Website Promotion Blueprint by Lee Dobbins - HTML preview

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Step 1: Keyword Research

Finding good keywords is key to getting some traction in the serps. Initially, you want to have about 30 – 50 keywords for each site you plan to build out . If you have more then all the better!

But not just any keywords will do, these need to be ones that bring in a fair amount of traffic and that you have a chance of ranking for.

How do you find these?

Well, it’s really a 2 step process. First find the keyword, then analyze how competitive it is.

To find the keyword, you can head on over to Google Keyword Tool and search for your main keyword phrase. Make sure that you select “Exact” under the “match type” heading.

You want to pay attention to the “Global Monthly Search” column and choose keywords that have more than 1600 searches – even 1600 is really low and if you cannot secure the #1 spot for that term then you might not get a lot of traffic, so plan accordingly.
Once you have your list of keywords, then you need to go over to google and type each one into the search bar (WITHOUT the quotes).

Take a good look at the top 10 sites that come up for that phrase and figure out if you can get in the top 3 positions. If it’s a keyword that gets a lot of traffic (6000 or more searches) getting any of the positions on page 1 might be worthwhile.

Here are some things to look for when analyzing the top 10:

1. Domain age
2. Backlinks to the domain
3. Backlinks to the page
4. whether or not the page is optimized for the keyword phrase with the title, url <h1> tag and in the article on the page
5. Gov and Edu links to the page

If you use the Firefox browser and add the SEO For Firefoxplugin, it will show you this information in the bar below the website listing.

I have a video that shows you exactly how to do this at: http://www.websitepromotionblueprint.com/step-1-keyword-research

Step 2: Going Social

Go to any internet marketing forum and you’re sure to find a host of posts about social bookmarking. There’s been a ton of eBooks describing different methodologies and a host of software programs to help you do it.

Personally, I don’t really get what all the hype is about. I mean, it’s great for back links but to tell you the truth most of the traffic your site gets from these social sites is pretty much worthless. The visitors rarely click an adsense link or make a purchase.

Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to add social bookmarking as part of your website promotion strategy because it is easy and will gain you back links.

Social bookmarking websites are sites where people can leave links to blog posts, websites and articles of interest on a particular topic. They are setup so that people with a particular interest can come in and go to the category they are interested in and learn about new sites that otherpeople have found interesting.
Many of these sites have “no-follow” links (links that won’t give you any “juice” for ranking in the SERPS) but there are also quite a few that are do-follow.

Social bookmarking your pages is easy. You sign up for an account, then login and bookmark your website pages. A bookmark typically consists of a title, brief description, tags and link back to the article. As you can see, it is much easier and faster than writing a lengthy article.

But, because it is easy, people have abused it and you have to be really careful that you don’t overdo it when bookmarking your site or you will get your account closed down.

What I usually do is I bookmark interesting articles other than my own so that my account doesn’t have only a few sites that have been bookmarked. Also, I only bookmark key pages from my own sites and never put too many at any one site. For each of the pages on my site, I might submit them to 4 or 5 different Social Bookmarking sites and leave it at that. I alternate between the different sites so no one site has too many bookmarks from one of my domains. Some of the social bookmarking sites that have “do follow” links (at the time of this writing) include:

Blinklist.com
Mister-Wong.com Backflip.com
Connectedy
JumpTags.com Dizzed.com
A1-Webmarks
Spurl
Diigo

I also submit to some other sites that are “no follow” but have high authority (why bother? Because even though the “no-follow links are not supposed to get any SE love, you never really know what the SE’s are doing with these links, do you?)

Some of these sites include:

Digg
Del.icio.us
Propeller
Stumbleupon Reddit
If you want to see some videos on how to speed up your social bookmarking and even put the whole thing on autopilot, then head on over to Step 2 at WebsitePromotionBlueprint:

http://www.websitepromotionblueprint.com/step-2-going-social

Step 3: Build Your Base

Remember those keywords you found in step 1? Well we’re going to use those here to build the base of your site and start training Google around what your site is about.

Now, if you have a Niche PLR Blog that’s great because you already have a headstart! Just add in your unique content a bit at a time – you can even combine this with autblogging for even more posts!

OK, so the first thing is that you need an article for each of the keywords. I usually don’t post the same article on my site that I use to post to article directories. That’s not because I am worried about duplicate content, it’s because I don’t want my visitors to click through and see the same article they just read. Having said that there are a lot of IM’ers that I really respect that advise you to put the article on your blog first and then submit it to article directories. You can judge for yourself which you want to do!
What you want to do is take your articles and set them to post every other day or every 3 days or once a week – you kind of have to make a judgment call on this depending on if you have autoblogging and how many articles you have.

The idea here is to have fresh posts every day for the first 4 – 6 weeks. Then you can scale down and post a couple times a week and eventually once a week or even once a quarter. You want to train Google to come to your blog often by adding fresh content every day. That way all your new posts will get indexed quickly.

The easiest way to do this is to go in and add several articles to post in the future. That way you only have to login to your blog once a week (or once a month even!) and all your posting is done.

If you don’t know how to schedule posts in wordpress, then I have a video on that for you – check it out at:

http://www.websitepromotionblueprint.com/step-3-build-your-base

Step 4: Using Article Distribution For Backlinks

One of the most popular and most effective ways of getting backlinks is with article marketing. This is the method that has worked the best for me in the past because you can warm up the visitor in your article and when they get to your site they really want to read more of your stuff, or better yet, buy the product you are promoting. I frequently see people posting on forums that they have distributed 5 or 10 articles and are disappointed that they don’t have a lot of traffic. I’m sorry to tell you that that simply is not enough! Unless you’ve discovered some great keywords with lots of traffic and no competition, you need a good 30 articles in order to see good results.

So what you want to do is take all those keywords that you found in step 1 and write articles for them.

Then you need to take all these articles and systematically submit them to (article directories as well as other web2.0 properties).

I think this is probably where a lot of people fail because it is tedious and boring work, but it is NECESSARY and it will pay off in spades because you will get targeted traffic that will build up over the months and your efforts will last for years and years.

This method has worked since day1 of the internet and it is sure to work for the foreseeable future. I have sites that I stopped doing any promotional work to years ago that still get steady traffic on the articles I submitted back then.
But, since this is so boring and tedious, there is a lot of room for error and it’s hard to keep on track. That’s why I created the handy spreadsheet that comes with this eBook. To see a video of how I use the spreadsheet – go here:

http://www.websitepromotionblueprint.com/step-4using-article distribution-for-backlinks

So, for each keyword you want to write an article and then submit it to ALL the article directories. In your resource box, you want to link back to the article on your blog that is targeting that keyword. Be sure to use your keyword in the anchor text! The last chapter in this ebook shows you more about writing articles and how to create a good resource box.

BTW – I don’t recommend that you go in and submit all your articles the first day! Do 1 or two a day or 1 or 2 a week as your schedule allows. This way Google will be seeing a steady stream of new links coming into your site over time.

Here’s some of the top article directories you should be submitting to:

http://www.ezinearticles.com http://www.buzzle.com
http://www.articlestars.com http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.articleclick.com http://www.amazines.com
http://www.easyarticles.com http://www.bharatbhasha.com http://www.articledashboard.com http://www.ideamarketers.com http://www.articlesbase.com http://www.articlealley.com

Step 5: Other Places To Get Backlinks

After you’ve submitted your article to the article directories you can keep on going!

Actually, what I usually do is the full article directory submission (like in the video in step 4) then I wait about a month to see how much that gets me. If my target page is at #1 then I don’t have to do anything else!
But, if after a month or two, you still need to move the page up further, you might want to consider submitting to some other sites. Here’s a list of some places you might consider putting your content on:

Squidoo (See the Squidoo Lesson to see how to get a dofollow backlink)
Weebly
Wetpaint
Blogger
Wordpress
Hubpages
Quizilla
Zimbio
LiveJournal

You want to be careful about putting affiliate links on these sites - a lot of them hate them and are really starting to crack down so just a link back to your website is the best thing to do.

I find that a good strategy to use for these sites is to wait until my website has been up for a while and I have found a good keyword phrase that is bringing in traffic and easy to rank for. Then I create pages on these sites, targeting that keyword phrase (i.e. I use it as the title, in the URL and sprinkled in the content itself). Next, I do some social bookmarking and maybe some article distribution to get links to these sites.

I know that last bit probably seems like a lot of work and you’re probably thinking that if you are going to spend the time to write more articles, you’d rather be linking them back to your main site.

But think about this ….

If you have a page on your main site that is ranking in the top 10 for a keyword phrase and you are already getting traffic – why not dominate the whole 1st page of Google with web “properties” that all belong to you?

You already know how to get 1 page there (the one on your site that is ranking) so just repeat the process for 9 more pages and you will own that first page of the SERPS, therefore about 95% of the organic traffic for that keyword!

Step 6: Blog Commenting

Blog commenting can be fun – addicting even, and it can also get you good traffic and some good links if you can find “do follow” blogs.

Commenting on blogs is easy – it’s finding ones in your niche that is difficult. There’s plenty of software tools you can use to do this, or you can just search for blogs in your niche and see if they allow comments. You can use a free tool to find blogs that allow comments:

http://www.inlineseo.com/dofollowdiver

It doesn’t have as many as you will find with the paid tools, but it’s free, and you might find some good places to leave a comment.

When you comment on blogs, you are allowed to leave a link to your website and, on some blogs, you can also use hyperlinks inside your post. Don’t be spammy and don’t over do it!

The one thing to remember is that you want to make an informative comment that adds value to the discussion. It need only be 3 or 4 sentences but it must be relevant and add value or it will probably get deleted.
I’ll admit that I don’t do this as much as I probably should, I find that it’s just too time consuming to find the appropriate blogs and then a lot of times you don’t even know if your comment will get accepted!

If you think that blog commenting is for you, then you can read all about different methods and tools you can use to find those blogs in the Blog Commenting Lesson at the website.

Step 7: Getting Backlinks To Your Backlinks

What? I’m having a hard enough time getting baclinks to my website and now you’re telling me I need to get backlinks to my backlinks?

Yep. Well you don’t HAVE to, but if you do it can be very beneficial!

Think of it from Google’s point of view. Lets take the average backlink … an article from ezinearticles let’s say. It’s on a high PR site so that’s good and when google sees the link to your website on that article, you get some brownie points.

Now, imagine if your ezine article had a few links pointing to that. That means the ezine article would get some brownie points and therefore, pass along even more brownie points to your website!

All of this adds up to better rankings and more traffic. So, what are some ways to get backlinks?

You guess it – the same methods you use to get backlinks to your website – article distribution and social bookmarking!

Plus, you want to be sure that you have submitted your author RSS feeds for any article directories and any RSS feeds for web 2.0 properties to the RSS feed directories (more on that in step 8)

Now, you don’t have to go crazy with backlinking your backlinks but a few links to some of your top articles can be beneficial. The web2.0 properties in particular can benefit form this because they don’t have the advantage of links from the directory like articles do. In fact, you might not even get your any of your web2.0 props indexed if you don’t give them a couple of links!

Plus, if you find you have a good keyword, backlinking can get your articles to rank on page 1 of google along with your website and you could potentially own all 10 of the spots on page!

Step 8: The Power Of RSS

RSS feeds are probably the most confusing website promotion technique but they are also one of the most worthwhile.

Most people associate RSS feeds with content that they put ON their websites, but, of course those feeds come from other blogs and websites. Now wouldn’t you like to have links to your content on other peoples blogs and websites? Of course you would!

If you have a blog, you automatically have an RSS feed for it and the link to it is usually displayed right on your site (look for the orange rss icon). If you have a static site, you can make it into an RSS feed at http://www.rssfeedssubmit.com/rss-generator/

So, How Do You Get These Feeds On Other Sites?

Similar to article directories that you submit articles to, there are RSS directories that you can submit your RSS feeds to. Those directories will display your feeds AND other people can pick them up for display on their sites. So, not only are you getting exposure and links for the RSS directories themselves, you also get your feed distributed to interested parties that might want to put it on their sites. Now if that wasn’t cool enough in itself, the blog RSS feeds are automatically updated every time you add an article to your site! So, every time that you post an article, you are getting immediate back links from the RSS directories to that article without you having to do a thing! How cool is that?

Not only that but, your Ezinearticles account, Squidoo page, Hubpage and many of your social bookmarking and other web 2.0 accounts have RSS feeds too. You can submit these to the RSS directories and you can also use tools (yahoo pipes or rssmix.com) to combine these feeds into different feeds that you can also submit to the directories.

Think about the possibilities – you could have tons of feeds out there with hundreds of links back to your website, your web2.0 properties and your articles.

Oh and while I am on the subject, you can also add your RSS feed from your website to your Squidoo lens, Hubpage, Blogspot blog etc… and it will automatically show your new articles on there.

Now, before you get too excited, a lot of the RSS directories are “no follow” and when you add them to your lenses and hubpages you don’t get any link juice. But any link you can get out there on the web is a chance for someone to click through to your site so I say any link is a good link and using RSS feeds to distribute them is easy! Here are some RSS directories to consider submitting your feeds to:

Feedagg.com Feedraider.com Goldenfeed.com Blogdigger.com Technorati.com 2RSS.com
Feeds4all.com

To find out how to do that and see a great video on how to create unlimited feeds by mixing and matching your existing feeds using Yahoo Pipes Check Out The RSS Marketing Lesson over at Website Promotion Blueprint.

Step 9: Video Marketing

Video marketing can be a good way to get back links to your site and, it’s easier than you might think!

Of course, you can go all out and have a promotional video made – kind of like a commercial – for your site, or if your site is on a topic where you can show people how to do things, you can do a video of yourself showing them how to do something.
But, if your site doesn’t lend itself to either one of these, or you want an easier way out, you can simply make video articles and distribute them for a link back to your site.

What’s a video article?

A video article is simply an article movie of sorts. What you do is you take an article and you split it up – you can use an article you already have or a PLR article. I usually split it into 5 or 6 different topics and then I have 4 or 5 bullet items on each topic.

I use photo editing software (I’m cheap, so I use the free software you can get at
http://www.freeserifsoftware.com/software/PhotoPlus/default.asp) to make them into slides, simply by pasting the text onto a blank 450x350 image. Sometimes I add a little image related to the subject in the background or on the bottom for interest and I put the URL to my website at the very bottom in big letters.
You could actually do the above a lot easier with power point or something similar if you have that already on your computer. I just got used to doing it with the photo software and don’t want to spend the money on power point!

Once I have 5 or 6 of these, I use a free program that you can get at http://www.codejam.com/slideshow/mow.htm or you can use Windows Movie Maker if you have that on your computer to put it into a movie slideshow. It’s so easy, it’s silly!

I put music in the background of mine but you could talk through the slides if you wanted I guess. That seems like too much work to me, so I opted to purchase resale rights to music that I can simply pop into the program (literally, you just drag it into the slideshow and it plays automatically!).

Please be careful when you use music because most music is copyrighted so you want to be sure you get music that you have the rights to distribute in your videos. The Warrior Forum – Special Offers section is a great place to pick up some really great music for this purpose.
Once you have your video made, you want to upload it to YouTube (you can create an account there for free) and also distribute it at heyspread.com – this service distributes the video to several other sites (you have to sign up for an account at each of these first, of course) and it’s pretty cheap. You buy credits and for $10 you can distribute a ton of videos so it’s really worth the money. Of course, there are other distribution services that will spread your video around even more, but these are more costly.

Step 10 Analyzing Your Traffic

HAVE PATIENCE!

Sorry, didn’t mean to scream but with new websites you have to have patience! Usually, traffic doesn’t just come roaring in … it builds over time and all the hard work you are putting in now will pay off in spades in the long run because you’ll have a website that gets traffic on autopilot!

Once your site is getting some traffic though (I’m talking 300 or more visitors a month) you can start to look at the traffic and see what keywords it is being found for, then you can work on promoting those pages to the #1 position in Google.
I have a video that shows you exactly what I mean over on the site – Click Here To check it out.

Article Writing Tips

Of all the website promotion techniques probably the most talked about is article marketing. It’s also my favorite and makes up the bulk of my website promotion strategy.

What’s so great about article marketing?

This technique of promoting your website actually serves 3 purposes:

1. The first is to get those all important back links to your website.
2. The second is to help establish you as an expert in your field
3. The third (and one that a lot of people forget about) is to get you actual traffic from the articles.

Needless to say, the first item can be accomplished with even the crappiest of articles, but to pull off items #2 and #3 you need to have a well written and informative article that commands respect and makes the reader want to learn more and, therefore, click through to your website.
For each article you write, you need to decide what it’s purpose is. If you are doing a mass submission simply for back links, it might be more cost effective for you to outsource the article through a low cost service and save your own time for more valuable activities.

However, if you are submitting to the more “important” article directories such as Ezinearticles, you might want to write the article yourself or hire an expert so that you can come off looking like you know your stuff and gain some visitors that might become future customers.

Writing The Article

Each article has a title, a body and a resource box.

The Title

The title needs to be well thought out as this is what you will use to draw the visitor in to read your article. It should also include the keyword phrase that you want the article to rank for.
The most important thing you can remember when writing your title is to list a benefit as part of the title. You want to show the reader how his life will be better after he reads your article. Something like:

“Skin Tag Remedies – You’ll No Longer Be Embarrassed To Wear A Tank Top With These Natural Remedies For Skin Tags”

Some other techniques that are effective include asking a question, or using a list style title like “10 ways to….” Or “5 steps to ….”

Don’t skimp on this part of article writing – the title is the only thing most people will see from a listing of articles so you want yours to stand out and draw them in so they click it and read the article, eventually getting to the resource box and your website link.

Finally, of course the body of your article must deliver on what you have promised in the title.

The Body

The body should give good information, but just enough so that it leaves the visitor wanting more.