All Entries in the "Hub Pages" Category

Article Submissions To Article Directories Is Not The Way To Go

Seriously, are you still getting a bunch of cheap articles written and distributing them to thousands of article directories? That method used to work. It was never that effective, but now it’s simply obsolete as a link-building method. The last Google update, Panda should have convinced you of that, but that method was dead before the update.

You don’t even have a way of knowing how many people actually read those articles let alone if they actually got published at the places you submitted them to. Plus, if it is garbage content, then no one who does read it will ever visit your website. Using article marketing just for link popularity is the wrong way to go.

1. Well-written articles will help you establish yourself as an expert in your field.

2. Well-written articles that are interesting to the reader will get them to click through to your website where you can actually make a sale.

Those are reasons to do article marketing. Links back to your website are the side-benefit of article marketing, not the purpose!

You need to promote good, original content, not spinning articles or hiring people to write them for the lowest price possible. It seems that poeople get the idea that something works and they will stay with that method even if it kills them. People hate change.

If you are still going with the cheap articles, thousands of directory submissions method, then you are missing the boat. Good article marketing is not cheap anymore. get over it. Hire some good content writers. Have them get those new articles onto knol pages, hub pages, squidoo lenses, large forums that allow articles to be published and other high-traffic websites.

These high-traffic websites that allow you to place good, original content on them is the method you should be using. You will know exactly where your article is published and know exactly how many people read it. Here are some details for you to look at;

Image via CrunchBase

1. Google Knol Pages – http://knol.google.com If you go there and do a search for your keywords, you will see several knol pages about that topic. You see next to each one how many people read those articles. Nice to know how many people actually read your articles. We can add images, embed video, use bold text, headers and other formatting to dress up the article and make it more appealing, more like a web page than an article. If you build the first one that is just all about your company, then build more knol pages, you add links to those knol pages from your first google knol page about your company. So you end up with a Central Knol about your conmpany that links to all of your other knol pages. That is exactly like having another website.

Image via CrunchBase

2. Hub Pages – (This is going to sound almost identical to a knol page) http://www.hubpages.com is another place you can search for one of your keywords to see what other people have done with their articles. Again, you get to know how many people read the article and get other useful analytics as well. We can add images, embed video, use bold text, headers and other formatting to dress up the article and make it more appealing, more like a web page than an article. If you build the first one that is just all about your company, then build more hub pages, you add links to those hub pages from your first hub page about your company. So you end up with a Central Hub about your conmpany that links to all of your other hub pages. That is exactly like having another website.

Image via CrunchBase

3. Squidoo Lens – http://www.squidoo.com You can also search there for lenses about your topic to see what others have done. You’ll notice that these are much longer than knols or hubs. Knols and hubs are one article. A lens is 10 articles. As with the hubs and knols we can add images, embed video, use bold text, headers and other formatting to dress up the articles and make them more appealing. The difference here is that you have us write a series of articles that flow from article to article like chapters in a book. Again you get to see how many people read the lens and everything.

Using Google Analytics in your website means you will also know how many of those readers actually visited your website. It’s crucial to know what kind of return you get from the different methods you use to drive more traffic to your website. The same things do not work for everyone. Having the knowledge of what is and is not working allows you to make adjustments and improve the return on your investment in SEO and Marketing.

Now that is article marketing. You may need to review your own article marketing plan if you are not including these methods. We can help.

Pricing

Google Knol Pages run $80 including the content writing and everything.

Hub Pages run $60 including the article writing.

A Squidoo Lens runs $400, including the 10 articles.

I’ve been doing article marketing longer than almost anyone on the web. I own 2 article directories myself, one of them with more than 150,000 articles in it and I’m still advising my clients not to go that route. The options above are so much better and the sites are much higher quality and they have more traffic than the article directories. For instance; My article directory gets 35,000 unique visitors per month. Hubpages.com gets 1 million+. Combine that higher traffic with the tracking that analytics gives you and you have a real article marketing plan.

Contact us here or call 512.322.9566 for a free, no-obligation consultation.

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Is It Really Possible To Achieve Number One In Google?

Image via Wikipedia

Is it really possible to achieve a #1 Ranking in Google?

Yes… If you hold your tongue just right…

I have to laugh as I say that, because I once worked with a short order cook who needed to stick his tongue out and squirrel it to the side to flip pancakes… His hand would only go in the direction dictated by his tongue…

Everybody wants to achieve a top ranking in Google… That has become the Holy Grail of Internet Marketing…

It is achievable, but it is not always necessary to achieve the treasured Google number one spot to make your placement in Google profitable for your business… Although it may not be necessary to reach Google number one, it sure does make you feel good when you get there…

Realistically, there are many variables that could make or break your business, regardless of whether you are #1 in Google or not…

Landing Pages

First things first… Any ranking in Google is perfectly useless to you if your Landing Page fails to convert visitors to buyers…

It is beneficial sometimes to get the top ranking in Google first, then to work on your sales copy conversion rates… But you can test your copy with traffic gained from any source online… In fact, traffic from sources other than Google tends to require far less money to get…

Between Google Adwords and Search Engine Optimization for Google, landing that top listing in Google can get to be pretty expensive…

Always, always, always test and track your results…

No one is going to get everyone to buy what they sell, but one should always keep an eye to conversion ratios to figure out if one can do better.

It is actually easier to triple your sales than to double your traffic…

Think about that…

If you can improve your sales copy to close 6% of your visitors, instead of 2% of your visitors, that is often as easy as tweaking your sales copy on your sales pages.

Doubling your traffic on the other hand is harder to do… You either need to spend more money on advertising, or spend more money to improve your SEO… Either way, doubling your traffic generally takes more time and/or money than most people are willing to give it…

It is an unknown fact that many people make really handsome livings online, and they never bother to try to please the Google gods… They could care less about Google and the other search engines, because they make a load of money without them, drawing their traffic from other more reliable sources…

Optimized Page Descriptions

Think about this for a moment, and you will know that I am right…

When there is a list of ads that you are looking at in Google’s paid listings to the right in the Google Adwords section, you read each title and the description to find the one that best suits your needs… Am I right?

So learn from your own behavior online…

To get more clicks, one only needs to present a better Title and Description than the next person…

It is a fact that the company paying 20 cents a click could legitimately get more clicks from Google Adwords than the company that is paying $1.50 a click.

This applies to Google Adwords, and it applies to the free listings area to the left – the organic search results…

So long as you are visible within the same viewing area as the #1 listing in Google, you can steal clicks from your competitors by presenting a better Title, with a more pertinent Description of your web page…

Once you recognize this as fact, it is no longer essential for you to gain the top spot in Google’s search results…

It is only necessary to have your search result where people can see it, then your better copy will draw the clicks away from the competition…

Let the company with the number one listing in Google keep spending its money to retain the top result in Google, while you siphon off the traffic and sales for that search term, by presenting a better offer than the rest…

Presenting A Better Offer In Google

With Google Adwords, you are in total control of the advertising that your prospective customers will see for your website…

In the organic search results, it is a bit more complicated, but you can retain a certain amount of control as to how your website is presented to Google’s users…

If you rank for a keyword or phrase that does not appear on your actual web page, then Google will present your users with your Meta Description as the given Description for your web page, up to about 150 characters…

You can strengthen your ranking for specific phrases by building those phrases into the anchor text of links pointing to your page…

For the words you target in your linking campaigns that do not appear on your web page, you must make sure that your Page Title and Meta Description attract the click from the person looking to find you…

However, if the searched phrase does appear in your web page, then Google will present its users the searched phrases in context of the words around them…

The best way to handle this is to present a variety and range of search keywords, used in the context of a sentence that is designed to attract a click…

For example, if someone were to type into Google: #1 ranking in Google, then the first sentence of this article may be used to describe this article to Google’s users. So it is possible that Google would present my description as: “Is it really possible to achieve a #1 Ranking in Google? Yes… If you hold your tongue just right… I have to laugh as I say that, because I once …”

It takes a little bit longer to create a web page when you do it this way, but if you have a good idea about all of the different search phrases that you might want to rank for in Google, then you could use that foreknowledge to structure how Google — and the other search engines, Yahoo and Bing — will present your website to their search users…

In the fourth paragraph of this article, I have included target keywords, “top ranking in Google”. Google may show my web page in its listings as this page, with this Title, and a description similar to, “Everybody wants to achieve a top ranking in Google… That has become the Holy Grail of Internet Marketing…”

By presenting a better offer than everyone else, it is entirely possible to attract more clicks than those people who rank well in Google near you… Even if they rank higher than you do…

There Can Be Only One…

I love including pop-culture phrases in my articles… In case you did not know, “There can be only one…” is from the Highlander…

There can be only one in the #1 spot in Google… And there can only be ten on page one of Google…

Some niches and some keywords are extremely competitive… In those tightly competitive niches and keywords, it could literally take years to break into the top ten listings in Google…

It’s funny in a way… Most people have tunnel vision when it comes to Google marketing…

They see one or three keywords that COULD BE useful to their business, but they fail to see the other 150 words… In one of my niches, the top three keyword phrases have 1.5 million monthly searches, and those are the three keywords that everyone tries to rank for in Google… But if you look at words #4 to #24, those words together also reach 1.5 million searches a month…

To my benefit, my competitors are fighting over the top three keyword phrases in my market… They are willing to pay up to $5 a click in Google Adwords… But the 20 keywords that I target only bid out at around 5 cents a click in Google Adwords, and more to my benefit, my competitors ignore those keywords for SEO…

I revel in their ignorance…

I profit handsomely in their ignorance and unwillingness to expand their horizons…

If you are one of my competitors, please forget that you read this article…

I rank well — in the top five search results — for each of the 20 keywords that I chase… I let my competitors drive themselves into bankruptcy trying to control the top three search keywords…

I still work at trying to rank for those top three, but I am not going to drive myself into the hole trying to accomplish that goal…

I throw some resources at those top 3 keywords occasionally, and I am making progress up the ladder, but I am not going to worry if I am not on page one for those terms… I know that once I get to page one for those top search terms, I know the competition will be fierce and I may not be able to hold page one forever… I won’t be able to hold on forever, so long as my competitors are willing to throw more money at it than I am… But, not holding #1 in Google for those top three search words will never break me, because when I do get page one for them, it will be sales revenue and profits on top of my operating revenue…

I suspect though that once I achieve page one with that top traffic search term that I will be holding the spot for a long time, because I have a ton of resources in place over the last two years to support a ranking on the #1, most-competitive keyword phrase in my industry. I am on page four right now, but I was on page seven last year…

I am pushing for a ranking there, but that is not my bread-and-butter search phrase… My bread-and-butter is those 20 other keyword phrases that everyone else ignores…

Can You Really Achieve #1 in Google?

Absolutely, you can…

I own dozens of #1 rankings in Google, and I own hundreds of page one results in Google in a variety of profitable niches…

It really is not as hard as people think it is to achieve number one in Google…

It is only hard to achieve  number 1 in Google, when you are competing with hundreds of other sites for the keyword phrase… Competing with people willing and able to outspend you…

Even if your search phrase has millions of results, there are literally only a few companies honestly competing with YOU, in most industries and niches…

Everyone else is just pretending to compete with you…

It is in this realization where achieving top rankings in Google is made much easier…

I rank #1 in Google for keywords where Google returns +40 million search results…

I rock with my Search Engine Optimization strategies… When I put my mind to ranking for a special keyword, I pull out all of the stops to get ranked well in Google for that keyword phrase… I focus on setting up my SEO strategies for my targeted keywords, then I move myself to where I want to be… #1 in Google, or at least page one in Google…

But I don’t try to rank for just one keyword phrase, but many similar keyword phrases for the same web page…

I just pulled one of my money-making keywords, and my site is #6 out of 63 million search results… And to my pleasure, Google is presenting my site description exactly the way I want them to do… In this particular niche, I have about 40 competitors, so it is a really competitive niche, but that is okay… I am holding my own just fine…

Most of my number ones in Google are “phrases that pay”, yet most of my competitors don’t even know that I try to rank those words… I was one of the first services in that niche, so all of my competitors looked at my site, for business intelligence, when they were designing their sites…

My most profitable #1 listing in Google has 45 million search results in Google… Yet, I have held firm at #1 in Google for years…

The Best SEO Strategies Work In Nearly All Niches

To be honest with you, I have utilized my SEO strategies on dozens of websites — for me and MY clients…

There is only one niche that I was never able to conquer, and the reason why is simple… In the financial industry, corporations are willing to spend millions on Internet Marketing and SEO service providers…

When I took SEO jobs in the financial industry, I was usually working with small firms that did not have a budget in the millions… We were simply outgunned and outspent in that industry…

Number One In Google

Achieving a #1 ranking in Google is pretty straight forward, when you utilize the SEO strategy of aiming first for the low-hanging fruit, and then working up to the fruit high in the tree…

My target keyword lists usually run in the range of about 100 keywords… 77 of them are so easy that a caveman could do it… 20 of them are low-hanging fruit that requires a bit of work, but is possible for anyone committed to the cause… and the final three will take some time to accomplish, because the rest of the world believes that those are the only three worth trying to rank for in Google…

My name is Bill Platt…

As the owner of  The Phantom Writers Article Distribution Service, I take my article marketing very seriously… If you would like to learn more about article marketing and how to utilize it to achieve Google page one and Google #1 results, download my free article marketing ebook titled, “Article Marketing: Beyond The Basics”.

If you are interested in SEO Services, visit the the SEO Services Provider website to learn more… Tell us about having read this article, if you contact us by phone or email…

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Why You Should Use HubPages For Article Marketing

HubPages is a great way to market your business through articles. Unlike traditional article directories, when you publish an article at HubPages you are given a ranking based on several criteria that are important to the HubPages team. They look at traffic of your article, the traffic sources for your articles, the length of your article and uniqueness of the content, the number of thumbs up received from other Hubbers, and the overall HubScore of the author. Take a look at my HubPages profile page and you’ll see that I’ve earned the reputation of “Prodigy” with just three articles.

These are important criteria because they determine your reputation and trust factor at HubPages.

There are plenty of reasons to use HubPages for your article marketing. Besides building a reputation for yourself, HubPages articles are viewed by a lot of traffic. Because a lot of other people are using HubPages, you can build a solid reputation by networking with other Hubbers. But you’ll also build link popularity and inbound links to your website from your articles. Unlike traditional article directories, HubPages does provide link juice and every article is a potential inbound link for your website. And another reason to add to these is the ability to earn income through AdSense from your articles as HubPages has a revenue sharing program with its authors. You can also earn affiliate income through Kontera, Amazon.com, and eBay using HubPages articles.

So how many reasons is that to publish your articles at HubPages? Let’s count them:

1. Build author reputation
2. Increase your link popularity through inbound links
3. Drive additional traffic to your website
4. Earn AdSense income
5. Earn eBay affiliate income
6. Make affiliate income with Amazon.com
7. Use Kontera for additional income opportunities
8. Networking opportunities

If you decide to use HubPages for article marketing, be sure to upload original articles. That will increase your author reputation tremendously. In fact, if you upload the same articles that you send out to article directories, HubPages will penalize you so make sure you are publishing original content.

I would recommend uploading your articles to HubPages first then sending them out to article directories if that is your plan. Though I haven’t tested this, I suspect that you may get a penalty after HubPages discovers your articles later. It may not be as big a penalty, but I think it’s possible that it will happen so you are much better off publishing original content always. But HubPages is a great article marketing opportunity.

What Is Article Marketing?

New Internet marketers may not understand what is meant by article marketing. Article marketing is the practice of using articles to promote a business, product or service. There are many ways to approach article marketing and some are more effective than others.

Directory submissions is just one aspect of article marketing. You can also submit your content directly to niche websites that you’d like be featured in. Other avenues for article marketing include free blog hosts, Squidoo, HubPages, and similar websites that allow you to publish articles on a revenue sharing plan or as a way to promote yourself and your business.

When it comes to online article marketing, you must use your imagination. Don’t get stuck in a rut.

How To Use Articles For Reputation Management

Reputation management is one of the up-and-coming niche marketing areas for online marketing. The necessity of it is growing and already important. If you have not put together a reputation management plan then you should seriously consider doing so. It should consist of more than just article marketing, however, article marketing should be a part of your reputation management strategy. Here are your important action steps:

• Set up accounts at as many article directories as you can, including distribution services like iSnare
• Write as many articles as you can and distribute them to the article directories (this should be an ongoing activity)
• Establish a Squidoo account on a particular niche and include information related to that niche; be sure to link to your website and blog from your Squidoo page
• Write original HubPage articles and publish them at HubPages
• Write original articles and submit them to other websites in your niche
• Use Google Knol to establish yourself as an authority on your subject
• Publish your articles on your own blog
• At popular social networking sites where you have an account, publish your articles wherever possible; for instance, Ryze allows you to publish articles and Facebook allows you to set up Facebook Pages

The key to reputation management is to start before you need it. Don’t wait until you have negative information about you online. Constant reputation monitoring and management is key to maintaining a positive image online. Articles can very helpful.