How to Find Free Content for your Web Site

By Kalena Jordan

I see a lot of webmasters complain in forums and chat rooms that they don't have enough content on their web sites, but they don't have the means or the knowledge to find more.
There are actually many ways to obtain more web site content. You could hire someone to write it for you. You could purchase some ready made content about your site topic or you could spend some time and write content yourself. But did you know that there is a way you can get hundreds of pages worth of high quality, fresh content every day without paying a cent? There is. It's called article syndication.

Article Syndication

Articles relating to thousands of topics are freely available for syndication on web sites. Authors provide them for this purpose to gain a wider audience and achieve more back links. Generally, the only requirement for webmasters is that the author's by-line, resource box and link are included with the published article. In terms of copyright, you simply need to follow the author's publishing guidelines when republishing their article. This usually involves an "About the Author" paragraph at the bottom of each article with a sentence and link to the author's site. These syndication requirements are generally specified in the article itself.

How to do it:

1) Browse the Internet to find articles you can syndicate. I use the article announcement groups at Yahoo Groups, but you can also find them at sources such as Submit Your Articles.

2) View the articles being distributed by the group and review their freshness and quality.

3) Join the email líst or subscribe to the RSS feed of any article groups that seem to be distributing content relevant to your web site.

4) Go through your email or feed reader regularly to browse and select new articles.

5) Cut, paste and publish the articles into your web pages, giving credít to the author as requested in their syndication guidelines.

6) Voila! Fresh, daily content.


Articles for Blogs

If the article content is to be used on a blog, there is an even quicker way to publish it. Depending on what blog software you use, you can simply forward the email containing the article directly to your blog control panel using the publish via email option and then edit the post to correct any formatting issues. The other advantage of this method is that search engines LOVE blogs and tend to index them more often than regular web pages.

I use blog article syndication quite successfully for a couple of my clients. One is in the travel industry and the other has a large wedding portal. I simply subscribe to articles on travel and wedding related topics and publish them to the blogs belonging to each client. My clients supplement these with articles and blog posts written by their own staff or hired writers.

Advantages

There are a number of advantages to using article syndication:

Relevant, Timely Content - You can choose content that is closely geared to your existing content and of interest to your audience. For example, if you sell airline tickets, publish travel articles about exotic destinations. The idea there is that persons reading travel articles might be thinking about traveling themselves and need to be reminded to book their plane tickets.

Cross Promotion - You can choose content that gives you the opportuníty to up sell to your own products or affilíate products. For example, if you sell scented candles online, you could choose to publish articles about increasing the romance in your marriage and then include a link at the end of the article to your candle sales catalog (would you like fries with that?).

SEO Value - Apart from the obvious value of having fresh content regularly available for indexing, there are other SEO advantages to article syndication. Most articles are keyword-rich, meaning that they contain a lot of keywords and phrases that people might use in search queries. Publishing these articles means that your site has a better chance of being found for related search queries. One of my clients noticed their syndicated article pages ranking in the top 10 Google SERPs for target keywords within two days of publishing! You can also embed links within the articles or at the end of articles to related areas of your site using keyword-rich anchor text.

Increased Traffic & Sticky Content - It's not only search engines that love fresh content. You'll find that you'll attract more visitors when you publish relevant articles. Provided you find ways to interact with your new visitors such as allowing them to comment or sign up for your article feed, your site will become stickier and retain those visitors more easily.

Disadvantages

There are really only two disadvantages that I can think of about using article syndication. One is that the same article published on various web sites can sometimes be treated by search engines as duplicate content. So generally, a search engine will try to determine the original source of the article and index/rank that page while ignoring all other versions. If you publish a fresh article quickly enough, you can sometimes be lucky and have your version of the article picked up and treated as the *original*. The other disadvantage is that it can be time-consuming to trawl through the hundreds of new articles announced daily and choose the ones you want. You also have to scan them carefully to ensure accuracy of facts and to ascertain if the author has used correct spelling and grammar usage. But compared to the costs of paying somebody to write articles from scratch, I think this is a very minor inconvenience.

Want to get the jump on your competition and improve your traffíc? Use article syndication to publish fresh, relevant content on your site every day.

About The Author

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the
first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a dailySearch Engine Advice Column,Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

The Single Most Important Ingredient For Internet Marketing Success

By John Hostler

I’m sure you think I’m going to tell you it’s your list...or maybe Big Gun JV partners, or something along those lines. Yes, those are certainly valuable and can help you become incredibly profitable. But that’s not even close to what I am talking about.

The single most important ingredient in Internet Marketing success is “focus”. Focus? “Whoa, John you’re nuts.” Well, that may be, but focus is life or death in this game. Focus is what separates the men from the boys, the women from the girls, and the successes from the wannabe’s.

Internet Marketing often highlights the brilliant successes and rarely speaks to the massive failure of 90+ percent of its business owners. Most of those 90% are basically what I refer to as the churn and burn crowd. Why? Because they don’t focus.

They buy the latest and greatest “thingamajig” or get involved with the next “Super Fabulous Mega Pre-Launch”, go at it for a couple of weeks, don’t see the massive riches they were promised, and move onto the next great thing. Churn and burn.

Although I will agree that the Internet is awash with garbage programs that offer money for nothing; there are many good programs out there as well. And yet people without focus get involved with quality programs, fail, blame the product, and move onto the next one.

Now, I am not in any way taking shots at the focus impaired, because I too am guilty of distractions. In fact, I am probably two steps from ADHD. But I know that I will not win at this game if I do not make a plan, follow the plan, and execute.

Here are some simple little strategies I use to stay on track and keep focused –

1)I make a schedule using Outlook (use whatever calendar you want) and follow it as much as possible. I set appointments and tasks and all that happy jazz and if something comes up which takes precedent over my previously scheduled to-do, I reschedule.

2)I turn off my email for certain periods of the day and shut down my messenger programs. It’s brutal being shut off from the outside world but when I have that stuff open I can get lost for hours...“Oh, I better get back to this email” or “Hey, Jerry’s IM’ing me”. Trust me, step away...it works wonders.

3)This one is more for the visually oriented like me. I keep a notepad next to my laptop and when I complete a task I scratch it off. I know this isn’t very tech friendly in this day and age, but seeing a to-do get scratched off gives me a feeling of accomplishment and motivates me to move on to the next item.

4)When I start one of my to-do’s I do not move to another until I finish; or until I run into a roadblock that forces me to leave it as an open item. Some times things happen and you simply can’t finish what you started at that very moment. But for the lion share of the tasks where this isn’t the case, finish what you start.

5)I limit myself to a certain number of purchases per month. I love toys, gadgets, and new fangled programs that will blast this and submit that...but when I get a new toy I have to go at it immediately, figure it out, and play with it. It costs me hours when something is cool. Those hours could likely be spent making money so it’s best to keep this to a minimum and eliminate the distractions.

This is just a hint at some of the things you can do to keep from getting distracted and staying focused. You have to stay with your programs and see them through. You need to make a plan, implement it, and stick to it. Eliminate your distractions. That kind of focus and determination will allow you to succeed on the Internet in ways you might not even have thought possible.


About The Author:

John Hostler, aka the Internet Renegade,has been marketing successfully both online and off for 6 years. He released his widely anticipated book on the subject of Internet Marketing on 02-01-06. To find out more about John or his newest release check out http://www.internetrenegade.com/

47 Simple Ways to Build Trust in Your Website or Blog

By Miles Galliford

If your website does not create a sense of trust in your visitors, all your efforts will be in vain. Your online business will not succeed. That's the bad news. The good news is that it is very easy to create and build trust in your online visitors. Below, I have listed all the techniques used by the hundreds of websites I have helped launch. If you have additional techniques, please add them to the líst.

As the old saying goes, you have only one chance to make a first impression. Building trust cannot be achieved by one single action. Trust is achieved by hundreds of little things you do throughout your website that, when taken together, give readers a sense of honesty, legitimacy and stability.

The other bit of good news is that few website owners focus on building trust in the minds of their visitors. If you do it well, it can become a real and sustainable competitive advantage.

Here are 47 simple actions you can take to get started.

1. Trust is built by lots of small actions on every page of your website.

2. Your website design is the first impression. Make sure it is professional and relevant to the subject matter.

3. Navigation must be intuitive. If visitors can't find what they are looking for easily, they will question your competence in providing what they want.

4. Make the website personal by giving it its own tone and voice. People buy people.

5. Follow the HEART rule of creating online content. (Reminder: HEART stands for Honest, Exclusive, Accurate, Relevant and Timely.)

6. Use language that is appropriate to the audience. It will build empathy.

7. Regularly add new content to your site. It shows that the business is alive and kicking.

8. Review all links. Doubts will quickly form in your visitors' minds if links don't work or, worse still, take them to error pages.

9. Good grammar and spelling matter. Errors give the impression of sloppiness and carelessness.

10. Don't make outrageous and unbelievable claims, like "Read this blog and you'll be a millionaire by the end of the week." People are used to scams, get-rich-quick schemes and rip-offs.

11. Publish REAL testimonials and third-party endorsements. Try to always use real names and link to websites where possible. Some sites show images of letters sent by happy customers.

12. Publish case studies about customers you have helped, who use your product, etc.

13. Don't put down, curse or insult competitors. It's unprofessional. It is better to offer an objective comparison of competitive services or products.

14. Focus on building your long-term reputation, not on making quick sales.

15. Write articles for humans, not search engines.

16. Make your 'About Us' page personal and comprehensive. It plays an important part in making visitors feel comfortable that real people are behind the site.

17. Publish your photo or the photos of the key people involved with the site. Again, this reinforces the fact that there are real people behind the screenshots.

18. Clearly identify who is behind the site. Nothing creates more suspicion than a site that tries to hide the identity of its publishers.

19. On the 'Contact Us' page, provide an email form, telephone number, fax and address of the company. In Europe, it is a legal requirement for sites taking funds, but even sites driven by advertising will benefit from openness.

20. Provide a telephone number that people can call and talk to a person.

21. Provide Web addresses linked to the website domain, not addresses from free webmail services such as Hotmail and Gmail.

22. Don't lie to make money. The most common way is to write a glowing report about a product or service to earn affilíate revenues. It is very short-sighted to lie to visitors to sell them rubbish. They'll won't come back or, worse still, they'll actively condemn your site on forums and blogs.

23. Think carefully about reciprocal links. If your site is about organic food and you have links to Party Poker, people are going to question your integrity.

24. Think carefully about the adverts you display on your site. Ensure that they are relevant to your subject and audience.

25. Be explicit when you are being paid to endorse a product or service. An advertorial is fine as long as it is transparent. Paid-to-post is corrupting the Web and will experience a user backlash. I don't read websites that accept payment for posting.

26. Write and publish your privacy policy. Be clear about what you will and will not do with any personal data you collect. State that you adhere to all data protection laws. Make it easy to read and don't use legal gobbledygook.

27. Write and publish a security policy. State what measures you take to ensure that all transactions are secure.

28. Ensure that you have a security and privacy policy which is linked from the footer on every page. Make the link more prominent on all the order pages.

29. Clearly publish your guarantëe. I would recommend making it a 100% money-back guarantëe if possible.

30. Clearly state your refund and returns policy.

31. Piggyback off reputable brands. If you use PayPal, put the PayPal logo on your site. If you have a merchant services account with a major bank like Citibank or HSBC, put its logo on your site.

32. Use Google search on your site for two reasons. First, it is a great search solution which will help your visitors find what they are looking for. Second, having the Google name on your site instills trust.

33. If there are well-known industry associations for your subject, join up and put their logos on your site.

34. Have a forum on your site and respond quickly to questíons. Have the attitude that you are happy to help others without receiving immediate reward. As the old saying goes, 'Givers always gain.'

35. Allow people to comment on articles. Interactivity and an exchange of views build community and a sense of involvement.

36. If people provide constructive criticism or comments in the forum, don't delete them, but respond with your point of view.

37. Put photos on the website of the owners, publishers and/or team. Let visitors know there are real people behind the business.

38. Put images of the credít cards you accept on every page of the order process.

39. Use the words 'secure website' whenever you try to get any information from visitors, including newsletter sign-ups, forum input and payment.

40. On every page, state, "We take your privacy and security very seriously." Link the statement to the security and privacy policy.

41. Remember, reputations take years to build and seconds to destroy.

42. If you are selling a subscription, offer a low-cost, entry-level option. This could be a one-day taster, 'a week before billing starts' or a monthly tríal.

43. Use a high level of security when processing credít cards. Make sure you make your clients aware of all the steps you are taking.

44. Don't send credít card information or personal details over the Internet unencrypted. Tell your customers that their data will be encrypted.

45. Only ask for information from customers that you really need. For example, for an email newsletter sign-up, the only information you REALLY need is an email address, so that is all you should ask for.

46. If you have pricing on your website, make it transparent. I recently went to buy a book which was advertised for $10. When I checked out, they added tax, post and packaging, and the final bill was $19.50. I didn't buy it as I felt they had deliberately tried to mislead me.

47. Keep your SSL certificate up to date. Let people know you are using SSL encryption and who the provider is.

You can't do too much to build trust. Most of it comes down to common sense and good business practice. To ensure that you are continually improving your trustworthiness, every time you go to a website, ask yourself whether you trust it or not. Then ask yourself why you have formed the opinion you have. Continually try to learn what makes a site trustworthy or untrustworthy and implement the relevant changes to your site.

If people trust you, the revenue will follow!

About The Author

SubHub provides an all-in-one solution to enable you to rapidly design, build and run your own content website. Publish for profít on the web. Website: SubHub.com SubHubArticles Feed

How to Get the Most SEO and Web Traffic Benefits from Blogging

By: Wilbur Corncob

The best way to get people and search engines (which means more people) to your website is by getting relevant inbound links. If you have some spiffy new gimmick on your website this may be easy as everyone will be linking to you.

However, with a basic, solid web page the process maybe much more difficult and slower. How do you get people to link to you?
The best way is to empty your wallet! Ok, just kidding, but first we will learn how easy that is.

For example there is a pay for blogging service that will cost you at least $5 per blog post (ie: per link) and maybe $25 or more. Now that will eat up your budget, and fast. These paid blog links don't come with any guarantee. You might get lots of visitors and you might not get any at all.

Pay per click is another great option for spending all your money. This will bring you visitors for sure and you'll know how much each one costs. That's it. There is no long term benefit. The ads show for only as long as you pay for them. When your money isn't on the table, you don't exist!

You can buy links all over the place and again this may end up costing you a pretty penny, you may or may not get suitable results but when you stop paying the results (good or bad) stop. You gain nothing for the future.

Now blogs are a great way to get visitors and develop a long term return. Blog posts tend to stick around for a long time. The trick here is to get people to blog about your website without forking over a bundle of your hard earned cash.

A great idea is to become a guest blogger. This would be where you write blog posts for other people's blogs. Read: your links on someone else's website for free!
This puts you in the drivers seat for a couple of reasons. First you have control over exactly what is said. Secondly, if you do a good job you may have the opportunity to make regular blog posts. That will build an audience on the blogs for your writing and turn into more and higher quality traffic for your website.

The key to being a great guest blogger is to write short (3 to 6 or so paragraph) posts that are interesting, informative, humorous and relevant to the topic of the blog (and your website). Of course they should have a link to your website. Don't over do the linking. Don't make it sound like an advertisement or something you just cut and pasted from your website.

A few minutes to compose a couple of well thought out paragraphs could do wonders for your web traffic. Keep looking for guest blogging opportunities and never use the same post for more than one blog. One post could bring a lifetime of traffic.
This may well be your most effective way to developing quality web traffic and enhancing your the SEO for your website(s).

Article Source:Reprinted Articles.com

About Author

Wilbur Corncob has made a list of almost 100 blogs that welcome quality posts from guest bloggers. Guest Blog List www.glrsales.com