The good news here is that you will have already done alot of the work when it comes to starting your article marketing, you will have already written articles for your website, so you can use those after Google has indexed them on your website (you need to be seen as the original author), write new ones, or even rewrite some and use those.  How to articles are usually the most read on the internet, the ones where if they do x they’ll get y.

Follow the same rules as you would for SEO, use the targeted keyword/phrase as the title, mention it towards the top a little in the middle and towards the end.  Use the useful but incomplete technique again to get people to visit your website. 

Have a look at Ezine Articles to find out how other people put their articles together, make sure you look at the successful ones, you’ll see the amount of views that each article has had.  You get a resource area at the bottom of the article and this will be the link to your website.  Don’t send people to your products and services straight away though, send them to pages inside your site (deeplinking) or send them to your PDF put together from the first set of articles that you wrote, to build your email list.  The idea is to get people to want to visit your website after they have finished reading.

Once you have a few articles written it’s time to distribute them.

There are many places available online that you can use to distribute your articles, the most popular places are websites like Ezine Articles, these articles show up in search results themselves and if this is the case and you have a link from there then this can only benefit your website.  Once you have submitted to the top five by hand you can then use a service such as isnare to submit your article to hundreds of article directories all over the web.  The reason we want to submit to the top five by hand is so we can carry out a fantastic technique that's worth the trouble.

***** Some SEOs might find this part slightly Grey ******

Google will find your links eventually, there is no doubt, but we want Google to find them asap so that we can get instant benefit.  Once you have submitted your article, view it as it appears on one of the sites and click to view your accounts RSS feed, take that URL and then visit this website -  www.rssmix.com

Try and mix this up as much as possible.  When you are submitting articles, I don’t expect you to be submitting one at a time, be sure to have at least ten saved up for the five top article sites.  So you’ll have ten articles on five sites.  Be random and use RSS mix to aggregate two of your articles from two different sites.  A good point to note here is that alot of the content that you will be putting on social sites also have RSS feeds, so you can use those to make the feed more random too.

Once you have put your own feeds through RSS Mix, you’ll have a brand new feed with all those feeds in it.  Submit this feed to all the top RSS aggregators to make sure that Google knows you are there.

Top RSS Aggregators

http://www.blogdigger.com/add.jsp (PR7)
http://www.blogpulse.com/submit.html (PR7)
http://www.feedage.com (PR6)
http://www.2rss.com (PR6)
http://www.blogstreet.com/bsibin/add.cgi (PR6)
http://publisher.yahoo.com/rss_guide/submit.php (PR6)
http://www.plazoo.com/en/addrss.asp (PR6)
http://www.feedbite.com (PR5)
http://www.rssfeeds.com (PR5)
http://feedraider.com/ (PR5)
http://www.feedsubmitter.com/ (PR5)
http://purerss.com/addfeed.php?catid= (PR5)
http://www.unclefeed.com/rss/addfeed.html (PR4)
http://www.feedsee.com/submit.html (PR4)
http://www.feed24.com/?c=add (PR3)
http://www.feedfury.com/ (PR3)
http://www.goldenfeed.com/AddFeed.aspx (PR3)
http://www.feedooyoo.com/ref.htm (PR3)
http://www.feedest.com/feedAdd.cfm (PR3)
http://www.rssmad.com (PR3)
http://www.feedbase.net/Add.php
http://www.rssmicro.com/?m=fs#theForm

http://www.rssmotron.com/feed_eater.php

To be doubly sure that you are getting good value from this, you might want to submit your new feed URL to lots of social bookmarking sites, and as an added tip, visit Pingo matic and Pingoat and ping the feed too.

Here is an objective list of five good article sites:

http://www.ezinearticles.com

http://www.buzzle.com

http://www.articledashboard.com

http://www.goarticles.com

http://www.amazines.com

Here are some more articles sites to submit to if you don’t want to use an article distribution service like Isnare.

Ideamarketers.com

Articlesbase.com

Articlealley.com

Easyarticles.com

Articlecube.com

Searchwarp.com

Afroarticles.com

Articlesfactory.com

Articlebiz.com

Apart from writing a best seller the only place where you can make real money using only words (keywords to be exact) is the internet.  Everything revolves around the search term that someone types into Google or any other search engine.  That someone could be looking to buy something, find out some information or they might just be browsing around.  

There are two main things that we need to take into account when we are talking about building websites.  Number one is to make sure that there are enough people searching for what it is that your website has to offer, and the second is to make sure that your website shows in the SERPs when people are searching via Google.

I'm going to explain a little about keyword research and then you'll want to watch the videos that take you through the several processes of keyword discovery.  All of the video content you'll be viewing is step by step, I'll show you exactly how I carry out my Keyword Research.

You must know what people are searching for.  If you begin to optimise a page for a search term that only has one search per day then you'll find that all the SEO in the world won't bring you any traffic.  If you begin to optimise your page(s) for terms that actually have people searching on them, then you are going to receive free web traffic when your pages begin to rank well.

Every page on your website should be targeting it's own keyword(s)/keyphrase(s), and these phrases should have people searching for them every single month.  This way, if each of your keywords/phrases on a 20 page site has 200 people searching per month, then you are competing for 20 x 200 = 4000 searches per month.  These numbers are quite conservative too.

So the first lesson in Keyword Research is that you need to find and write about keywords/keyphrases that people are actually searching for before you do anything else.

I'm going to take you through the exact steps that I take when I'm carrying out keyword research, but before that it's worth mentioning that it's probably not a good idea to target keywords that are way too competitive. 

I know that you'll work hard, but if you haven't seen results after a few months, then it's easy to give up.  Pick some easier keywords.

A single keyword is always a bad idea, and a two word keyword may also be a bad idea if, again they have alot of competition.

A way to get around this is to find keyphrases that contain your ideal keyword(s), if you want to target 'wedding photography' it will take a long time and/or a large budget to rank well.  So what you would do is find words that contain that term, eg 'contemporary wedding photography', 'birmingham wedding photography', 'professional wedding photography', 'reportage wedding photography' and many more . . .

This way you'll begin building momentum to be found for 'wedding photography' (first level keyword), but in the meantime you will start to be found for the second level keywords above, each of which has it's own search volume.

When you are building your list, you'll also want to consider related keywords too.  If you were building a website about Debt or Debt Consolidation, you would also consider different words that mean the same thing, such as 'credit consolidation', or 'consolidation loan'.  This helps with LSI, or Latent Symantic Indexing.

The last thing to talk about is how wide or deep you want to go with your market.  If you're going really wide, ie you are a photographer and you want to target everything about photography ie, weddings, products, events, portrait, boudoir, contemporary, then you're going really wide and your keyword list would be enormous, bear in mind that your keywords need content and content costs either alot of time or money.

If you just want to target wedding photographer in leicester, then your list is going to be much smaller, and you'll have much less content to write or outsource.

Think about the goals of your business or site, why are you building your website?  What do you want to get out of your website, advertising revenue? leads? enquiries? sales?

I encourage you to write down the goals for your website, and bear these in mind when compiling your keyword list.

What is a First Level Keyword

You might visit a website about catering supplies, so you would expect the owner to try and rank for the word catering supplies, this is a first level keyword for this website owner.  Catering Equipment would also be a First Level Keyword too.  There are usually only five-six first level keywords that you would want to target.

The way keywords relate to each other is the same as how markets relate to one another, you have a market, and then there will be lots of sub sections of that market.  The subsection that describes your business most accurately would be your First Level Keyword. 

Back to the Photography example – this is quite a large market.  You might be a Photographer, but what type of photography do you specialise in?

If you are building a Directory of Photographers, then photography would be without a doubt one of the most attractive first level keywords, it is impractical to target a single word though, so you would drop down and make events photography, wedding photography etc your first level keywords.

If you are an Events Photographer that travels nationwide and this is the main core of your business, then Events Photography, and Events Photographer would be two of your first level keywords.  If you are a wedding photographer that goes no further than london, then london wedding photographer would be one of your first level keywords.

Can you see how we are breaking the vast market of photography down into sub sections, it's like a ladder, and you get on the ladder as high up as your business allows.

Bear in mind that markets go wide as well as deep, if you are an events photographer in london, you might also attend weddings, and you might also provide portrait shoots.  In this case your first level keywords have now expanded to wedding photographer london, portrait photographer london, events photographer london.  There will be many more keywords that have people searching for them that describe the sub section of your market, and these are easily found using freely available online tools.

Second Level Keywords

This will help to further explain what I mean, if you are building a Directory of Photographers, then your second level keywords would be sub sections of your first level keywords, so if wedding photography is a first level keyword, contemporary wedding photography would be a second level keyword, a sub section of the wedding photography market.

Tertiary Keywords

These usually have little or no traffic in a month, because they are very specific, these are usually product names, or model numbers etc.  You would promote these keywords in product descriptions for each individual product on an ecommerce site.

Modifiers (Google’s free keyword tool doesn’t display modifiers that well – paid tools do)

Modifiers are what we type into a search engine when we don’t find what we want the first time to narrow down the search.  You could start with digital camera, then slr digital camera, then cheap slr digitial cameras, then maybe cheap slr cameras in Wokingham. 

So from the initial search of digital camera, the modifiers would be cheap slr, and in Wokingham.

We can see if there are any popular modifiers when we check your subject in the keywords tool.  These are usually not targeted, but you will do well to include them in your site content when writing it.

So, keeping the above in mind, people talk about targeting the head of search and mining the long tail.  The head would be your main keywords and some secondary keywords, the rest would be the long tail.

Head – 80% of your traffic will come from roughly 20% of your terms.

Long Tail – 20% of your traffic will come from 80% of your terms.

Other aspects of the keywords/markets you choose are seasonality and relevance to whats going on inside the searchers head.  People will search for Halloween costumes all throughout the year, but they will only want to buy a Halloween costume in the couple of months leading up to Halloween.  This also includes relevance; how would you monetise a website that is geared towards selling the halloween costumes in January for example?  My guess is it would be difficult, so you would have to use other methods to make money during those times.

Your competition plays a large role in whether you want to enter a market or not, although to many people out there on the web, they won’t even consider competition because they are in the market they are in.  If you run a dentist’s surgery then that’s the market you are in, but don’t worry because using the right methods that we’re going to teach there’s no reason why you won’t start to get traffic.  For the people who are building websites purely to make recurring income however, you have much more choice over which niches to enter.

Don’t be afraid to compete, most of the people out there won’t know half of the stuff on this website, but bear in mind that there is a fine line, if you only commit to an hour a week then you won’t even be generating traffic for a site about Ceiling Tiles, if however you spend more time and commit to generating yourself a recurring income for years to come, then you can own multiple positions on page one of Google for many markets with websites that are turning a profit.

Yes, I'll be there some day, that's what all this internet stuff is about isn't it, the dream of sitting on a beach with your Laptop and a 3G connection, with the pound notes rolling in.

She also talks about getting your marketing calendar in order, so that you can look after your already qualified buyers (and make a few quid at the same time).  It's worth a look.

I've heard this idea a few times from different sources, and I realised that I too, take my fair share of workations, although I wouldn't have classed them as a holiday tbh until today's reflection.

It's common practice for some to have a hotel day, this is where you lock yourself in a room at the local Travel Lodge and catch up with everything that you haven't had the time to do that month.  It's a fantastic idea, and one that lets you get some of that clutter out of your mind, clearing the way for the next step in your project, or even your next project.  If you're anything like me, once one of your services has gone to market, you're going to give something else a bash.

So if you can't take a week out, I'd definately suggest taking at least one day a month, if you can't disappear and go to a local cheap hotel, then lock yourself in your office and make sure that you get no distractions, no telephone calls, no emails and just concentrate on what needs to get done – 50 minutes of pure concentration at a time, then have a cuppa, go for a walk or grab a bite to eat.

You need to create a period of time where you get to do what you want to do, your projects, the important stuff that's been piling up, no clients or customers to worry about and no one ringing you or emailing you.  Sure, maybe check once a day to make sure there is nothing life threateningly urgent to do, but don't act on anything short of a catastrophe until you've taken an amount of time out for yourself.

I've got three personal projects on the go at the moment, and they all need attention, so this is where I can make alot of progress and maybe get one ready for market.

Make sure you give the idea a go, hotel days are the way forward, I'll be back a week on monday

This keyword is quite important to me as it's the main keyword phrase for one of my businesses that returns a nice portion of my income.

Google, you've disappointed me;

Google has introduced a new way to display their business listings, when the engine thinks you are looking for local results (this will depend largely on what market you are in) it will return local business listings. 

This means that the top two results are at the top of the page and you have to scroll quite a way down to get to position three, and that's where my ranking settled   Last week I would have been ecstatic as this is quite a competitive term.

Google has been doing this for a long time, but the new results are much larger and they have longer descriptions, they have even put a google map at the top of the sponsored listings! 

I always thought that the local listings were for local results ie when you type in 'wakefield photographer' or any search term appended with a term specific to an area, but my keyword phrase is targeting the whole of the UK (although people may prefer to use people nearby (hmm interesting) ).  I feel a little cheated and I need to rethink my strategy for this part of my business, but I always enjoy the learning curve balls that Google throws, afterall they are the daddies of online advertising

What this means to me:

1. I used to aim for a listing in the top three positions, with the new business listings, I now need to aim for position one or two (the business listings start at position three).
2. I need to pay more attention to Google Business Listings and make sure that I appear highly for these.
3. My PPC marketing has to be a little more aggressive as Google is putting their maps at the top of the sponsored links, we all know if we want the majority of the traffic we need to be as close to the top as possible.  At the moment if I'm in position five I will get clicks.  If this is a precedence for things to come (it might begin to affect more markets), if there is a great dirty horrible map taking up the top five spots, then this is going to affect my PPC stats.

Overall, I can't complain, because I should be aiming at the top spot anyway, this is just going to motivate me to do more than necessary to get the rankings.  I have been putting off optmising for google business for a while, so this is going make me want to learn more about how to get the best spot on Google Business.  Not wanting to blow my own trumpet, but I'm pretty good at PPC marketing anyway, so it probably won't affect me that much apart from having to share some of the traffic with business listings.

Try to get a name that will appeal to people searching for your main keyword phrase.

You don't need to have the exact keyword phrase in your domain, but thats the best thing to do to appeal to the person searching for your product, and it also helps tremendously with SEO.  If you have www.magicianleicester.com then you won't have a hard time ranking for the keywords 'magician leicester' and 'leicester magician'.

As we're in the UK, you'll need to start with .co.uk and .com domain names, if you can get both, do so.  You might also want to purchase the .net and .biz extensions to prevent anyone else from buying them.  The extension that ranks the best is debatable but if you're only targeting people in the UK use .co.uk, if you ever see yourself wanting to compete internationally then get .com

An example of the above is if you are selling childrens toys, if you could get childrenstoys.co.uk then great, you'll be on top of google for that search term in no time for users inside the UK.  If you ever wanted to start selling in the US or Australia or Canada (the big three of the net), then .com would be the best one to go for. 

This does take us into the realms of country specific domain extensions such as .com.au (australia) and .ca (canada), but this article isn't going to get that deep. 

In a nutshell, if you are targeting users in a specific country then use that domain extension. 

If you are targeting internationally then get a .com unless you are big enough to create a brand new site for each country specific domain and create seperate content for each (avoiding duplicate content as far as possible).

The best Registrars in my opinion are the following

1. Dotster.com – http://www.dotster.com/
2. NameBoy – http://www.nameboy.com/
3. Deleted Domains – http://www.deletedomains.com/ – Costs extra money
4. Namecheap – http://www.namecheap.com/

Although I listed it last, I use Name Cheap for all of my domains, I also use their hosting too.

Finding Aged Domain names

If you can afford it then you can take a short cut here.  You can buy an aged domain that already has backlinks and if you're lucky some Google Page Rank (PR).

Age, Links and Page Rank all help towards getting your site indexed and listed in the Search Engines.

Download and install the Google Toolbar.

After installing the toolbar, you may have to activate the page rank viewer.  Do that by clicking on the 'settings tab', going to 'options', choosing the 'more' tab and clicking the box next to the page rank and page info title.

Step 1: Using Google to try identifying aged domain names that you may be able to obtain.

1. Go to http://www.google.com.

2. Do a search for your main niche keyword phrase.

3. Quickly go to each site in Google and look for extremely outdated personal sites, hobby sites, and even eCommerce sites. Also look for parked pages that do not have active content on them and sites that appear to be under construction. You may want to do this for the top 50 – 100 ranking sites in Google.

4. When you find a poorly done site that you may be able to obtain, put it into a simple spreadsheet.  Next to the domain name, put the page rank of that domain name. In a 3rd column, enter the age of the domain name. All of this can be determined by entering the domain name at http://www.checkpagerank.net.

5. Once you've entered all of that information into the spreadsheet, send a quick email to thr site owner by using the email address or contact form on their site. Alternatively, you can call them if there is a phone number available. If no contact information exists, go to http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/ and do a “WHOIS” search using the domain name. This will typically give you their name, address, phone number, and email address. If the domain name is private, you will not be able to locate their contact details. Ask them if they would consider selling their domain name to you.

6. When a website owner indicates that they are willing to sell their domain name, ask them what their asking price is. Add this information into the 4th column of your spreadsheet.

7. After finding a handful of domain names that you are interested in, identify the one that you want the most and make the owner of that domain name an offer. To start off with, offer around 50 – 60% of what they are asking. Remember, if they want more than you are willing to offer you can eliminate that site from your spreadsheet of possible domain names to obtain.

8. Bargain back and forth with the owner of the domain names until you can come to an agreement on a site that you are interested in.

9. If the owner is an individual, pay them through PayPal or through escrow.com. By doing this, you are protecting yourself because these companies will allow you to request your money back if you don't receive what you paid for.

10. Once you've made payment to them, give them your name, phone number, address, and email address and ask them to initiate a transfer from their registrar to yours. (note: if you don't have a registrar I recommend setting up a free account at http://www.godaddy.com/ )

11. Once they have transferred the domain name into your account you will receive an email from GoDaddy. Follow GoDaddy's instructions for accepting the transfer and you will then take over ownership of the domain.

Step 2: Using advanced searches in Google to find potential domain names to obtain.

This process is identical to the process described above with the exception of how you do your search in Google. Rather than simply entering you main keyword phrases, use advanced search phrases that contain a root word from you niche phrase or synonyms of that root word. Here are some examples of good searches to do. You will want to replace the word 'dog' with your root word and/or synonyms of your root word:

inurl:dog “domain name is for sale”
inurl:dog “name is for sale”
inurl:dog “website is for sale”
inurl:dog “buy this domain”
inurl:dog “are retiring”
inurl:dog “have retired”
inurl:dog “out of business”
inurl:dog “domain is for sale”

NOTE: Keep in mind while you're viewing Google's results for these searches that you are only interested in looking at the domain names that would work for a store. Don't bother looking at domains that wouldn't work well. Also, remember that if a result in Google is a sub page, you need to go to the homepage to see if that site has any page rank. Sub-pages often don't have pagerank, even though the homepage may. If the site will not allow you to go to the homepage, you can enter the domain name into http://www.checkpagerank.net/ to find out if it does have some page rank.

Step 3: Using auction sites like http://www.tdnam.com/ and http://www.sedo.com/. You can use these techniques on any auction site, but for this example, we'll use tdnam.com (aka GoDaddy Domain Name After market).

1. Go to http://www.tdnam.com/ and click on the 'advanced search' link to the right of the search bar.
2. Next to the keyword tab, choose 'contains.'
3. Enter your root keyword or a synonym into the search box.
4. Next to 'auction type' click on 'select all.'
5. In 'domain extensions' select only the domain name extensions that would work well for a site selling products. We typically only search for the following extensions: .com, .net, .co.uk.

1. Click 'Go' and wait for the results.
2. When the results appear, click on the 'traffic' heading above the results to sort by traffic (in general, the sites with the higher traffic will have higher page rank as well).
3. Now that the sites are in order, most traffic appearing first, you can copy and paste the domain name into a separate tab or browser.
4. If it has page rank, you can put it into your spreadsheet. In the 4th column, put the price that the domain name is currently at and in the 5th column, note the date and time that the auction is going to end. Some domain names in the after market have the option to 'buy now' as well.
5. If you intend to try to win an auction, you will need to create an account with the company that is holding the auction. This is usually free or very, very cheap.

Getting an aged domain is NOT required, but after this step you should have either a domain or an aged domain.