How to get 10 times the traffic from your articles

There are two key components that get thousands of page views and tons of traffic from your articles. Articles using these little known tactics will increase page views and traffic by 10 fold versus those that neglect these techniques.

The first key factor in generating traffic from your articles is the title. Most article writers will slap any old title on the article and send it off. This is a huge mistake, The title is the advertising for your article. In most article directories, only the title is shown to attract readers. Your title has to grab them by the ears and scream out, 'READ ME!.'

To develop a title that attracts tons of traffic from your articles, do some research. Determine what people are searching for (related to your article). Then include those terms in your title. Of course, in a well crafted article, you should also use these terms several times within your article and add them to your listing of keywords. This will bring in readers from the article directory.

But there is another way that readers might be attracted to your article and wind up as traffic to your website. That is through listings in search engines. On some articles that I have written, my article shows in 7 of the top ten positions on the first page of Google. This can bring you many times the traffic from your articles that you can get through the article directory alone.

In most cases, search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN will include your article description below the title. To entice these readers, you need a great description. Your title is the bait that will cause them to nibble, but a good description will reel them in and land them in your boat (a fishing reference). In other words, the title will get the attention of the reader, and the article description will cause the reader to click on the link and read the article.

A good description begins by asking a question, and then lets the reader know that they can find the answer by reading your article. Of course, your article has to answer the question, so make sure the question you ask is relevant.

3 Reason why I earn money from Article Marketing and You Do not

Do you earn money from article marketing or you only spend time putting up articles that earn no money?

Before you start complaining to me that you DO earn money from article marketing and the title is wrong, let me tell you that the title is not for everyone and is only for those who do not earn money from article marketing.

Image Source: Money by jenn_jenn

Article marketing is a great way to get backlinks and rank in front page of search engines. But it is not only meant for that. You can earn money from the articles that you write and submit to article directories.

So how do you earn money from article marketing?
It’s simple and you can do it from this moment even if you haven’t done it before. It is a 6 step process:

1. Find a niche (or topic) you are interested in
2. Brainstorm keywords using services like Google keyword suggestion tool, wordtracker tool etc (also try finding keyword questions)
3. Write articles based on the keywords you have brainstormed
4. Find a product(s) in your niche and join as an affiliate. You can find products in sites like clickbank, paydotcom etc.
5. Create a blog or website promoting the product and link to it in the article. You can also write product reviews and promote it through the articles that you submit.
6. Collect cash from your bank (if you did everything well, you will earn money).

Though these 6 steps look easy, it gets harder when you execute it. You could be making a mistake in any step (of course, not in the last step).

When you do a mistake in any of the steps, you might earn less money or sometimes, earn nothing. So think and research properly before you put all your hard work. There is no use worrying that you made a mistake in picking a niche after you write all the articles.

With that, let’s move on the 3 reasons why you might not be earning any money from article marketing:

1. Selecting a Niche Which Has No Buying Audience
A niche is a topic. There are also sub niches. Health is a niche while weight loss is a sub niche. Making money is a niche while affiliate marketing is a sub niche. When you are selecting a niche, you should consider two things: 1. whether the niche has a buying audience 2. whether you have interest in the niche that you have selected.

I cannot write more than a dozen of articles in a niche that doesn’t interest me. At the same time, I can write hundreds of articles in a niche that I am very much interested in. List down the niches in which you have interest. Break it down to sub niches. One of my favorite topics is making money online. When I break it down to sub niches, I list my interest as blogging.

Once you have found the niches you are interested in, try to find whether there is a buying audience for that particular market. One of the best ways to do it is by typing your niche keyword in google search and looking at how many sponsored listings the keyword has. There are other ways of checking but that will require another blog post.

2. Brainstorming Wrong Keywords
One of the major mistakes people do is, find the wrong keywords and try to rank for it. There are two types of mistakes in selecting keywords: 1. selecting a keyword that has high competition 2. selecting a keyword that has very less searches per day.

You should try to find the ideal keywords. Ideal keywords are those keywords that get average number of searches per day with less competition. They are not hard to find. With a proper research, you can find many ideal keywords.

To find the competition, search for “keyword here” in google search WITH quotes. People who search in google won’t search that way but it is the way to find the competition. Some people find competition by looking at the pagerank of the sites that come up in the result. Some people determine the competition by looking at the number of results for that keyword. You can do it any way.

3. Promoting a Product with Poor Sales Letter
I often find people complaining that they have done the niche selection and keyword selection properly and yet not making any money. The main reason for this is the product they have chosen. When you choose a product to promote, go through the sales page. Get into the customer’s shoes and think whether you will buy the product or not, after reading the sales page. If you answered ‘yes’, this product is the right choice. If you answered the otherwise, try finding a product with better sales letter.

Have you realized that you did a mistake in one of the above after writing and submitting all the articles? If so, will you make sure to check all the above three the next time you consider article marketing? Or if you are new to earning money from article marketing, would you make a checklist with the above three? Please share your views in the comments.

Blogger widget problem (section 1D error) and a temporary workaround

As many of you have expressed in your comments and emails, there seems to be an issue with installing widgets using the Blogger Widget API (widget installers).

From what I have read in various forums all widget installers are affected by this, including even the Feedburner widget to add an email form or blog list to a Blogger blog.

As yet, I'm unable to devise a solution for this problem, but I can offer a workaround for those who need to add a new widget to their layout. Here are the details of the problem and a temporary solution until the issue is resolved.

The issue with adding widgets to Blogger layouts

Many of us have been experiencing problems when trying to add a widget using a third party "widget installer" such as the recent comments widget, Feedburner's email subscriptions code and even Amazon widgets.

We are able to follow any steps nescessary to add the widget to our blogs until we are redirected to Blogger's "Add a new widget" page, where we can customize the title, content and choose the blog where the widget will be installed.

At present, clicking the "Add widget to your blog" link results in a screen like this:

The top half of the screen explains that there is a missing required field in the form used to add the widget to our blog:

We're sorry, but we were unable to complete your request.

The following errors were found:

sectionId: Required field must not be blank

While the lower half includes a bX error code.

It seems that the API for adding new widgets may either be in the process of an update or has a temporary error as everything up to this point seems to be working fine.

There are already several threads in the Blogger help group regarding this issue and many of us are trying to work out a solution to the problem.

I will of course update this post when the problem is resolved or when we have discovered a working solution, but in the meantime we can use a temporary workaround.

A temporary work-around for the problem adding third party widgets

As far as I can tell, the API for adding new widgets works just fine up until the point of adding to a specific blog.

This means that when we arrive at the "Add Page Element" page, the code included in the "Edit Content" section should already be configured and suitable for our needs.

If you click the "Edit Content" link on the "Add Page Element" page, this will reveal the code which should be added as the widget content.

You can then copy this code to your clipboard, and paste inside a regular HTML/JavaScript gadget through the Layout>Page Elements page in your regular Blogger dashboard.

While this will take longer (and is certainly more troublesome) than the regular method to add a new widget, it is certainly preferable to being unable to add a new gadget at all!

Your thoughts on the problem?

If you have any suggestions or know of a solution we could use for the widget installation problem, please let us know about this by leaving a comment or sending me an email.

Once this issue is resolved or documented further, I will be sure to update this post with the new information so we can begin using (and developing) widgets for our Blogger blogs!

11 Useful Speed Links for Blogger Users

Here are some of the best tutorials and sites for Blogger users which have caught my attention this week:

1. Customized Feedburner Subscription Box After reading a thread on the Blogger Buster forums about customizing Feedburner's email subscription box, Doug Cloud has written an excellent tutorial to explain how he created a version to match his template design using Photoshop and CSS styling. If you haven't already visited Doug's blog, I really do suggest you pop over to see a beautiful Blogger powered design...

2. Add Yahoo! Buzz Buttons to your Blogger template Over at Woork, you can read how to add Yahoo! Buzz links to your Blogger template to benefit from this new social bookmarking system. While you're there, check out the amazing new design!


3. Utilize Blogger to reduce email overload

As part of an article explaining methods of reducing email overload, Digital Inspiration suggests using Blogger! I won't explain the details here as the post itself is an excellent read :)

4. iBlogSpot with Lifecast (iPhone App Review)

Over at The Blog Herald, you can read a review of Lifecast: an iPhone application for those using Blogger.

5. Weebly (An alternative to Google Pages)

As many of you may be aware, Google Pages will be phased out by the end of the year. So if you're looking for a free alternative host for your scripts and template files, Weebly is an excellent option. (Thanks to Fernandoo1 for the tip!)

6. Wowzio Widgets

Alisha of the Wowzio team let me know about this new service which automatically produces useful widgets for your blog based on the content from your blog feed. It certainly seems easy to use, and you can preview your widgets right away.

7. Show the current date in your blog

Over at ThemeLib, you can find a useful tutorial to display the current date in your blog with only minor tweaks to your template.

8. Show off your followers (new feature for Blogger)

I'm dying to try out this latest new feature for Blogger, but my dashboard hasn't been updated yet! If you'd like to know more, head over to Blogger Buzz to read this introductory post.

10. Ratings Widget for Blogger (With Popular Posts Widget for your Sidebar)

Although Blogger has recently introduced "star ratings" for our posts, this still lacks a fundamental function which I'm sure we'd all love to use: a popular posts widget for to showcase the most popular posts as determined by our readers.

Yellow Turnip has developed a ratings widget which you can add to your template with ease. There's no need to register, AND you can use a popular posts widget too!

11. Blogger Showcase

This Blogger powered site showcases the best of Blogger designs and is well worth a visit just to see how well it's been designed! You can vote for your favorites and submit your own designs for consideration:

Blogging exhaustion !

Blogging exhaustion can happen to any blogger, whether you are relatively new to the scene and working hard to get your blog noticed, or are a blogging pro who's struggling to juggle blogging with work and family life.

If you've suffered from this yourself, you probably know what it's like: tiredness, headaches, a lack of enthusiasm for posting or replying to comments and emails... This often happens when bloggers work too hard and don't give themselves a break, particularly when they are so passionate about their blog that it takes over every spare minute of the day!

I'm writing this post as it seems many others in the blogosphere are feeling the same way. There is no magic pill to overcome this, though I do have some tips which may well help!