesn't leave you hanging - it's not "okay, thanks newbie for buying my course, good luck and have a nice life." She provides you with ongoing support through her forum.

Now that my little problem was taken care of, I was able to move on to Lesson 41 and some more off-site SEO methods with article marketing through article directories. Laura says it can be a useful tool if it's done in the right way. EzineArticles.com was one of the directories she spoke about. Perhaps I was a bit naive about this, but I've always thought Ezine was sort of a cheesy thing. First of all, the site at first glance is unappealing (yes I know, it's what is on the inside that counts hahaha). I guess I really never took the time to understand the concept and perhaps dismissed too easily articles that came from there when researching on the Internet. I do feel that the site is over-saturated.

To be honest, I'm not quite sure if I'll end up utilizing Ezine, but you never know. However, I am digging Laura's suggestion of using Qondio which she says she likes to use for backlinks. The concept is kind of cool in that it separates the garbage content from the quality content by ratings and rewards given to the best contributors. A small side benefit being it's a revenue-sharing site as well. I signed up for it today as a matter of fact.

Lesson 42 had two more methods of off-site SEO about commenting on blogs and forums as well as guest posting on other blogs, as a terrific way for your site to get backlinks and traffic. Laura says understanding the concepts involved and doing it correctly are a must in order for these methods to work for you; she provides a detailed outline on how to go about it. I'm still in the process of researching forums and blogs related to my niche to belong to and register - I'm having a slightly difficult time for some reason in finding one. It's my hope I will find what I want by my next post!

Until next time......
Kelli

Laura's comments:

I agree that the Ezine Articles site isn't much to look at and "cheesy" probably isn't far off the mark! But it is well respected, and their guidelines are fairly strict. However, you're right; that doesn't mean you can rely on the information 100%. The articles are still written by anybody and their cousin, some of whom don't know what they're talking about. It's not as though Ezine fact-checks all the articles.

If you submit high quality, accurate articles, though, over time you will develop a reputation as someone who does know what they're talking about, and you will get more click-throughs to your site, as well as reap the benefits of having those extra backlinks for ranking purposes.

As Kelli indicated, articles submitted to Qondio are user-rated rather than editor-approved. No doubt some users, unconcerned with fulfilling the intent of the guidelines, give meaningless ratings just to earn more points (you get rewarded for screening other people's submissions as well as for submitting your own). But for the most part, the cream rises to the top.

Guest posting is really big these days. It's something that I have only recently begun to do but I'm thoroughly convinced it's one of the most effective ways to increase traffic to your site. I've gotten more site subscribers and visitors each time I've done it so far. It may be beneficial to set aside a whole day each week to research other blogs that accept guest posts and then write and submit those posts.

And by the way, you're making me blush, enough with the awe! (People are going to start thinking I write your article for you, LOL.) I'm glad we got the category thing figured out. I guess my itchy clicky finger comes in handy sometimes.

Okay, I'm off to read more on Kelli's site about how to banish cellulite—not that I have any, mind you...just researching, for my...friend...yeah, that's it...

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Now playing: Barracuda by Heart
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I am having a problem with content. My niche is glass doodads.*  I thought I’d be able to have a site that revolves around doodads and sign up with some merchants that sell glass doodads.  I looked on other sites and their content revolves around: how to care for your doodads, description of various doodads, how to create your own doodads, how to choose the right doodad for you, etc.  I want my site to stand out, but am wondering where do I get information for my content?

I am not an expert on glass doodads, but discovered this niche and I think it will be profitable. Would it be advantageous to pay someone for original content?

What I would do to gather content for your site is use these other sites for inspiration as far as what kind of topics you could cover, as well as, of course, going to your keyword list for topic ideas. Then I would read up on those subjects around the web and write your own articles with the knowledge you’ve gained. If you’ve read a good variety of info from other sites (or from magazines or books, any source you want), you should be able to come up with your own original articles, worded in your unique voice and from your viewpoint. Don’t worry that just because someone else’s doodad site has an article on how to care for the doodad you can’t have an article on that same subject. Just make it your own.

You definitely don’t have to be an expert. That’s why I suggest in the course that the topic be something you are interested in, so that the research needed in order to become an “expert” isn’t drudgery for you. If you like what you’re writing about, you will enjoy researching it. And compiling articles from your research will actually make you more of an expert in the subject than 99% of the general population!

To make your articles, and therefore your site, stand out, try to come up with creative ways to present the information, such as making charts or diagrams or using photos to make the information on your site more enjoyable to read, more helpful than anybody else’s. You may not be able to surpass all other sites in every respect because I’m sure some of them have nice photos and graphics too, but I’ve found that an awful lot of the other “Internet marketers” putting up niche sites are not really doing that great of a job.

A lot of them are scraping content from others and doing just the bare minimum to get a site up and running, paying no attention to accuracy or presentation whatsoever. It shouldn’t be too hard to do better than the majority.

Think in terms of what YOU would find helpful if you were searching for information on the topic. If you think of an idea for a helpful article but can’t find anything about it online in order to get inspiration for you to write from, then BINGO, that probably means there’s an opportunity for you to provide something that no one else has.

If you have the money to pay someone for original content, that’s great, but keep in mind that if they’re not already an expert in the subject, they’re just going to do the same thing as you to find information—the research that I mentioned above. If you’re crunched for time, having someone write for you is great, but if it’s just a matter of you not feeling like you know enough to write about it, don't worry about that. Your writer is probably going to feel the same way until she does the research, unless you are able to find a writer who already specializes in doodads.

Here's an older article from this blog that might help too when you're stuck: How to overcome writer's block in Internet marketing

*Not really. Niches have been changed to protect the innocent.