Place your articles on other websites
STEP 11: Place your articles on other websites
You can write articles and distribute them to article directories (This is fairly easy but not nearly as useful as it used to be.) Persuade other GOOD websites and blogs to publish your articles. (This is more challenging but much more useful).
Find blogs in your niche and offer to be a guest blogger, with a link back to your site.
This step isn’t absolutely essential, but it helps enormously if you do it. I strongly recommend you do it. As you can see, it’s vitally important that you choose a topic that is easy for you to write about.
Once your website is making money, you can speed up your progress by hiring good article writers to create articles which you get published all around the Internet, each one containing a link back to you (links to your home page and also links to internal pages).
Get some more of those one-way links I talked about. You want a diverse range of links – many different types, from different places, using a natural variety of anchor text (the clickable words in the link). The Internet’s most successful websites have a huge diversity of links so, ideally, that’s what you want, too.
REMEMBER: Strong links may take time and effort to get, but when you get them they’re like tireless slaves working for you, helping your web pages rank well in search engines, attracting visitors 24 hours a day, so you can get clicks, make sales, and earn commissions. The more competitive niche you’ve chosen, the more slaves you need.
STEP 12: Social media and time-sensitive blogging
(For your first website, this step is optional, although I DO recommend it. You can ignore it, but you need to know that as each year passes, Google is placing more value on social media signals. Over the years, I’ve gradually updated my advice on this, making it more important. If Google thinks its important, you should, too.)
If you enjoy getting involved in social media, you can set up acounts at Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Pinterest, etc., and get involved in making friends and interacting with contacts on other websites and blogs, keeping up-to-date with events in your niche, commenting on hot topics and discussing them with people in your niche.
Google likes sites that keep getting mentioned in many different places, so being in many different places online is VERY useful.
Here are more excellent reasons for doing social media marketing…
The more places you appear where people can see you, the more chance you’ll have of being recognized and attracting visitors and making sales. People who recognize you and are familiar with you, people you’ve engaged with in social media, are MUCH more likely to open your emails, click on a link and buy something you recommend. They’re also more likely to “like” your stuff on Facebook and share it with other people. So, done right, social media marketing can have a wonderful snowballing effect.
Beware: Time-sensitive blogging and social media marketing can be a huge trap. It’s so easy to get sucked in, convincing yourself you’re “working” when you’re really just chatting instead of doing things that earn revenue and build your business. For most affiliates, it’s often more efficient to spend the time creating interesting, useful, keyword-researched articles (with the occasional affiliate link woven in) and adding them to your site.
If you have a flair for writing talked-about, provocative, attention-getting articles, social media marketing will be a perfect match for your business. As your revenue grows, consider hiring someone to write such articles for you.
But what if you don’t have much flair but you still want to do SOME social media marketing without getting sucked into a huge time sink? Here’s the best answer I’ve found…
The best book I know of on social media marketing is Social Marketing Results by marketer and solo parent Lynn Terry, who’s been earning her living online for 16 years. To feed her family, she HAS to succeed. She really does know what she’s talking about. Lynn provides a plan showing you exactly how to get results in only 15 to 30 minutes a day. With her book as your reference guide, you won’t waste endless, unproductive hours. She provides action lists and checklists which show you exactly what to do and keep you on track. I highly recommend it.
What I really like about Lynn’s book is that she doesn’t just tell you what to do, she shows you how to do it. For example, on page 16, Lynn shows you exactly how you can put yourself in front of a community of raving fans IN YOUR MARKET. The example Lynn shows took only a few seconds.
STEP 13: Add more pages and get more links.
Keep adding useful, interesting, keyword-rich pages (Do research at Wordtracker or SBI or the Google AdWords Keyword Planner for this) and keep encouraging more sites to link to your site.
Make friends with other website owners, and more people will link to you.
STEP 14: Be patient.
If your new site is typical, nothing much will seem to happen for the first couple of months or so, and you’ll probably become frustrated and find it hard to believe that this is going to work.
You’re likely to feel annoyed, cheated and ready to quit. You’re likely to be a prime target for people selling get-rich-quick junk.
Many affiliates give up at this stage. Stick with it. If you’re persistent and get the details right, the process I’m describing works beautifully.
Learn something new every day. Do something to improve your business every day. If you do this, success is inevitable.
NEXT STEP: Expect to see signs of success