Recently in the Wordpress Goldmine we’ve been looking at a tool which lets you know which pages are indexed, this works for your own sites and also articles you may have distributed.

Having checked lots of EzineArticles author feeds i was surprised at the low level of indexing. Watch the video below and I am sure you’ll also be surprised. You’ll also learn which article directory had 100% indexing for the articles I checked.

If you really want to find out which of your articles are indexed get Andy Blacks Index Checker

Then submit the unindexed urls to www.hostmyrss.com

You can then distribute the feed either manually to Feed aggregators or by using a tool like RSSbot

I am currently testing other methods of getting the unindexed articles indexed. I should be able to release a report about the best way of doing this later in the week , if you would like to receive this report then please sign up to my mailing list using the form on the right

The birth of the Internet and the mass availability of personal Computers in the late 80’s changed peoples life forever, Everyone now has had the potential to be their own boss whether you are mother at home looking after your children or a manual laborer there are opportunities in abundance . Just a search on Google for business opportunities will bring up more offers than your parents would have had in their whole life. So it must be easy to make a living from the internet right?  Wrong!  No it’s not, you need a firm business plan and you need to work hard at it.

Lets make it clear from the start: To Make Money Online You Need To Work.

Setting up and running an online business does have several advantages over setting up a “normal” business. You can usually run it in conjunction with your current job, your potential market is bigger your initial overheads are usually smaller and you can operate it from the comfort of your own home. Once you decided that you want to enter into the world of E-commerce you then need to take a lesson from main stream business and create a business plan.

The very first thing you need to decide is what type of business is right for you and then research the market. Possible businesses open to you are.
Adsense Sites

Affiliate Sites

Selling Products

Creating Info Products

With an Affiliate Program you are paid a commission for selling a companies products. You have no contact with the customer, all you do is provide sales leads to the company of whom you are an affiliate.

An Adsense site is where you take an existing website of yours about a particular subject and add contextual Adverts from Google’s Adsense program. When a person clicks on an advert you then receive anything from a few a few cents to several dollars. There are 2 approaches to Adsense programs, build a well respected Niche site with lots of traffic the more traffic you get the higher the Click Through Rate (CTR) and thus the higher the income. The second method is sometimes referred to as the shotgun method, build lots of sites with less traffic but earning a smaller amount from each site. A $1 a day income from each of 50 sites is better than $40 from 1 site.

The final E-commerce method we will look at is the most similar to mainstream business, selling a product. You build a web site with a shopping cart and give as many details about the products as possible. The products can be something you make yourself, or a product you buy in bulk or a product from a drop shipper. With drop shipping you sell products which are then dispatched from a location elsewhere by a 3rd party.

Creating and selling Info products can be very profitable, whether you create your own or buy PLR products and make them unique this method can lead to a very good income in a short amount of time especially if you get lots of affiliate selling your products.

If all this sounds too easy it’s not. Setting up the business is just the start of it, the hard work needs to start now. You need to get traffic, the more traffic you get the higher your sales will be. In addition you need to look at the performance of your site and tweak the layout so you make more sales. You need to get your site onto the first page of Google and other search engines. You may need to write adverts and operate a Pay Per Click program or create multiple articles. In short you need to become an expert in many new subjects.

If you have the drive and dedication then it is possible to make a good income from E-commerce but don’t expect to spend an hour a day at the computer and the rest of your time on your Yacht.

I really don’t want to put anyone off starting an online business but there is work involved and if you are happy to work or outsource the work you don’t want to do then you can create a great lifestyle for yourself a few years down the line.

If Hard and a steep learning curve  doesn’t put you off and if you want a place where hundreds of like minded people hang out and help each other achieve their goals then we’d love to have you visit Wordpress Goldmine

I was tempted to call this post “Article marketing Is dead long Live article marketing” But that would have just been plain ridiculous. Although reading some of the posts in some of the bigger forums you would be forgiven for thinking that Article marketing was on it’s death bed. One post referred to some posts about Ezinearticles and said that it was obvious that people should no longer use EZA and what were the alternatives. I have never so much rubbish spoken by people who are supposed to know what they are talking about.

So lets get this straight Article Marketing is alive and kicking and going from strength to strength In fact 2010 is going to be bumper year for article marketers.

So before I look at what’s to come in 2010 and finish with a prediction lets have a look back at what happened in 2009. The most obvious things that had an affect on Article marketing was Ezinearticles and their bit of house cleaning. To listen to some people over react you would have thought the sky was falling. I admit I was very critical of some of the things that EZA announced and that was said by the management but they now seem to be being sensible about things. I suspect there was an initial knee jerk reaction on both sides.

For example When they initially announced the keyword density changes and the more stringent review policies I asked Chris if domain names would be counted as keywords. The answer I got was yes they would. This was obviously poorly thought out as surely an article about blue widgets pointing to a site about blue widgets was preferable to one pointing to a site about pink fluffy bunnies and yet because my sites are well targeted I get punished. However this doesn’t seem to be the case now so perhaps common sense has prevailed.

None of the changes are cause for concern , the only thing you need to do is to adapt your articles. If your keyword is 4 words long then you need to increase your word count to over 400 words. The great thing that the EZA changes did was to make people look elsewhere for links and post articles at other article directories. Personally I’ve slightly reduced my articles that go to EZA and increased the articles that go elsewhere and where I used to only give EZA unique content I now often include content that has been posted elsewhere. After all Article marketing Is a 2 way street.

So what for 2010?

Well the first thing that is already happening is that There is now more than 1 good article directory, ArticlesBase and GoArticles are making headway and challenging EZA. They are not quite there yet but it’s only a matter of time. Goarticles recently had a big SEO audit done and this can only mean that their articles will start to rank higher in future.

Access to stats will also become more prevalent, EZA recently started showing CTR which is an excellent step forward, I want to know my CTR and which links get clicks.

Articlesbase is an excellent directory and already starting to outrank EZA in some cases. I know very little about the management and ownership but I’ve had a very positive discussion with them after they rejected some articles. The great thing is that they are prepared to listen to common sense.

With sites like Go articles you can currently add links in the Body and also link directly to sales pages if you wish. The more visible links in an article the higher the CTR. So if you aren’t using these directories then it’s time to start.

My big prediction for 2010 is for a rise in the number of article directories who don’t have any adverts and allow 3 of 4 links in the body of the article in return for a small monthly fee. I can see this business model becoming prevalent. EZA state that a CTR of between 2 and 12% is normal, I can regularly get 3 or 4 times that so a site with no ads and well placed links and resource boxes should achieve 50-70% CTR I for one would happily pay for that!

Article marketing is as strong as it’s ever been and is going to get stronger, more competition is a good thing and can only help us article marketers.

Good luck with your article marketing in 2010

If you have read my blog a few times you’ll know that when I start with a disclaimer that I am going to rip someone a new one! So here is my disclaimer.

I really like Ezinearticles and Chris Knight , Ezinearticles and Chris have provided a platform that have allowed myself and hundreds of other marketers to make profits from our sites. Even as I write this I am drinking coffee out of an EZA Mug. Several thousand dollars a month of my income can be directly attributed to EZA. Of course Chris also profits from my articles so it’s a good symbiotic relationship.

I completely respect Chris’s rights to do whatever he wants to do with ezinearticles and change the rules when he feels it’s for the best. Surprisingly that’s not what this post is about .Occasionally Chris seems to say things without thinking them through. Maybe in a bid to lessen the impact of his “War on Internet Marketers” (dare I say that EZA has been built to the position it is today largely by internet marketers?) he posted a video and a post last night about the statistics of the Problem articles they have.

http://blog.ezinearticles.com/2009/10/derivative-content-be-gone.html

The part that make me angry is the following

Get this: Over 142,000 articles are currently in “Problem Status.” Of those, 41% are under 399 words. Compare that to those that are over 750+ words which account for 1-2% of the total. That means you can significantly increase your chances of having your article accepted purely by increasing your word count to the 400+ range. Watch for a full blog post this week with the details on this internal stats study.

Thats the type of stats a politician would quote to justify something that is basically unjustifiable.

Let me explain more, The stats mean absolutely nothing without something to base them on.

142,000 articles in problem stats …against how many live articles?

41% are under 399 words ..Ok but what percentage of live articles are under 399 words?

2% of articles of over 750 words are problem articles .. so how many live articles are over 750 words?

It could be that when we know all the stats that articles less than 399 words are statistically LESS likely to be in problem status.

Additionally no mention of why the articles are in problem status is made. Surely unless it is due to article length then the stats above mean absolutely nothing. How does an article that is in problem status due to a keyword stuffed title have any relevance on the article length?

I realize that Chris is trying to make people improve the quality of the articles and I fully support that, but more keywords doesn’t mean higher quality. I’ve often spent time trimming a 500 word article down to 300 to get the facts across quicker. Unfortunately most people just skim read the articles so the shorter and more concise the article the better. Of course if they get bored they are more than likely to click one of Chris’s Adsense adverts!…hmmm

How about this for a compromise if Chris is happy to move the resource box to the top of the article I will happily write 1000 word articles all day long

There is absolutely no need for Chris to justify the recent rule changes but by using weak statistical data with nothing to support it he is doing himself a disservice.

Before I go there is one stat that would end this discussion right now.. whats the average CTR of 700 word articles against 300 word articles?  I suspect it’s considerably different!

What aspects of Internet marketing do you enjoying doing? Keyword research? article writing? Building sites? promotion?

We all have our favorites, I was writing a report today and spent 5 hours just bashing the keyboard. I love dong that type of thing It challenges me and forces me to concentrate and generate Ideas on the fly. While I was doing what I enjoyed I had other people promoting sites and creating content for new sites.

It’s all about doing what you do well and off loading what you don’t do so well. When I first started in Internet Marketing I used to build auto generated sites to order for people, they’d pay me $10 and 20 minutes later they would have a site. I liked building sites (well pressing the build button!) and the money I earned helped to pay for me to expand my business far faster than I would have been able to. It also meant I didn’t need to find a real job.

Working smarter is all about doing what you enjoy doing , if you don’t like writing but like keyword research then offer a keyword research service, take the money you earn from that and pay a writer to write your content.

Any idiot can work harder, spend hours researching keywords, and doing nothing with them, creating beautiful looking blogs and not promoting them even buying the next shiny thing to come along that will make him his millions… and not acting on it.

Why not spend the next few days sorting out a business plan that will allow you to build your business and allow you to do what you want to do. If you can’t afford to outsource, build a site and sell it , then use the profits to build 4 sites and sell them. Then take you profit and hire a writer of a site promoter while you build your next sites.