Writing Articles Online for Money Lets Get Intimate

Posted on October 2, 2011 by carlos

Writing articles online for money has two primary requirements. Your content writing must please Google and please your reader. We all know that our overall goal is to make money writing articles online.

Unscrupulous Marketers

Although not all of us writing online for money admit it, we also know that unscrupulous marketers have made a mockery of website content writing with black hat tactics. I know, they are laughing all the way to the bank. Someday they will get their just deserves. Fortunately, Google and other search engines are taking steps to minimize black hat tactics in article marketing.

Have some marketers forgotten that they are writing for money and that it dictates an exchange. In the case of this industry, article marketing (writing articles online for money), the exchange is content writing.

We exchange quality information in the hope that the reader will react to our words and buy a product or service that we offer as a solution to their questions.

How do we do that?  Obviously, we need to get people (traffic) to our site and to our articles. As we also know, article writers depend on organic search results to get that traffic.Bounce Rate

Let’s Get Intimate

Here is where the rubber meets the road. If you are serious about building a long term business, then pay heed to the following.

How can you expect a visitor to stay on your site and read at least one article to the end and click on the call to action without providing solid quality content? How do you know if you have quality content?

Let me tell you one of the ways Google measures the quality content writing of your site – Bounce Rate. What is bounce rate? It is the amount of time a visitor stays on your site before he leaves.

Google’s Eyes

If Google’s eyes see a high bounce rate, Google infers that your site is of low quality. The search engine assumes that the visitor did not find the information you promised, that the you did not provide the site content that you promised, and that the site is therefore of low quality.

As article writers, writing for money, this should raise the proverbial red flag. You can check your bounce rate in your c-panel or with Google analytics. Never mind if you believe you have content better than Andy Rooney’s two minute comments on the “60 Minutes” TV show, Google does not think so and your search engine ranking page reflects that lack of confidence.

Without good page position in the search engines, as you know, your traffic is less and so are your sales. However, if your bounce rate is low that is to say those visitors stay longer on your site, you will improve your conversion many fold even without good page position. That may sound contradictory. Let me explain why.

Syndication

Bounce rate just shows that your content is more than simply writing articles online for money. Your content writing holds the visitor long enough to act on your call to action. Your conversion to sales does not depend solely on your search engine position.

It is very possible that if your articles have high quality content, webmasters will re-publish your article in their blogs and newsletters. Think of it as an indirect form of an email campaign. Your article is sent to a targeted audience. The traffic you get is not because of SERPs, but the result of syndication by interested webmasters.

All this to say that if you want a long term business writing articles online for money, then pay attention to your bounce rate which is a direct indication of a visitors perception of your content.

Start off on the right foot, if you want to learn make money writing articles online, then learn how to structure your article and increase your sales and traffic by following the rules of the road in my new e-book: Writing On The Web. Learn more about the basics of article writing.

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Content Writing (UCO) – The New Kid on the Block

Posted on September 25, 2011 by carlos

Content writing has a new acronym, UCO (user content optimization).  UCO may not be a new tactic. In fact, it is as old as writing itself. Many of you know it by its former name, quality content. Nevertheless, website content writing has taken on a new role, challenging SEO as the acronym of choice. Content Writing

Search engine optimization (SEO) will not give up its king of the hill status easily. I doubt that it will ever be replaced. Yet, the new kid on the block may give it a run for the money. Let me explain why.

If you want to write articles online, then you have a dual challenge. Article writers must write material that is noticed by the search engines and noticed by a human observer. The two are not mutually exclusive. Although some would have you believe that the one or the other is more important.

I say that because in the past, many article marketers have focused on SEO to the near exclusion of quality content writing. We have all witnessed published gibberish obviously intended solely for the electronic eyes of some monstrous data gathering behemoth.

We all know it as gaming the system. A tactic used to get a webpage or site onto a search engine’s first page of results solely to make money writing articles online.  We can all relate to that.

Many fellow article marketers paid lip service to quality content; either the content was shallow, not relevant to the title, or slipshod grammatically. Again, the emphasis was more about gaming the system. It worked for a while. There are many gurus that make money writing articles online that can attest to it.

Then Google in its infinite wisdom implemented the Panda/Farmer algorithm. Websites tumbled, pages fell off the web map, and article marketers cried foul. Why, because Google has a stated policy of wanting to give their users the best possible relevant search results. It was only a matter of time and inevitability that gamers would be shackled.

Google had to do something to save itself embarrassment. In the fallout, the famous and the infamous felt the slice of the Google sickle. The pain could have been avoided. To make money writing articles online, article marketers should understand  the  true meaning of content writing for article marketing.

The operative word in the phrase ‘article marketing’ is not marketing. It is article. What is an article? It is a written work that conveys information. Combine the word article with marketing and you have a channel to sell your product or ideas.

Search engines like Google are more and more obsessed with semantically relevant search results. That is why article marketers can no longer pay lip service to quality content. If you want to make money writing articles online and want your work to be relevant in the future, your work must be relevant and have high quality now.

High quality as defined by Google is not limited to relevant content. By Google’s definition high quality also includes formatting, spelling and grammar. Quality website content writing and writing online for money go hand in hand.

The writing is on the wall. Write articles online  and provide user friendly quality content for user content optimization or fall by the wayside.

Some may think that semantic searching for the popular search engines is still in the distant future. Computer World reports, “Moreover, enterprise software vendors like IBM, Oracle, SAS and Microsoft have started to incorporate semantic search and W3C standards into their platforms, as have Web search engines like Google, Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo.”

User content optimization is challenging search engine optimization as the prime traffic builder. Write articles online with quality content writing or the search engines will ignore you.

Gone are the days when writing for money meant keyword stuffing and laboring over strategically imbedding keywords at two to four percent of the article body. The behemoth search engines are looking elsewhere, and they are gathering steam.

SEO is not dead and will always be a factor in generating traffic.   We all know that keywords are paramount in generating traffic. Yet, the emphasis is shifting from statistical indexing to contextual validity and relevance. Write articles online with this in mind and your SERPS will improve.

As article marketers we must continually remind ourselves that we are marketing with articles, articles that provide solutions, relay news, or give information. We write articles, writing for money, to get traffic. The traffic is generated by exposure to readers via multiple appearances of our work throughout the internet and by high positioning on search results pages.

Ultimately it is the quality of our content writing that visitors use to make a decision. Those decisions result in achieving our goal of converting the reader to buy, to optin, or to accept an ideology. That is what we do to make money writing online. Let us stop dumbing down our articles. Write articles online for your readers and the search engines will find you.

Start your article writing career without the hassle of conflicting information. Learn the simple and thorough way to write articles online to get traffic and sales, follow my road map to Google’s page one, and ultimately to make money writing articles online.

Have a look at this simple step by step article writing course: Writing On The Web.

photo by Chris Haldeerman @flickr
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How to Find a PLR Package That Over Delivers

Posted on September 24, 2011 by Rachel

Ok, hand’s up all you internet marketers out there. Let’s be honest. Life would be much easier if you had access to the ultimate PLR package featuring a whole site full of fantastic quality PLR content, as well as graphics, keywords, autoresponder series and websites that you could load onto your site and autoresponder provider.PLR Articles

In this dream you could simply load it all and watch your site miraculously take shape. If the content was absolutely unique to you and your site, that would just be the dream completed wouldn’t it?

Well, it might surprise you to learn that this dream is closer than you may have thought.

While in the past there may have been some less than satisfactory PLR articles and content out there these days there is a whole new generation of PLR providers whose main goal is to provide you and your readers with quality content.

So where do you find these people?

Most of the good new PLR packages and PLR article providers are found in internet marketing forums, like the Warrior Forum and Articles Productions Forum. Do a bit of digging around these places and you will soon learn who is providing quality PLR content, what their ‘niche’ is and even better, what specials that they might be running.

So what does a great PLR package look like?

In the past if it was in one of the ‘evergreen niches’ of love, wealth or health you couldn’t go wrong, but these days you can also add certain sports, like Golf and Tennis and popular hobbies to the list. Pets are also a fairly lucrative market and the range of PLR articles for Amazon products is growing by the day.

When it comes to PLR packages you can get them in all shapes and sizes. Most people looking for PLR providers will need a basic eBook which you can customize for your own use, a smaller report for you to giveaway and build your list with, a sales page, headers. Graphics, a PLR article set for your site, an auto responder set and a template for a squeeze page.

To buy all of this from a ghostwriter or graphic designer would cost in excess of $2000 – try getting a copywriter to create you a full sales page for less than $1000, bespoke ghostwritten articles cost anywhere upwards of $10 per 500 words, graphics will set you back at least another $500…… all in all it quickly adds up.

Compare this with the cost of PLR packages or even just buying PLR articles. Most PLR article sites will sell you their article packages for around $1 an article and if you choose your provider well, the quality will at least equal that of your $10-$40 per article ghostwriter. There are also providers who will provide you with the whole shebang, that’s site, ebook, report, articles, graphics and autoresponder series for around $200.

Some providers offer spin ready masters with their articles, some also give you a keyword list to use. Scout around and see who has what on offer and I bet that you are pleasantly surprised at what you find.

For anyone worried about the PLR content being used by others online a quick survey suggests that only 10% of PLR buyers ever use the articles that they buy without substantially altering them so that they are unrecognizable from the original. That means that even though a pack may have sold 200 copies there is a very good chance that you will only have to compete with about 20 other sites. Those are pretty good odds!

Of course always keeping a look out for new providers and content is one of the best ways to ensure that you get the best deal possible on fresh content and a great PLR package.

We are proud to have Rachel McNaught as a guest blogger on Writing For The Web. Ms. McNaught is co-owner of Niche PLR Products.

-Admin

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SEO vs. UCO – What is UCO?

Posted on September 3, 2011 by carlos

Make Money Writing Articles Online With User Content Optimization

Google’s Panda update created a whirlwind storm.  It sent marketers scrambling looking for answers. It is no secret. Read any article writing guide on website content writing and most likely it will emphasize SEO techniques and tactics.

Up until now, SEO has been the dominant driving force behind search engine results and the predominant method to make money writing online. That is changing. Let me introduce User Content Optimization (UCO), the latest in website content writing. UCO is the new kid on the block, formerly known as quality content.

Why would anyone query a search engine? Common sense would tell you that the searcher was looking for information, for quality content.  All he wants is an answer to a question. He may be searching for something to buy or perhaps some entertainment, or even the latest news. Regardless, he is looking for information.Quality Content

Web of Buzzwords

Yet, how many times have you made a query and found an organic list of sites wanting to blatantly sell you something? If you have had my experience, then you have seen those billboard webpages many times.

They are billboard webpages filled with lots of color, lots of hype, but no substance, no quality content. They are a web of tangled buzzwords suspiciously meant to attract digital spiders in the hopes of ultimately snaring an unsuspecting human with its web content writing of alluring brilliance.

It is no secret that there are two opposing factions in the world of how best to make money writing online,  those that promote SEO content writing and those that promote quality website content writing. Does it have to be one or the other?

Article writing guides tend to emphasize SEO techniques and methods over UCO. Common sense should tell you that both methods play important roles in article marketing. You may favor one over the other, but using both, informative quality user content optimization and search engine optimization can sky rocket your ranking over that of your competitors.

Football and Article Marketing

It seems to me that if you decide to be serious about playing football you should know the rules of the game and if you aspire to professionalism, then you must not only play by and learn the rules you must also play on a regulation football field. Not to mention a wide range of unwritten rules called sportsmanship that you abide by.

Professional football is an extremely physical and very competitive sport. But the unwritten law of sportsmanship denies a player the use of illegal drugs or the blatant use of physical violence to gain a competitive edge. In other words, unsportsmanlike conduct is not condoned. It is not always explicitly written in the rule books, but you know it when you see unsportsmanlike conduct.

The game of writing for money (article marketing) is no different.

In one vast sweep, with one block of filtering code Google brought the industry to its knees. Websites crumbled. Giants in the page rank race toppled. Why, because many players were unsportsmanlike. They were not playing by the unwritten rules.

Article marketing is self explanatory. Articles convey information. Articles inform. In its broadest sense the conveyed information is knowledge in various forms like solutions, general facts, news, comparisons, or opinion. Articles convey user content optimization.

The other half of the article marketing label is marketing. Marketing promotes products or ideas with the intent to sell those products or ideas. It is information used to sell product or ideas. Marketing is a much broader term than article. Marketing includes SEO, syndication, back linking and many other tactics.

The operative word in article marketing is not marketing, but article. ‘Article’ defines the primary type of marketing that is to be conducted. It is not hard to understand. Article marketing is writing for money.

In keeping with the football analogy, think of the football as the product. The idea of writing articles for money is to move the product up the field of page ranks to the coveted goal line of position one page one.

Some players decided that the marketing ingredient of the article marketing game excluded the use of carefully crafted plays of information to reach the goal line.

Imagine a football team that ignores the written and unwritten rules and that decides that they need only pick up the ball and through brute force without paragraphic downs, they cross the goal line and expect a reward. Luckily, that does not happen often in football.

User Content Optimization

User Content Optimization (UCO) internet marketing will soon become the new buzzword, right up there with SEO internet marketing. In fact, it may even receive equal billing. Why?

Because UCO is so much easier to learn, there are no schemes to outwit the search engines and no black hat tactics to compete against. It requires only that the author write articles online that provide informative and relevant articles to his readers. No extra bells and whistles or secret formulas are required for writing articles online for money.

It is not that SEO internet marketing will fall by the wayside. SEO will always be an integral part of the article marketer’s methods. With the User Content Optimization model, you write quality content, quality information. The semantic relationships flow naturally and the web searcher gets his information and the search engines reward your efforts with page one position one rankings.

Any article writing guide for internet marketing should emphasize SEO and UCO equally.

It may seem that I am touting an altruistic scenario, not really, Google is on my side. As search engines become more sophisticated in their semantic searching algorithms, the emphasis on content will become more dominant. They are not there yet, but they are moving in that direction. Is Google on your side?

Start off on the right foot, if you want to learn to make money writing articles online, then learn how to structure your article and increase your sales and traffic by following the rules of the road in my new e-book: Writing On The Web. Learn more about the basics of article writing.

Photo by NeoGaboX @flickrhoto
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Proofreading Articles for Quality Content

Posted on September 2, 2011 by carlos

Money Making Proofreading, For Website Content Writing

How important is proofreading your website content writing? Just ask Google. Google has downgraded many websites and pages on the internet simply because their website content writing was not relevant and was of poor quality.

Proofreading ArticlesThe Google Panda update is not just about keyword stuffing and copied content. It is about providing overall relevant high quality content. The update has changed online article writing for the better. It has changed how article marketers make money writing articles online.

Many of us understand relevance to denote that the content is meaningful, that it is in keeping with what the title implies the article is to be about. What about poor quality? What does that mean? How does Google define poor quality or good quality when writing web content?

Google and Quality Content

Here is what Google has to say about what to consider assessing the quality content of a page or an article: “These are the kinds of questions we ask ourselves as we write algorithms that attempt to assess site quality… Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced? Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book? Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?”

Since Google’s stated goal is to provide their visitors with the highest possible quality content search results, doesn’t it mean that proofreading articles has taken on a much more important role in writing articles online? Does it mean that as an article writer you must insure that your articles are as free as possible from bad syntax, misspelling, and bad grammar? Yes, it does mean that, if you are serious about writing articles online for money, then the quality of your content writing must be raised a notch.

I am sure you would agree that you can gain an advantage over your competition by meeting or exceeding Google’s high quality criteria. You want your content writing to be the best. You want your articles to stand on their own, able to withstand the scrutiny of a comparison to printed magazines or books. You want to make money writing online.

Proofreading

What is the solution? Proofreading. Online article writing allows us the privilege of virtual self publication. Except for a few editorially wise article directories, your article is almost always published by article directories with little to no editorial guidance. If you publish on your own website or blog, there is no third party editorial overview.

Article writers’ writing articles online for money must change their editing and proofreading habits. Proofreading articles must become a high priority when you write articles online. You can proof read your own work by reading it aloud, by using a word processor with proof reading features, by having a friend or relative read it, or by paying someone to review it.

Read Aloud

When you read your work out loud it is much easier to catch simple errors like the omission of a word or a change in verb tense. Reading out loud can also help you spot a lack of continuity, skipping from one topic to another. I found that to be one of my weaknesses.

I get a spontaneous thought and include it in the paragraph I am writing. It makes perfect sense to me at the time. But, after reading it out loud I realize that it has no place in the paragraph but it might fit well somewhere else or I might even discard it, if it is not relevant to the topic I am writing about.

Use a Word Processor

You can use a word processor like MS Word or Open Office to help in editing and proofreading articles. Word processors are very useful in checking spelling and they can suggest sentence structure for awkward sentences. They will also catch sentence fragments, sentences lacking a verb. You can decide whether you want to keep the sentence as is or edit it.

There is a word of caution you should pay heed to when using word processors. They do not correct homonyms like stationary and stationery or to, too, and two. It is very easy to insert the wrong spelling of a word that is perfectly legitimate and yet the word processor will not catch it even though it is used incorrectly.

Reading aloud sometimes helps to catch homonyms, but even then our brains insert what we want to see and not what is actually written. Writing articles online for money we should treat our content writing as we would any work we would perform for an employer.

Third Party Review

A better way to catch homonym errors is to have another set of eyes review your article. Another set of eyes is more likely to ‘see’ that the written word is not the intended word. Having a friend or relative read you work will also improve the continuity of your article. No automation in editing and proofreading articles can replace human review.

As I mentioned earlier, it is easy to befuddle your audience with thoughts that have no place in the subject matter you are discussing. Visitors become confused and may not think that you really know what you are talking about and you lose credibility and ultimately a sale.

Finally, you can hire someone to proof read your work. If you are operating on a limited budget, it can be expensive. Typically, professional proof readers and translators charge by the word, by the page, by the hour, or by the project.

Rates can vary anywhere from .05 cents (US) per word to hundreds of dollars for a project. Unless you have a thriving business, you may want to stick to editing and proofreading articles yourself and use the options mentioned above.

Sleep On It

One last tip, if you do not have a deadline to meet, sleep on it. Surprisingly, after a good night’s sleep, editing and proofreading your work you will often find errors and omissions you hadn’t seen before. Review your work after a good night’s sleep it works.

Writing articles online for money can be very profitable. Start off on the right foot, learn how to write and structure your article and increase your sales and traffic by following the rules of the road in my new e-book: Writing On The Web: An Introduction to Article Writing.

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Article Writing, Readability, and Content Marketing

Posted on August 17, 2011 by carlos

Content Marketing How to Make Money Writing Online

Article writers using content marketing often overlook content readability when composing their articles. Writing articles online for money must not only consider motivating readers to buy a product. To make money writing articles online, authors must also provide readable quality content.Readability

With the advent of Google’s stated goal to improve a user’s search experience, many websites and articles lost their coveted positions in Search Engine Ranking Positions (SERPs). It is now, more than ever, that quality website content writing is king. Writing online for money as a means of ‘gaming’ the search engines through keyword stuffing, article blasts to thousands of article directories, and weak, poorly structured content writing are gone.

Readability

Readability measures the grade level needed to understand any document. There are several schemes that are used to determine readability. The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level is one of better known and most used measurements. Your content writing can be much improved if you incorporate this measure into your article writing.

Although it has come under criticism for its simplicity, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level scale  is still widely used and can give you an idea of your article’s readability.

You can determine your article’s readability with the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level scale which assigns a grade level to the written material. MS Word provides a readability statistics feature found under the spell check tab that determines your article’s grade level reading score.

There are free utilities on the web that allow you to copy and paste your document and the utility will return the grade level score. There are others. Online-Utitility.org is one. You can find them with a ‘free readability tools’ search on the internet.

You can also use the Google ‘more search tools’ feature found at the bottom of the left navigation bar when doing a Google search and choosing ‘reading level’. The organic results will show ‘basic’, ‘intermediate’, or ‘advanced’ reading levels for each of the page results.

Although, the results may not be 100% accurate, they do give you an idea of the grade level that your article or page is written at. It may seem that I am putting much emphasis on readability and quality content. It is important to note when writing for the web that the content be easily understandable by your targeted reader. You make money writing online by targeting your reader

Ideal Reading Level

If you dumb down your website content writing, the reader may feel insulted and dismiss your words. If your words are too pedantic, readers may accuse you of flaunting your knowledge. You may have quality content, but not readable by your targeted audience.

What is the ideal reading grade level? The answer eludes me. Many claim that the national average reading level is eighth grade and that article writers should write at that level or lower when writing for the web. I have yet to find any evidence to substantiate that claim or that you will make money writing to that grade level.

Studies have been conducted by various governmental agencies under the U.S. Department of Education and by independent private agencies on various aspects of literacy throughout the United States, but I have yet to find any authoritative data that specifically identifies the national reading average to be at the eighth grade level.

Adult Literacy in America

The study most often cited as the source of the eighth grade reading level claim is a 1993 study, Adult Literacy in America: A First Look at the Results of the National Adult Literacy Survey, by Irwin S. Kirsch, sponsored by the National Center for Education Statistics. You can review the results yourself at the National Center for Education Statistics.

However, the study does not specifically state that the national reading level average is at the eighth grade level. In fact, the study’s committee “… agreed that expressing the literacy proficiencies of adults in school-based terms or grade-level scores is inappropriate”.

The study did survey levels of literacy skills ranging from Level 1 to Level 5, with Level 5 being the most difficult or the highest skill level. The survey did show that about half the population performed at levels 3-5 and half performed within the lower levels 1 and 2.

SERPs and Readability

Nevertheless, if we accept the various reading level scales like, Flesch-Kincaid, article writers can improve their content marketing to more closely match the acceptance of targeted readers. In addition, Google and other search engines may or may not look favorably on the webpage or article and rank it higher than one that Google deems to be written at an inappropriate level as evidenced by this Official Google Blog article.

For instance, an article written at the twelfth grade level about building a tool shed may not be looked upon as worthy of Google’s definition of maximizing the user search experience. An article on the same subject written at the sixth or seventh grade level might well fair much better in the SERPs.

On the other hand, writing an article on the Literacy Statistics of Migrant Workers at the fourth or fifth grade level would not fare well with academic readers and probably not with the search engines.

The point is that article writers should consider readability when writing articles. The effort does not need to be an all consuming effort. Readability can easily be checked with one of the tools I mentioned earlier.

Be aware of the end user. The more you comply with Google’s goal of “providing the best user experience possible,” the more favorably the search engine will rank your writing for money efforts.

Writing articles online for money can be very profitable. Start off on the right foot, learn how to write and structure your article and increase your sales and traffic by following the rules of the road in my new e-book: Writing On The Web: An Introduction to Article Writing.

 

Photo by jemsweb @flickr
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Content Marketing for Article Marketers

Posted on August 17, 2011 by carlos

With the advent of Google’s Panda Update the current rules of article marketing have changed and should be labeled under the umbrella of content marketing. If content was king before the update, it is now the supreme ruler over all writing for the web.Quality Content

If you are new to article marketing or content marketing you may have the misconception that all you need do is write an article, have it published by an article directory then sit back and wait for the money to come in.

If you believe that writing for the web requires only that you write a few four hundred word articles with well placed keywords and a call to action, then wait for the articles to be singled out by one of the many publishers that your article directory has access to you are mistaken.

Content Marketing

Before the Google Panda Update many article writers gave lip service to the mantra, “content is king.” Writing for the web became a game to see who could outwit the search engines by publishing the least amount of information and get the greatest amount of traffic.

The term, content marketing, has been associated more with the dissemination of information to customers and was not necessarily aimed at directly promoting a product.

The idea was that by giving customers valuable information, customers were more likely to develop a sense of loyalty and continue to buy or become customers of whatever brand was offering the quality content in the form of brochures, handouts, and website content.

The philosophy is that by educating the public with, for instance, educational material, the marketing company would be recognized as an industry expert and the brand would more likely be purchased.

Content marketing is no longer limited to the world of corporate, big name brand writers. The search engines are forcing the article writers to create informative quality material.

Quality Content

What is quality content? Ask five people and you will get five different answers. Instead of getting opinions, let us see how Google defines quality content.

Google’s Official Blog defines quality content sites as “sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”

But wait! That is not all. They go on to say that relevancy, grammar, and originality or uniqueness play important roles in the quest for high quality content.

Relevancy in keywords, relevancy of titles to content, relevancy of content to your audience all plays a role.

Although writing for the web is very forgiving in that anyone can publish most anything, Google is now viewing proper grammar as a part of their goal to help people have a better search experience.

Finally, originality and uniqueness of content are considered. An article should be well researched and provide useful information.

In their blog they list twenty-two questions that can give you the guidance you need to understand the Google mindset. The questions range from ” Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?” to ” How much quality control is done on content?”

As you can see the questions vary from asking about trust to asking about grammar. The playing field has changed. Article writers wanting to be a successful as article marketers must give much more attention to content marketing.

Start off on the right foot, learn how to structure  your article and increase your sales and traffic by following the rules of the road in my new e-book: Writing On The Web.

photo by aithom2 @flickr
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Article Writers A Keyword Tip How to Find More Keywords

Posted on August 16, 2011 by carlos

Here’s a little tip when writing for the web and doing your keyword research, a tip that article writers overlook. The experts tell you that you should use quotes around your keyword to determine how much competition you can expect and to decide whether or not it is a good keyword to rank for.

Some expert article writers tell you that if the competition is too high, and that marketing for that keyword is an exercise in futility. They also advise to ignore that keyword and go on to the next one. Consider this. Google does not display all of the keyword content results.Keywords

Google is aware of the listings but does not list them. The listings may well be “indexed,” but they are not displayed. Don’t discard that keyword yet. It may be easier to rank for that keyword than you think. You may be passing up a chance to use a well searched key word in your content marketing.

Let us look at an example. Using the keyword “digital sound systems” with quotes, the Google search returns 5,920,000 indexed results as of this writing. Article writers know that it means that that exact combination of words was found 5,920,000 times.

That is a formidable amount of competition. It would appear that we should consider discarding this keyword.

Before we discard our keyword, let’s look a little closer. Scroll down to the bottom of the Google search page for that keyword and you will notice that you can look at the first ten pages of Google’s results.

Click on the tenth page and another nine pages of Google results appear. Keep clicking on the last page and eventually you will reach page 52 of Google results.

Now this is where it gets very interesting for us, article writers. Just above the Goooooooogle icon there is this curious message: “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 533 already displayed.”

What it’s telling you is that only 533 of the most relevant sites are displayed and for all practical purposes your true competition is 533 not 5,920,000. That is a big difference.

It is a significant reduction in your competition. All those other returns are still in the Google database. Google just doesn’t bother to list them because Google doesn’t think they are relevant.

That could mean that the results are articles that are written by the same author posted on different sites or article directories, a form of duplicate content. It could mean that the keywords are only casually mentioned on some site and do not relay any relevant information.

Who knows what specific criteria Google is using to decide that the results are not relevant when writing for the web. The point is that article writers do not have to compete against those other 5,919,467 indexed listings.

That is not to say that you will necessarily have an easy time of ranking for that keyword, but it may be a lot easier than you think. The key is relevance.

Google tells you that “to show you the most relevant results” it limits the pages it displays. Now more than ever, content marketing demands unique quality content in addition to SEO and bookmarking techniques.

By crafting your content to a high degree of relevance and quality, and by insuring that you properly SEO your article, you have a very good chance of beating your competition.

You still have to promote your article by creating back links to your keyword through publishing your article and bookmarking in social networks. Writing for the web is no longer viewed by Google strictly on SEO terms. Quality, relevance, grammar, and authoritative links play an equal role in its ranking algorithms.

The point is that just because at first glance a keyword seems to be infinitely competitive, it may not be. Of course, some keywords may not rank regardless of the effort you expend in attempting to rank them. If after a few weeks, the keywords do not rank then you may need to try different keywords.

Are you writing good content and still not getting the traffic you need to make sales? Improve your SEO and your content. If you are serious about improving your article writing and about maximizing your sales, learn the basics of writing for the web.

 

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Writing for the Web How to Use MS Word to Improve Sales

Posted on August 16, 2011 by carlos

Writing for the web you can use MS Word or any word processor to help you. This article will show you three simple yet often overlooked tips using MS Word to help you achieve clearer, better writing and make more money.Writing For The Web

Here are three MS Word tools to improve your articles.

Check Your Spelling

This seems obvious. Still many article writers do not use their spell checker when writing for the web. If you use a plain text editor to create your articles, you can easily overlook even the most common of spellings.

Simply copy your content from the plain text editor, like notepad or word pad, and copy it to your word processor and do a spell check. You will be surprised at the misspelled words you may have overlooked.

A word of caution word processors will not correct misspelled homonyms like ‘to’ and ‘too’, and ‘sight’, ‘cite’ and ‘site’. Have someone read your article.

Appropriate Grade Level

Use the MS Word Spelling and Grammar checker found under the Review Tab at the top of the MS Word page to determine the grade level that you are writing for. After selecting the spell checker and completing the spell check, it will ask you if you want to continue checking the rest of the document.

Respond with yes and a box will pop up called Readability Statistics appears. At the very bottom of the box is the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score. Newspapers and magazines target a grade level score of between 4th and 6th grade reading levels. Because of this, many article writers restrict their writing to those grade levels.

I believe that self imposed restriction is wrong. You want that score to be at a level that is appropriate for the subject matter and the audience you are targeting. In most cases, a reading level between fifth and eighth grade level will do. Many of your readers might well read at those levels.

If your article is about nuclear physics, I doubt that you would keep your reader’s interest level if you wrote your article at a 6th or 8th grade level. Article writers that dumb down their words quickly lose their readers.

Passive Sentences

That same Readability Statistics box will also give you the number of passive sentences in your article. You want to keep this at a minimum. When writing for the web article writers should keep passive sentences to no more than two or three for every five-hundred words.

There is nothing wrong with them and there is no hard fast rule to the number of passive sentences you should use. But, you do want to make your sentences are action-oriented to help the reader move easily throughout the body of your article and ultimately to your offer or resource box.

We have looked at three tips that you can use to improve the quality of your articles and ultimately the salability of your articles. Keep in mind that in writing for the web, content is king and no tools can create unique quality content like you can. Web content marketing depends on it.

Quality content is necessarily a must. Let MS Word do some of the work for you. Use these three tips and your content marketing quality will improve.

Are you writing good content and still not getting the traffic you need to make sales? Improve your SEO and your content. If you are serious about improving your article writing and about maximizing your sales, learn the basics of writing for the web.

 

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Article Marketing Is Best For a Home Internet Marketing Business

Posted on August 13, 2011 by carlos

Article Marketing/Article Writing is one of the most profitable of the Internet marketing businesses. Beginning your home based internet marketing business is not any different from starting any other business. It takes planning, effort, and determination to succeed.Internet Marketing

Surfing the Internet looking for a home based internet marketing business? Sometimes it can be overwhelming in that there are so many choices. I am sure you will come across some product or service you might be interested in promoting.

Online retail sales grew to $155.2 billion in 2009 and is expected to grow to near $250 billion as forecast by 2014 by Forrester Research  an independent research company. It’s no wonder that many fortunes are being made through Internet marketing. You can too!

Before you choose article marketing here are four things to help you focus on an article marketing, article writing business at home.

Choosing a Niche

At first it is wise to choose a product you are familiar with or one that you are passionate about. As you gain experience you can venture into less familiar opportunities.

Whether you decide to sell your own product or a vendor’s choosing the right niche at the start can mean the difference between success or failure.

Is the Vendor Trustworthy

Find out if the company or product you have chosen has industry credibility. You can determine that in part by asking how long the company has been in business.

  • Is their product or service a fad?
  • What does their website look like?
  • Are the sales page and the website attractive?
  • Do they support article marketing by providing relevant keywords, sample articles, and other resources for you?

Check the product testimonials, if you can. The National Fraud Information Center at http://www.fraud.org/tips/internet can help uncover scam and fraudulent operations.

Earning Potential

Vendors create ‘cookies’ that tell them who has sent them a customer. How long does the ‘cookie’ last? In other words can it be overridden by someone else? If so, how long does the ‘cookie’ last? How much is your commission?

Single sales are great. But, do not overlook companies that offer residual income. Seek them out. You can get paid month after month on the same customer.

Support and Training

Is there training available? Do they provide free sales materials to support and market their product? Do they offer banners, images, sample articles, and emails? Do they have a support desk and is it by phone or email?

Keep these things in mind as you make your choice. Many fail at article marketing because they get frustrated with not only the amount of choices, but also by the fact that they chose hastily. Later not satisfied with the product or service potential article marketers decide to give up.

Stay focused. Remember that it is best to start with a product you know.

The opportunities in article marketing are many and the rewards are unlimited.

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