Don’t Forget About Your Old Ezine Articles

f_0money4.jpgIt’s over. You’ve written your ezine article, sent it out to some ezine publishers, posted it to some article banks and announcement groups, and have even had it published in a few ezines. Pretty good, huh! Now it’s time to forget about that article and move on to the next one. Or is it?

Actually, if you forget about your article now you may be missing out on some of the most important benefits that can be gained from writing ezine articles. Listed below are 5 ways to get more benefits from your already published ezine articles.

1. Submit URLs of Published Article to Search Engines

Many times people will like your article enough to post it on their website. Once you find the URL where your article is published try submitting it to some search engines. The webmaster probably won’t mind but a email asking for their permission can’t hurt. Additionally, if your article is published in an ezine that is archived on a website you can submit the URL of the issue of the ezine that your article appeared in. If it’s a well-designed site the search engines may except the submission and your article may start appearing in search results all over the Net.

I recommend using free search engine submission sites like: http://www.addme.com or http://www.submitexpress.com

2. Submit Article Bank URLs to Search Engines

When you post your articles to article banks like Ultimateprofits.com or Ezadsuccess.com, your articles are posted on their own webpage. Submitting the URL for this page to search engines can bring added readers to your writing. I tried this tip a while back and truthfully I forgot that I even did it. Recently, I was surprised to find that a few of the article bank URLs that I had submitted were actually in some of the major search engines!

3. Post Your Articles on Your Own Website

By posting your articles to your own website you are giving all visitors to your site a chance to read over and benefit from your writings. Having well-written, informative articles, that you’ve personally written, on your site can add to your credibility-which can increase sign-ups and sales.

4. Save All Articles and Promote Them Again in 6 Months/1 Year

New people are logging onto the World Wide Web each day. The ezines that run your articles now will have thousands more subscribers in a years time. Your article will be new to all these fresh faces. And even the people who read your article in the past will probably learn something from it the second time around as well. Of course, you’ll want to be sure an update your article and maybe even add some new information.

5. Compile Your Past Articles Into an E-book

E-books are everywhere these days and for a good reason: People read them! After you have written a few articles you may have enough content to publish your own e-book. Then you can offer this e-book to subscribers or website visitors as a free gift. Or you can sell your e-book for a small fee.

**Bonus Tip** Always Include Good Resource Box

Whenever you write an article be sure to always include your resource box. This is the section at the end of the article where you talk about YOU. If people like your article they will look for your resource box to find out where they can get more information from you. Be sure to include at least one URL in your resource box. That way anytime your article is posted on a website you will have a link to one of your websites, which, coincidentally, will help out your websites search engine ranking if you follow tips #1 and #2 in this article.

So don’t forget about those previously published articles you’ve got saved in Microsoft Word. Pull them out. Dust them off. Re-use them. Start on your E-book. And try and remember all the websites that have posted your articles. Get the URLs. Submit them to a few search engines. The benefits you receive may suprise you. And now, my resource box:

Google, Updates, Upgrades, Penalties And Filters

f_2money7.jpgMy site dropped from no.1 spot to nowhere. Google tech people replied to my email telling me I must have hidden text or used some kind of ‘illegal technique’! Why don’t they just admit it’s their mistake?

Standard reply
It’s a standard reply, nothing else. I would imagine that 9 times out of ten when Google get an email about a site that has dropped into oblivion it has something to do with using techniques that go against their webmaster guidelines. It may not be the case with you but from their perspective I should think it a reasonable reply in the circumstances.

There seems to be some confusion about ‘penalty’
A ‘penalty’ is applied to sites using tricks and sneaky stuff to boost their rankings in Google. A good recent example would be BMW who were using one page for the search engines and another for the web visitor. Since this was contrary to Google’s guidelines, BMW were removed from the index entirely — they were penalised (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ramping-up-on-international-webspam/).

Filtered
Another type of ‘penalty’ although it really is a purely an algorithm filter, is a webmaster using things like hidden text or keyword-stuffing, for example. This gets aggressively filtered (assuming the site is not removed from the index) by the application of the filter(s) which then causes the site to drop down the search engine rankings. It may seem like a penalty but it is the result of filtering, not penalty.

Penalty is different from ‘ignoring’ links
When links are ignored, there is no penalty being applied, the links simply don’t count. The site itself is not penalised, it is merely the case that some of the links into that site are not counted. This measure not only filters out link farms and spam techniques but also prevents a competitor from acting against another site by spamming in order to attempt to incur aggressive filtering.

Google does not owe you a living
Google does not owe any webmaster a living! I must mention this as many webmasters seem to forget at times, that it is up to them to keep their sites filled with visitors, not Google, or for that matter, any search engine.

If Google are busy with rebuilding their infrastructure, their database, their spiders, their algorithms or for that matter, the breakfast bar at Googleplex, and it adversely affects your website, then it’s just too bad!

Complaining to Google that your website isn’t at the #1 spot any more is like complaining to the bestseller booklist that you should still be at the top of the bestseller list even though your book isn’t selling as well! If your site no longer meets the current market requirements then you need a new product. The market isn’t going to change to suit you.

Panic, Florida and Big Daddy
Now is definitely NOT the time to panic. Google are upgrading. Things will be all over the place for a while yet. If you take drastic measures for what was up until recently a highly placed site, you run the risk of completely ruining your placements.

During the infamous ‘Florida update’, many webmasters panicked and began changing, tweaking and altering things that had no bearing on their ultimate placement. However, thanks to the ‘adjustments’ made in haste, they did manage to bring problems on themselves that took months to recover from once the dust had settled and everyone had a much better understanding of what had occurred.

Steady at the wheel, Captain!

People Getting Rich Online – Niche Research

f_11311108762_moneyfaucet.jpgHow’s that list coming along? You wll recall in the first part of this series I covered getting a list together of ideas for your site or blog niche. Hopefully you have a good sized list of general categories. The next steps involve narrowing the keywords and then doing some supply and demand research.

There are many keyword tools out there. I like to use Overture’s because it’s free and easy. Keep in mind that the numbers from Overture are usually inflated — sometimes a little sometimes a lot. They fudge the numbers by counting like queries — fly and flies or affiliate and affiliates get counted as the same query. Remember — they make more money convincing their prospective advertisers that a search term is popular.

So plug in one of the general search terms from your list. I’m going to try dogs. Here are the results:

Searches done in February 2006
Count Search Term
1104234 dog
225786 dog breed
183180 dog training basics
152056 dog show
139072 dog breeders
98321 dog name
97021 dog training
91172 dog picture
88480 dog for sale
62657 dog grooming
56907 dog gift

I edited a few like snoop dog out for expediency. I like dog breeds and dog training [basics]. Looks like people are searching for both quite a bit. Now that we have the demand, let’s go over to Google and check the supply.

Type in the exact search term, putting quotes around it so Google searches for exactly what we want. If you put in dog breeds, Google returns 5,59o,000 results. Look in the upper right-hand corner for this number.

Ever heard of Sumantra Roy? Probably not. He’s a man who specializes in SEO and particular keyword research. He has invented a formula called the Keyword Effectiveness Index or KEI to measure the potential of a keyword. I use a simpler version of it. Here it is:

KEI = Demand / Supply

That is – Demand divided by Supply. The higher the KEI the better. This gives you a simplified KEI that ranges from 1-10. People compare this to the Richter Scale, meaning that each successive number is exponentially better than the last number.

In our example above, the KEI for dog breed would be .04, which isn’t that great.

Dog Training Basics yields 45,600 results for Google. The KEI would be 4, which is terrific. Hmm…wait a minute. That concludes our lesson. Bye. [Sound of running down the hallway and door slamming]. A little nerd humor there.

Do a few more and see what you come up with. I did dog name and got a KEI of .10, which is lousy. I also tried dog gift, which got me a KEI of .07.

I usually pick up the highest KEI keywords and plug them back into the Overture tool and try it again.

Incidentally, Wordtracker does this all for you. Try it for free and see how easy it is. Just keep in mind that they use different sources for both supply and demand than my example above, but that shouldn’t make too much of a difference.

So now we should have a much smaller list that has some good prospects on it.