This article will demonstrate an exciting promotional technique I learned about a few months ago and have tweaked and improved specifically for Seekyt writers. Using this method, you will be able to choose the right topics to write about and promote your articles on the right kinds of websites using freely available online tools. Everything in this method is white-hat. In my own experiment using three different articles on a test blog, I was able to average 353 visitors per day, per article, or just over 1,000 visitors per day. Is your mouth watering yet? Keep reading to learn how you can write and promote your articles the same way I did, improve your Google rank to page one, earn way more money than you ever have, and spend no more than 30 minutes per day for about a month doing it.
Step One – Write Content People Want to Read
Some people naturally write content that is evergreen – topics like cancer, weight loss and fitness are always in demand, 12 months out of the year. Other topics can also be evergreen: from automotive to finance, from cooking to psychology, the most relevant content will always be evergreen. If you have articles that are ‘evergreen,’ congratulations: you can skip to the promotional part of this article and learn how to start promoting them right away. Evergreen topics typically have 30,000-100,000+ searches per month in Google.
Using Google Trends to Find Evergreen Niches
If you don’t have any evergreen content, choose a topic you want to write about that is ‘Evergreen’ in nature, and then visit Google Trends and explore the popularity of the topic. You are not going to be exploring your keyword so much as you are the topic in general. For example, if you wanted to write an article around the keyword ‘Nascar Crashes,’ first you’d visit Google Trends and type ‘Nascar’ into the search bar and click the search button. Change the ‘2004-Present’ in the dropdown menu above the graph to ‘Past 12 Months.’ If you can see a graph that is ‘mostly’ consistent across the year, congratulations! – you have just found an evergreen topic. If there is no graph and it says ‘not enough search data’ please avoid writing about this topic – there is little, if any, interest in it at the current time, and the subject is definitely not evergreen. In our example, you can see that ‘Nascar’ is quite evergreen and popular throughout the year, and has plenty of searches at any given time. A ‘Nascar’ themed keyword such as ‘nascar crashes’ would be one worth investigating.
Use SpyFu (Free) To Find and Test Keywords
Go to SpyFu.com and enter your keyword into the search box. For ‘Nascar Crashes’ you will see that there are 9.9k US searches per month. This keyword has some potential! Look for keywords that have at least 5,000 local searches per month, because it’s just not profitable enough to pick keywords that have extremely low search volumes – especially for this tutorial.
If your chosen keyword doesn’t have enough searches, search Spyfu for your main niche and look at the ‘profitable related keywords’ section for a different keyword to target. Remember, it is very important that you pick a keyword with at least 5,000 local searches for this tutorial; however, if you find some great keywords with at least 1,000 searches per month and they don’t have much competition, you can always add those to your portfolio as well!
Check Your Competition The Old Fashioned Way
The final step in making sure your articles will be profitable is to make sure the keyword you are choosing doesn’t have too much competition. Search Google for your chosen keyword, look at the first page results, and make a decision as to whether you can compete. Ask yourself whether you can create as much content, as high-quality or better, and promote your article further than your competition. If all of the results are made by highly-respected or well-known websites, move on. If all of the results have thousands of other sites pointing to them, move on. On the other hand, if you find that these sites aren’t too hard to compete with, go ahead and write your article using your chosen keyword
Article Writing Tips
When you write an article, you need to do several things in order to make sure your content is high-quality: you must have perfect spelling and grammar, you must use headings and images appropriately, you must have expertise in what you are writing about, and you must use high-quality sources to back up your content whenever necessary. If you can do these things, you can write an excellent article. Please do not waste anyone’s time writing about topics you are not familiar with. You will never rank well with these articles.
If you didn’t already know it, Google has actual human beings (many thousands of them) check search results for both their usefulness and page quality, and they do this by following a very strict set of rules. The program is called ‘Leapforce.’ Reviewers will automatically demote articles as being ‘low quality’ if they don’t meet all of the above standards. Remember, we don’t want low or medium-quality content – only the very best you are capable of producing!
Using Google Alerts to Promote Your Article
Once you have written your article, go to Google Alerts and enter your keyword into the box. Change ‘Everything’ to ‘Blogs’ and set this alert to be emailed to you once per day. Now, once per day, Google will email you with new blogs which mention your keyword. Read each blog carefully. Leave a comment on all of the blogs that allow it. Not just any comment, either; your comment should be very helpful and useful – don’t just say ‘nice blog.’
After you have typed your comment, on another line, put the link to your Seekyt article with a description or disclaimer. For example, you might say something like ‘You can read more about nascar crashes here: http://…..’ You do not have to use anchor text when you do this, and should not use anchor text each time – limit the amount of time you use anchor text to less than 50% of the time, and make sure your HTML is correct before attempting to do so. Otherwise, just copy and paste the URL of your article.
Next, repeat this process, except change ‘Blogs’ to ‘Discussions.’ You will receive another email once per day which will list all of the forums which mention your keyword. Make a note of all of these forums and create an account on the most relevant ones. Reply to the posts which directly ask for information with a link to your article. You can try saying something like ‘I have just written a pretty-lengthy article on (whatever), I think you’ll find it useful. Here’s a link: http://…. I would post the whole article but it’s too long for a forum post.’ For forums that don’t directly ask for information, join in on 3-5 discussions first and participate by leaving insightful and useful information – maybe information you learned while writing your article. Once you have posted at least 15-20 posts, you can then create your own thread with a link to your article, or even put your link in your signature.
You can get creative and use other keywords in your Google Alerts to receive other, more specific emails. You can also choose other types of sites if you’d like to experiment. Blogs and discussions are simply the easiest to explain in this demonstration.
If you use an asterisk (*) in your keyword, Google will treat it as a wildcard. From our previous example, you could try ‘Is * Nascar’ or ‘Is Nascar *’ or ‘Does Nascar *’ to find questions being directly asked by people in blogs and forums. Find these questions, answer them with a solid amount of information, and then offer them a link to your Seekyt article. Be an expert.
It is very important that you are the first or second person to leave a comment or reply on these forums. By having the advantage of recency, your links will be at the top of the comments list and will be highly visible by readers. That means that within the first day you will be sending readers directly to your Seekyt article – this is the most qualified traffic you could ever get. If these readers are looking for exactly what you are providing – great, high-quality content, images and videos – they will be much more likely to click an ad or affiliate link within your article. It is a win-win scenario.
Promote Your Promotional Activities
After you have left your comment or forum reply, use an appropriate social bookmarking site and social networking site to promote those blogs and forums. You will quickly see the traffic that you were already getting will increase slightly as those blogs and forums start to get more visitors. By this time, the search engines will be taking notice of the recency and social influence these pages have – and the fact that they all link back to your Seekyt article! You will begin to see organic traffic from these efforts. That means that you will start to rank in Google for your keyword, and whenever people search Google for that keyword, they will be directed to your site. Google traffic is the most likely traffic to convert; that is, it has the highest likelihood of all other types of visitors to click on an ad or affiliate link.
Repeat this process everyday for 4-6 weeks. It will take you approximately 20-30 minutes each day to visit 5-10 blogs or forums and participate in them. If you follow these directions, you should have about a 95% acceptance rate. In other words, only 5% of publishers will choose to remove your comment or forum post, because 95% of publishers will recognize the utility your content and link are providing to their readers.
Scale This Up And Earn Much, Much More Money
If you complete this task as instructed, you should start to see between 250 and 500 visitors to your articles per day, all of which will be targeted traffic. This traffic will average an eCPM of about $20, which means you might expect to earn $5-10 per day, each day, from this single article.
Depending on how you rank in the search engines at the end of this experiment, you can choose to continue promoting the same article, or create a new article with even better content and start the process all over again. Whenever one of your articles begins to lose traffic, refer first to the Google Trends graph – most topics do have a seasonal ‘high’ period, so the ‘low’ you might be seeing could be quite normal. If not, you know that you need to improve and promote your article a little more to regain your previous numbers.
Why This Is Better Than Your Current Methods
Many new writers have the same, lame linking strategy: promote on digg, reddit, pinterest, facebook, twitter. This is a good way to gain social influence if you happen to have hundreds or thousands of followers on those sites. Most newbie writers don’t even have 10 followers. Social networking and social bookmarking sites have a lot of content on them that spans many, many topics. That means that these sites are not considered an authority in any niche, and are not the best places to waste time with your promotional efforts.
Instead, the Google Trends and Alerts method will allow you to find the best, most relevant websites to get links from. Plus, these alerts are personalized and are delivered to you in a convenient email. Remember how every SEO professional has always told you about how it’s the quality of links and not the quantity that counts? This is what they mean. You need to get the right kinds of sites linking to you, and have some very impressive content in order to rank high on page one in Google. There’s not much more to it. If you follow this guide, you will be earning much more money with Seekyt than you already do, and will be scratching your head wondering why you didn’t start doing this sooner!
Don’t Procrastinate
If there is one thing that I have learned in my self-employed career, it’s that if you keep putting something off, it will never get done. Some writers might think ‘I’ll write 30 articles first and then promote them’ or ‘I don’t want to promote my articles – they will promote themselves!’ This is not the right way to approach internet promotion and content creation. In fact, it is downright naive. Don’t waste months writing articles and earning pennies when you could be earning potentially $100-300+ per month, per article by the beginning of your second month. The power is in your hands.
Final Words of Advice
If you have the chance to look at CPC data when examining your keywords on SpyFu, please try to pick keywords that have a CPC of at least $1.50 or more, and try to find keywords that have at least 3-4 advertisers. The more money that a topic is worth, the more you will have the potential to earn when you write your articles because the ads will pay more when readers click on them. Finally, remember that your articles need to be high quality – higher than you already think they need to be! Do your best, go the extra mile, and you will be rewarded for it.
