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  • Looking for a FREE Online Keyword Research Tool?

    Looking for a FREE Online Keyword Research Tool?

    Wikipedia Keyword MiningEverybody loves FREE and so it is good to find something which is not only free but does a job that you actually need – keywordpredator.com is one of those rare creatures – as long as you use it properly instead of just expecting it to do what every other tool already does! Read on for the nitty gritty..

    When you are in the internet marketing or SEO business, or in fact any business with a web site, you will be spending rather a lot of time on keyword research and for that you will most likely be using one or in fact several tools to help find those nuggets of keyword gold. If you are not actually doing any keyword research then it’s about time you got your act together and start doing some as it is fundamental to any web based venture!

    So Many Tools, So Little Time

    There are many good tools around which you can and should be using to automate as much of the research process as possible because it’s no secret that the research process can be long and tedious. There’s no escaping it though if you want to succeed, you have to bite the bullet and take the time required to do the job right. The amount of time involved can be significantly reduced through the use of tools but it will still take a while no matter what – nothing beats the “Mark I Eyeball” combined with the human brain for picking out the winning keywords from huge automatically generated lists.

    Wikipedia Mining

    Most keyword research tools rely on Google, one way or another, to produce their keyword suggestion lists and stats and this is fine up to a point – the point where everybody else is using the exact same tools as you and ends up finding the same keywords as you which of course leads to more competition and less money in the bank for you. However there are other methods for keyword discovery and one such method is mining Wikipedia for related keywords – that site is a treasure trove for top quality articles and contains bazillions of keyword relations which you can utilize.

    Mining by Hand

    You can manually search for wikipedia articles in your chosen niche – obviously the nature of Wikipedia means you can’t always search for too narrow a niche or geo-targeted keywords, for example something like ‘new york dentist’ will not work at all on Wikipedia since nobody would ever write a Wikipedia article about that. However it will of course have plenty about dentistry and about New York but not specifically those two combined.

    Once you find an article relevant to your niche, Dentist for example, you will see there are loads of links to other pages – each of these links is a highly relevant keyword which you can copy and paste into your list or spreadsheet for further analysis. You can then click each of these links and find even more related keywords – you can keep doing this as often as you need to build up a huge list of really good keywords. Just keep drilling down through all the links on all the related pages and copy/paste the keyword from the links.

    Now alone these keywords can be great but if you click the View history tab at the top of each page you will see there a link for Page view statistics so you can see just how popular or how much interest there is in that particular article topic – this is great info as you can use it to quickly assess the potential worth of a keyword. Normally you would copy those stats into your keyword spreadsheet as mentioned above so you can later sort them all based on the view stats. However all this manual digging through Wikipedia pages and copy/pasting keywords and stats is a lot of work, is there a better way? Why yes, finally there is a better way..

    Automatic Wikipedia Mining

    A new keyword discovery and research tool called Keyword Predator makes it really easy to dig through all that great Wikipedia data and all you need to do is enter a seed keyword (a broad one, not localized due to the Wikipedia limitation previously discussed) and then click click click to drill down through all the suggestions and add the good ones to your own private keyword database. Once a keyword is added to your list it is then automatically analysed and a whole load of additional data is pulled in from various places across the web.

    The end result is a great list of keywords with data such as Social Competition, CPC, Difficulty rating, Domain availability and more so you can easily pick the best keywords for your articles or for entirely new sites. How much does all this wiki mining wizardry cost? Nothing – it really is free!

    So what are you waiting for? There’s gold in them thar Wikipedia hills! Go and dig it out now!

  • I Tried this Viral Content Marketing Trick and You Wont Believe What Happened Next!

    I Tried this Viral Content Marketing Trick and You Wont Believe What Happened Next!

    Viral Content MarketingThere’s a lot talked about viral content marketing on the web these days but you probably think from the title of this article that the trick I am going to tell you about is some kind of strategy which involves catchy viralnova style titles, right? Well that certainly does have its part to play but there’s more to it than that, much much more and the real meat of the trick is a dark and dirty secret of content marketing, something that really makes it work and separates the men from the boys or women from the girls if you like or to be extra PC the responsible adults from the reckless kids.

    In short the secret is what is known as paid amplification and I’ll explain much more in this article about what that means and how you can use it, so read on to get the details and learn how shockingly powerful it actually is.. you will be amazed and you may even cry! 😉

    The Old Way

    So a fairly typical plan followed by many, possibly including you, when writing and promoting a new article goes something like this..

    1. Keyword research to find a topic worth writing about (ie. gets plenty of google traffic) and not too hard to rank for.

    2. Write a 500 word (or whatever length you decide on) article around the chosen keyword (or phrase) and include it in the title, meta tags, image tags, the body of the article and maybe a few other places too (while being careful not to fall victim to keyword stuffing).

    3. Publish your article on your site, ping it and then post a link to it on Twitter and Facebook in the hope that it will go viral.

    4. Possibly do some “blogger outreach” – not just sending it to your mum!

    5. Try to get some backlinks through various means.

    6. Check Google every hour to see if it has been indexed yet and watch for it to rise in the serps.

    7. Sit back and watch those traffic stats as the visitors flood in!

    A week, two weeks, a month later and still no viral love and just a trickle of traffic.. you just assume that’s the way it goes and so you will just try again with a new article and another new one and another and surely eventually your time will come and one of your articles will finally go viral!

    Only it doesn’t.

    Sure your traffic may well be slowly creeping up, you’ve been posting quality content regularly, you’ve made fancy infographics, informative videos and great articles.. you’ve followed all the guidelines, you’ve been tweeting madly, you’ve been posting comments on relevant blogs and forums and you’ve been trying to get known by the influencers in your industry.

    The Long Game

    All these things (and more) certainly do work but that’s the long game.. for many people that may be fine, your blog is your passion, your hobby, you don’t care about going viral, you do it for the love of the game and over the years you will build up an enthusiastic audience if you keep producing the good stuff and engage them. Eventually you will have enough traffic to make some money from it, possibly even a lot of money. If you are really focused and work really hard on your content marketing and all your ducks are in a row, you may be able to reduce this to a matter of a few months before you see a decent amount of success. If you are an SEO wizard or wear a hat of a darker shade, you may even be able to do it much sooner, however not everyone can do it that way or even wants to. There is of course more than one way to do it, as Tim Toady says.

    But what if you really need to make it now? You’re trying to start a business and that means it has to make money as soon as possible, even more so if you’re financed by OPM (Other Peoples Money) or the Bank of Mum & Dad and they demand results sooner rather than later, or if  you need to pay the rent next month or put food on the table.

    Is there a shortcut? In a word.. YES!

    The content marketing secret that every online marketing agency knows and which every marketing professional in successful companies knows.. you have to pay to play. It really is that simple. Of course it is not just a matter of paying for some advertising to send traffic to your site in the hope that it will convert, that is a different kettle of fish and not what this article is about.

    The Secret to Success

    The real secret to viral content marketing is what is known as paid amplification. In other words you pay to amplify your content, to extend its reach on the web, on social networks, wherever the people are who can spread the word for you. Unless you are incredibly lucky or well connected, the only sure(ish) way to make your content go viral is to make sure that enough people see it to start the ball rolling.. you have to overcome the inertia somehow, to reach that tipping point where it is being shared by enough people to take on a life of its own.

    Of course just throwing money at the problem is not going to fix all the worlds problems, or even just yours, if your content sucks then nobody will share it and so it will only be seen by those you’ve paid to reach.. that may be enough for some people but you’re just putting lipstick on a pig which is a wasted effort (unless you have a thing for pigs). Quite simply if you’re going to spend money on paid amplification you better make sure the content you are amplifying is top notch unless you have money to burn. There is no point doing this for a basic 500 word article you just whipped up (or outsourced) and threw out there. Take the time to plan and create something really good, something actually shareable both from a quality and technical point of view. By technical I mean you include things which make it easy and likely for people to share.. social sharing buttons, appropriate calls to action and psychological triggers etc.

    Make your content awesome and people will want to share it – if they know about it. Again this is why you need to pay to amplify – too few will know about it otherwise and so your chances of going viral are massively reduced. You need to seed your content widely and appropriately.

    So how exactly do you amplify your wicked content?

    Well as above, Tim Toady applies here too but I will outline a few methods and places you can go to for paid amplification. It is really quite simple and not even that expensive – you do need to have funds available for this method but we’re not talking millions here, you can start with a small amount like $50 or even less if you just want to test the waters before jumping in but for as little as $200 you can have massive reach which can quickly springboard you to success.

    Everyone online should know about Reddit by now and it is a great source of free traffic if you approach it right but there are strict rules in place about self-promotion there so you walk a fine line when using it for traffic generation. However they also provide an advertising platform which works very nicely for getting the word out. It takes the form of a paid post which means not only do you get your link on Reddit but people there can actually comment on it so you can directly engage with them which makes it much more likely they will take notice an even share your link with others on Reddit and of course elsewhere.

    You’ve surely seen Outbrain links even if you didn’t know what they were – at the bottom of bazillions of news articles there will be a list of possibly related content on other sites. Those are put there by Outbrain (amongst others) which is a paid discovery service and which you can use to put your links on loads of high traffic sites such as CNN. Yes you can actually have your article linked on major sites like CNN!

    Another paid content discovery service is Taboola which also has massive reach on a network which includes some of the biggest and most prestigious sites online such as Time.

    Disqus is a popular commenting plugin used on millions of sites, often replacing the commenting section on blogs for example, and as such this provides them with millions of places to place links or ads. They call it promoted discovery but by now you will get the idea so I wont dwell on the details.

    But wait, there’s more.. in case you didn’t have enough places for paid content discovery, have a look at Zemanta! Their content and link suggestion system can push your links out to millions of people.

    The Social Networks

    Besides the above content discovery platforms there are of course the big social networks which also sell advertising. The biggest of which these days is Facebook and fortunately they have a self-service advertising system which you can use to quickly “boost” your articles to a very targeted audience. Rumour has it that it costs less to show your ads to people who are already your “fans” so it can be worth building up your Facebook page first – but it is extremely important to make sure all the Likes you get are from real people who are actually interested in your content – Facebook will actually reduce your exposure on the network if their system detects low engagement and of course buying cheap (ie. untargeted or in particular fake) likes will kill your reach and end up costing you much more!

    Twitter is also a great place to amplify your content and their self-service ad system is being gradually made available in other countries besides the US and a few EU countries so go check them out – their promoted tweets are an excellent and affordable way to get the viral buzz started!

    Also on Twitter you can buy credits on services such as JustReTweet which will get your tweets retweeted by loads of people – imagine 1000 people retweet your message and they each have 1000 followers on average.. that’s 1 million people on twitter that will see your tweet!

    Stumbleupon is a smaller social platform but also a great way to get eyeballs on your content by means of what they call “paid stumbles” which cost about 10 cents each and can easily end up with many more as people push your link out to their networks.

    Retargeting is a great way to maximize your ad spend. While not strictly speaking a paid amplification method, what it does do is give you a second (and third and..) shot at converting all the traffic you got as a result of your big amplification campaigns. How it works is simply showing your ads to people who already visited your site – in other words when someone came to read your content then left without buying or registering, you can show your ads to them when they are on other sites. Since they already saw your site they are familiar with it and will more likely notice your ads and be more inclined to come back.

    Putting it all Together

    Using all the above systems you can extend your reach to literally hundreds of millions of people, limited of course only by your budget. However even with a relatively modest budget you can reach a huge number. For example with Outbrain they recommend paying 15 cents per click – you can of course pay less but you may get less exposure so you have to experiment to find the sweet spot for your content. But lets say you are paying 15/click on average and lets say you get a click through rate of 1%, that means for just $15 your link/snippet is going to be seen by 10,000 people and you will get 100 actual visits (ie. clicks) to your site from those 10k. The actual CTR could be very different, you could get 100,000 views for those same 100 clicks, it really depends. Needless to say you should try to maximize your return on that – it doesn’t have to be just based on clicks – 100k people seeing your article snippet along with domain/site name for example is a nice way to get some branding.

    Of course you need to carefully craft your article titles and snippets and/or visual media previews to get the most benefit from all this content amplification activity. You could and indeed should take a leaf from Upworthy and write something like 20 versions of your title, then split test them and only then choose the best one to run with. To test them you can just do small runs of a few thousand views on several platforms and keep tweaking and testing until satisfied with the response rate.

    Paying for ads of any kind is a quick way to lose your shirt if you are not careful so you must, I repeat MUST, make sure to carefully target your ads – don’t just go for the quick fix “click to boost” types ads that Facebook and others offer to the unwary. Dig deep into their targeting options and test small scale campaigns while learning the system before expanding your campaigns to extend your reach further.

    Get Coupons

    Here’s a quick tip – if you are a namecheap customer, they actually have a page of deals which offers all sorts of freebies such as $50 Twitter advertising coupons and even a $150 retargeting coupon which is a fantastic offer. All you need is to be a namecheap customer so if you are not yet then go now and register a domain or get some cheap hosting so you can take advantage of the coupons and discount codes they offer – the more you spend at namecheap the better the deals you get (ie. you get more!) but you don’t have to spend much to get some great deals. They also have other deals besides advertising coupons, such as free content (stock photos) you can use on your sites and more so it is well worth it. Using these coupons allows you to test the waters with paid content promotion without risking your own hard earned cash, so you can now easily and safely learn the ropes before moving to the big leagues.

    Hopefully you will find the above tips useful, just make sure to test everything carefully and make a plan of action which you can follow each time you publish great content. Do you have any favourite places or methods to amplify your content? Feel free to share in the comments section below.

  • Get Unlimited Custom Articles Written Exactly How You Want

    Get Unlimited Custom Articles Written Exactly How You Want

    The bane of every internet marketer is producing enough good quality articles to feed the Google machine and result in an effective content marketing effort. The truth of the matter is that it is just not easy for most of us to write all that content, no matter how much we want to or how convinced we are at the start that we can actually do it.. as they say – the road to hell is paved with good intentions!

    iWriter Review

    Sure anyone can throw together 4 or 5 articles for a new site but how many can keep up the momentum and churn out 50 or 100 articles and keep on updating it to turn that little microniche site that nobody ever visits, into an authority powerhouse that brings in more traffic and money than you can shake a stick at? The answer to that is “very few”.

    The Auto Way or the Writer Way

    So what can you do when you have a great idea for a site, you’ve done your keyword research and you’re sure it will make loads of money if you can just produce enough quality content to keep it going long enough to take off? Fortunately for every problem, there is a solution. In fact more than one, depending on how you want to do it. One method is to use automation tools to rewrite articles acquired from various sources (PLR for example). Once you have such an article, you run it through the rewriter and then edit the the returned article to fix any grammar errors (no automation tool is perfect) and when you’re happy you upload to your site – job done. However this method does rely on rewriting existing content which, while it has its place and should be part of every internet marketers toolkit, is not ideal if you plan on producing a quality authority site for long term income.

    Outsourcing

    The other method, one which is suitable for your authority sites if done right, is to outsource to a real human writer or in fact multiple writers. There are many places you can find writers, such as oDesk or even Fiverr but frankly the best place is one which is designed specifically for writers – iWriter. The entire system there is optimized for writers and those of us, probably including you, who are looking to hire writers and it is disarmingly simple to use – the only real danger is you may find yourself hiring more and more writers and getting far too many articles written!

    Hiring writers is not without risk in other places, however with iwriter you can actually reject an article if it does not meet your specifications – there are no questions asked, no arguing, just click a button and it is gone and then your article job is sent back out to the network of writers for another go. This raises an important point – you do not want to be rejecting every article, so how exactly do you make sure to get a good article? It is critically important to approach this the right way because if you fail to specify exactly what you need, the writers will have to guess and will very likely return something which is not up to the standards you expected or may even be totally wrong in terms of subject matter.

    But no need to worry – we’ve been there before and can tell you how you can get good content written with minimum fuss. You have to be very clear about what you want – you also need to be aware that there are different levels of writer: Basic, Premium and Elite. A Basic article goes out to all writers, including those with low ratings and also costs much less – a 500 word article can be had for just $3! But there’s a much higher chance of getting back poor quality, clearly spun articles. A Premium article will only go out to writers with more than 4 stars and a 500 word article will cost you $5.50 – having more than 4 stars doesn’t guarantee you will get good quality back though, you could still get back some borderline gibberish. If you’re really keen you can order an Elite article which will set you back $10 for 500 words and will only be sent to writers with a rating of 4.6 or above. Of course you are not limited to 500 word articles, you can have 150 words or 2000 words, whatever you prefer.

    In fact you don’t have to stop at getting short (or even quite long) articles written – you can go all out and get full-on Kindle ebooks written for you which you could market through Amazon like a ‘proper’ author or on all the many ebook sites out there. Or you could use such ebooks as your signup incentives for your mailing lists – when you can offer a good quality, unique product (ebook) to your site visitors, the chances of getting them to subscribe goes way up.

    The Right Way to Hire a Writer

    To ensure you get a decent article, you should use specifications similar to the following, but of course adapted to your own requirements..

    First of all make it clear that you will reject any article which does not meet your specifications – put such a warning (in your own words) at the top of the specs to make sure the writer will see it. This helps you feel less guilty if you do have to reject one since you clearly warned them of that possibility in advance.

    Secondly, warn them that you will not accept content which is auto-generated.. anything that looks dodgy is probably auto-generated so you must reject that. Note though that it could still be created automatically but then manually edited to make it look like it was all written manually – there’s not much you can do in such a case and as long as it is unique, fully readable, grammatically correct, in native level english and ultimately makes sense, then it doesn’t really matter.

    Thirdly, warn them that you wont accept content which is copied – iwriter runs everything through copyscape for you so it should be unique but still it is worth doing a manual check before accepting an article, just for some extra reassurance. If it turns out to be very similar to an existing article then reject it fast.

    Next you should give some specifications about the structure and content of the article – for example tell them you want 4 paragraphs or 10 paragraphs (depending on article length of course) and even how many sentences you want in each. Doing this helps to ensure you get something which looks substantial and has a side-effect of potentially getting you more words than you paid for.

    Specify the number of times the keyword should appear (an upper limit to prevent keyword stuffing), tell them to include sub-titles, explain the tone they should use (you can select friendly or professional already in the form but you may want to explain further). It can also help to provide some links to sources they can use to get a better understanding of what the article should be about, particularly if it is an obscure or complicated subject that they may otherwise never have heard of or have no expertise in.

    It is also worth saying that you will give them a good rating if they do a good job – and make sure that you do! It helps your reputation as well as theirs which makes it easier for you to hire writers in future. Also consider that when you reject an article it affects your stats on iwriter – everyone can see the percentage of articles you have rejected and nobody wants to waste time writing for someone that ends up rejecting 90%! If you’ve done your part of the job properly (defined the task clearly) then you will be much less likely to have to reject articles, which means you have a low percentage and writers will be more keen to work for you.

    What Next?

    When you’ve found a writer that does a good job – make sure to add that person to your favourites list! This makes it easy to rehire the same person for future jobs – not only do you get a writer who is familiar with your requirements, but they also get paid 5% more for the job while it still costs you exactly the same, so it’s a win-win situation.

    As with the old saying – garbage in, garbage out – if you explain clearly what you want and have realistic expectations (you probably wont get someone with a PhD in astrophysics writing your articles), then you can really get decent quality content out of the system and in a pretty much unlimited supply since you can hire multiple writers in parallel. Using the services of iWriter, there is now nothing stopping you from building that massive authority site you’ve been procrastinating over for so long – get it out there, fill it with great content with almost no effort on your part (besides keyword research) and start raking in the money!

    What are you waiting for? Hire some writers now!!