What does this mean for you?  Well the catch here is that when you submit an article it is mandatory that you are allowed to include a signature.  In this signature you are going to link back to your money site.  If you’ve written your article well and created interest with it and offered some value, most likely people will click on your signature link and they will then be drawn to your site.

This creates a huge ability to generate traffic to your blog.  Imagine if you did this with 100 articles.  The amount of traffic that you would be pulling in would be a pretty decent number.

There are many tips and tricks that you can do with article marketing, I just wanted to cover the basics here, and this will be discussed in further detail in future posts.

Here are some sites that have high authority that you can submit your articles to:

• www.ezinearticles.com
• www.goarticles.com
• www.directorygold.com
• www.articlecity.com

Example:  If I go to google and type in “Paris Hilton” odds are I’m not going to be looking to purchase anything.  Keywords such as this are for people looking for free information.

Now what is a buying keyword?  Try to think like the customer.  If you had a credit card in your hand and were looking for a product what would you search for?  Let’s use the example “Canon PowerShot SX10 IS”.  If you’re searching for that specific camera you have done your research already and are most likely looking to purchase it.  While of course this is not always the case, it is many times more likely than the example with Paris Hilton.

These are the type of keywords that you need to target.  Buying keywords offer a higher rate of conversion and that means more money in your pocket per customer.

When you first start a website that is designed to get traffic from search engines, you base your ENTIRE site off of a keyword. You don’t have to use just one keyword, but you’re going to have your very base keyword thoroughly researched.

There are many free tools out there that allow you to do this and I will cover this topic using those.

There are two factors when picking a good keyword: Searches/Month and Website Competiton.  We’re going to have to find out both of these.

Let’s fire up Google’s free Keyword Tool and have a look at what that looks like:

Google Keyword Tool

If you click on the image you’ll notice I typed in Quick Weight Loss.  The reason for this is if you’re new to website creation and traffic generation you’re going to want to target small niche’s that don’t have a lot of competition.  If you went for a more broad keyword you would have quite a difficult time ranking on any search engines and getting any traffic from all your hard work.  Work smarter not harder!

Alright, let’s get our keyword idea’s and see what happens:

Google Keyword Tool Results

This may be confusing to look at but it’s very simple and organized.  On the left you will see suggested keywords to use, then advertiser competition, then local search volume, and global search volume.  I tend to base all of my numbers on the Global Search Volume.

I’ve scanned through the list and have found a keyword with reasonable search volume that will probably have low competition.  ”Quick Weight Loss Pills” that has a global search volume of 1,900.  Alright that sounds good and all but how are you going to find it’s competition?  This step is very easy.  Simply go to Google.com and search “Quick Weight Loss Pills” **With Quotes**.  The quotes are going to tell you how many sites are directly competiting for that keyword.  Without the quotes it is all the websites that are relevent to that keyword and they could be a huge number of different keywords.

Alright I’ve searched on Google for Quick Weight Loss Pills and this is what we see:

Keyword Search Results

Notice that the only competition is 12,000 sites.  This is a relatively low amount of competition for any keyword and with proper research and search engine optimization on your blog you should easily be able to rank number 1 for this.

Now that we’ve found a keyword we want to check to make sure that the domain is available.  Simply go to your favorite domain and hosting site and check to see if  QuickWeightLossPills.com is available.

It appears that the .com is not available at the moment, but the .org is.  This is completely fine and there is no better domain ending.  .Org is just as good as .com or .net.

There, you’ve done it!  You’ve found a profitable keyword that you should be able to easily rank for and start getting traffic to.  This little bit of information you have just read will greatly increase your ability to get traffic.  Without proper keyword research the rest of your hard work will have been for nothing if nobody is going to see it and if nobody is going to purchase anything you are selling.

Once you’ve mastered this process and have set up a few blogs and perhaps you’d like to get serious about it I highly recommend checking out Micro Niche Finder.  This software allows you to research, in depth, multiple keywords.  It is an amazing product that will help you reap the benefits of smart marketing.

How to Make Blog

Backlinks essentially are other sites that point to yours.  When site A links to your site, you now have a ‘backlink’.  Ok that’s pretty simple… so why do I need them?

To generate traffic the easy (well… cheap) way – through search engines – you want to rank high.  How do you rank high in the search engines?  By having relevant and powerful backlinks.  The better and more backlinks you have, the better and more relevant your site must be!  Or so says the google algorithm.

ohhh, ok now I see.  Well I don’t think I have that many backlinks at all.. how do I know if I do?

One very very easy way to check is by using Yahoo Site Explorer.  This is a great tool that will allow you to see the backlinks of not just your site, but also of your competitors sites.  That is a very powerful thing to know.  Once you can see the competition, you will know if you’ll be able to conquer that position they are in or not.

Well it doesn’t seem that I have very many backlinks and I’m not ranking too well for my keywords..  how do I get more?

Here is a list of a few easy ways to get backlinks

• Web 2.0 Sites
• Blog Commenting
• Link Exchanges

Those are all extremely easy to do and all that is requires is taking action.

Web 2.0 Sites

These are the new crave of sites that allow you to sign up and follow the theme of the site.  Sites such as Squidoo.com are for making ‘lenses’ where you can make your own personal page about anything you want.  Well, we have a great way to take advantage of that.

Start by making your own lens about whatever you blog is about.  Then throw in a link or two to your homepage.  Now what has this accomplished?  You now have 2 backlinks coming to your site from a very popular and powerful site (google likes this) and you now have a whole new page promoting your blog.

A few other sites such as these are:

• WordPress.com – Create your own blog
• Blogger.com – Create your own blog
• HubPages.com – Create your own Hub Page

There are so many more but these are a few you can start with.  All that you’ll want to do is create a small informative page/blog about whatever you are blogging about and post links back to your main site.  This creates a large web of sites all revolving around your main blog.

Blog Commenting

This is a new one I just picked up.  Go into your Google account, and if you haven’t already made one make one NOW!!, and check out the Google Alerts.  Put your Google Alert settings to this:

Google Alerts Settings

This will send you a list of blogs that write about your keyword every day.  With this awesome resource coming to you everyday you can then go into each blog that is sent to your e-mail and write a comment about the article.  Try to make the comment valuable.  Don’t just go in and say hey great post and leave.  Offer something that will make the administrator want to keep your comment there.

Now what is the purpose of this?  Yes you are right, it creates backlinks.  Not only that but when you comment on a blog you can use your name as your anchor text and link it right back to your homepage.  This is very important in dominating specific keywords.

Link Exchanges

This is the easiest of all of them to do.  What you do is search for your keyword and on the front page contact all the webmasters you can and ask them for reciprocal links.  While not all will say yes, the ones that will do it will create a huge amount of backlinks for you that will help juice up your site.

There you have it!  A few tips to get you started in getting your blog ranked.  If you have any questions or comments just leave us a comment below and we’ll get back to you ASAP.