You may have heard of things like article marketing, blogging, and web2.0 sites. These are three very broad topics that together I call content marketing. Using the techniques of content marketing you are going to be placing your content in various places to promote your site or business.

And the best part of this is that it can be done without having to pay anything. There are systems, tools, and things that can be done to speed up the process if you have the funds to do this but these are totally optional.

For content marketing to work, you need an important thing - content. And you need as much as you can get. You can never have too much content.

Getting content for your promotions

Content is an article relating to your business is some fashion that you write or have written for you.  Your article should be from 300-800 words in length.  This should be a unique article.  Please don’t take other peoples' content off the Internet. This is not going to work for some of the places where you will be putting the articles.  There are places to get PLR (Private Label Rights) articles, but again, these will not work as too many people have access to the same content.   You can take PLR articles to use as research and rewrite them to make unique articles. I do this quite a bit with the PLR groups I am in.

Some people say you should be writing for a certain keyword density.  No. Please don’t do that.  You should write a natural looking and sounding article without trying to stuff any particular word in there a certain number of times.  If you were ever to hire a writer and they ask what keyword density you would like, fire them on the spot.

At this time, don’t worry about putting any links in your articles. This can be done once you are finished.

I will be discussing this site more (for submitting articles to) but for now if you would like to see samples of articles poke around this site:  http://ezinearticles.com. There are tons of articles in a verity of topics. Some are good and some are not so good.  It will give you ideas of what you can do.

If you are like me and don’t like to write, you can hire other people to write for you.  There are sites that allow you to post jobs and people will respond to them. These are sites like guru.com, elance.com, and rentacoder.com. Craigslist.org also is a place where you can post an ad. Finding a good writer might not be easy though. Many times you will have to go through many people to find one or two good ones. Don’t be afraid to fire the bad ones. It doesn't help you if you don't get what you need.  I normally say that you should be paying from $6-15 per article based on the size and topic. If you are writing for an English speaking audience you should look for native English speakers.  Overseas workers can be cheap but often times they aren't the best option for articles.

I now use a service called need-an-aritcle.com. It's a low monthly fee of $10 and then about $6 an article. Using this service you place your article request on a posting board and one of the writers can choose to accept your job if they can write on that topic. The articles are normally top rate.

Using articles for site promotion

Depending on how you plan to use the content you will need to have it set up in certain way.

If you go back to ezinearticles.com and look at various articles you will notice at the bottom of the articles are an author’s resource box. For article marketing, this is how you get to promote your site. You add the extra few lines at the bottom with a "call to action" and keywords to get them to go to your site. A call to action is simply something that you write there that will hopefully get the person to click the link to your site. If I just say “I run a fishing site, click here to see it”, that will not get much action. But if I say something like "get your free guide to catching more fish in New York" than people interested in fishing in New York are likely to go through to your site. This is the best traffic.  They are targeted to your business, in this case, if you run a fishing business in New York. And when doing this you can get targeted keyword backlinks.  This is when you choose to use keywords for your links and not "click here".

Here is a sample resource box using html to create two keyword backlinks and a URL link.

If you are interested in <a href="http://ezinearticles.com/submit/">getting backlinks to your site</a> and learning more about <a href="http://ezinearticles.com">article marketing</a>, visit http://ezinearticles.com

Don't forget to link to more than just your home page.  Link to other pages on your site. This is called deep linking. And the next time you submit an article, change up the call to action to include different keywords and different URLs on your site.

Putting the content to use

If you don't already have an account with ezinearticle.com, head over there and set up an account.  http://www.ezinearticles.com/submit/ 
They have lots of information on the page to help you.  On the top of the page, there is an audio play button for information about the form.  On the right is a short video about using their site including how to submit an article.  Please watch this video to learn how to use the site.  I would also recommend the option to receive their email training series.

Go now and get started submitting articles to ezinearticles.com.  Don't stop after one article. Keep submitting more articles as you have them ready.

And keep creating more content as there are a lot more sites where you can be placing the articles.

I was recently asked what a backlink is and why would one want one for their website. Here is some important information about backlinks. They are vital to the success of your site.

What is a backlink?

A backlink is simply a web link that points to another site.  This is also known as an incoming link.

What is the purpose of a backlink?

In simple terms, backlinks point out other sites.  These are links that people or search engines bots can travel from one site to the next.

Why are having backlinks important?

Backlinks serve a couple of important purposes.   First, they get you noticed.  Think of it this way; if you saw a person point to another person you might notice. If you saw many people pointing to single person it would do a better job of getting your attention. The more people that are pointing at you with backlinks, the more you would get noticed.  And in this case you will be noticed by an important party, the search engine bots, also known as spiders. These bots are what find and crawl your sites to get them listed in the search engines.

Second, backlinks bring you traffic. This traffic is the real people who are reading web content and click on one of your backlinks to get to your site.  The more places you have backlinks the more likely you will be seen.

Backlinks are also a bit of a popularity contest. The search engines use knowledge of the links pointing to your site to help judge how high your page will show on the search result pages. There are many other factors that also help with this ranking.   At one time it was a race to see who could get the most incoming links to their sites so they would rank the highest.  This created link spam. Unscrupulous people made automated programs that would slap out backlinks as fast as possible in many different ways. Once the search engines caught on to this, they changed their secret ranking formulas so that the person with the most links is not necessarily the winner. So please don’t try these gimmicks that get you thousands of links with a click of the mouse.  These don’t work.

One thing that matters more in links these days is the trust or authority value of the site that is linking to you. This means that the higher the authority value of the site pointing to your site, the more the value you get. Think of it this way. You are in a university class and you point to another student. Now the professor points to that student. Between you and the professor, it would be the professor that would hold more authority and thus have more “value” in pointing.

So why bother chasing after links from sites that you have never heard of? Well, first, you don’t know the trust/authority value of a site. This is a hidden value. Therefore all links have some value. It comes down to working in a time efficient manner to get links that should be the best value for you.

For the best time value you want to find a place to put a link that can include getting some user traffic while including some trust and authority value. You should be looking to get links from sites that are within the theme of your market.  If you are in the real estate market, you would not get a lot of value with a link from a dog training site: whereas, if you had a link on a mortgage site this link would be of better value to you.

One easy way to get themed backlinks is by joining conversations on blogs. You find blogs related to your market, read the posting, and leave a comment about that posting.  Blogs were built for commenting. This interaction with the site users is very well liked by the search engine bots. The important thing to note here is that I said to join the conversation. This means you need to read, or skim the post and leave a worthwhile post. Don’t just leave a “good info” comment with a link to your site.  This is considered as spam and will most likely not get posted and/or it will get deleted.

When posting a comment, blogs generally ask for your name, email, and a URL.  This URL entry box is where you can enter your site and then leave your comment below without any links.  The blog will automatically link your name to your site. If you put a link in your comment it is more likely to be considered as spam.  

Want to see how it works? You can scroll down below this post and enter a comment. Yes, I said on theme links are better, but any link is better than no link.

If you have not already done so, you can download a special program called Comment Kahuna that will help you find on theme blogs that you can leave comments to and start getting links.