I’m not surprised to see the amount of people focused on Google and the Penguin update. It’s like this every year, it seems. People whining, bitching and moaning and using it all as an excuse to not get anything done, as usual. Why work when you can pretend to be while visiting forums full of (broke) experts?

If something is broke in your Business, you fix it. There’s no reason to sit on forums all day “studying” what others are saying. Most SEO “experts” are running services these days and not doing much more than selling something. If you’re going to listen to them and not try things yourself, you’re going to fall behind and eventually fall victim to your own clueless mishaps.

I don’t care if 98% of your traffic comes from Google. There’s always a way to fix it and you should be doing everything you can to keep that traffic coming back. No excuses.

As for Google, it’s screwy, it’s all kinds of ugly right now. That’s life. But it will get back to normal soon and you can’t do anything about their Business. I’ve seen hundreds of bloggers talking about the Penguin update and giving all kinds of cool images, graphics and theories, and most have a lot of Matt Cutts stuff in them.

Awesome.

Neat.

Yet, not one of them has any real clue about what’s really going on, and not one of them is going to help you get your Business back on it’s feet.

Work on new traffic sources and come up with new plans on how to deal with these types of issues. It’s nobody’s fault but your own and reading a bunch of blogs about how [x] found cool data and theories on how to get your site back to normal is not going to help your Business.

SEO is a crazy Business these days. Moreso than it was in the past. No biggie, this is why you should be working on diversifying your portfolio and learning how to work with every traffic source you can, until you find that perfect source of traffic.

You should also be focusing on building lists on each property, too. If you’re not, you’re missing out BIG time.

Either way, stop focusing so much on things you cannot control and work on things you can.

Blogs talking about Penguin = not something that will help you.

You working on getting more traffic = something that will help you.

See the difference?

Posted by Clint Lenard | No Comments »

I’ve been doing Article Marketing for many years now and it seems like all of the information you read or hear about is all about getting links. This is foolish, and if this is what you’re focusing on, you’re going to be poor.

Article Marketing is a great tool, but like with any tool you have to use it correctly or you’re simply wasting your time. Writing Articles isn’t for a link on the site you’re submitting it to, and if you’re spinning that article and submitting it to a bunch of crappy sites, you’re wasting too much time on nothing.

I don’t care how high your site ranks today or tomorrow. If you’re doing things correctly you should be building a site with authority. A site that will exist years down the road and still be making money. You may get lucky and find a site that makes you some money years down the road after a lot of “testing.” Consider yourself lucky.

Building an Authoritative site consists of time and patience. You need to be persistent and you need to build a ton of content. For most sites, this content is articles. When writing articles for marketing on other sites — you need to focus on VALUE.

Articles that provide no value are deemed useless. Google has been saying this for years, yet we’re still trying to “trick them” for quick and easy links… derp.

When you provide value you will be providing your users with answers. When you provide answers you give them what they wanted. You have no earned their trust.

Oh, cool, you’ve ranked #1 for Make Money Online and it was because you built 45,584 links this week? Sweet, I’m guessing that site of yours will be there for a while and I’m guessing it provides users with great content, spun like crazy. Spinned like insane. Turn like bonkers. Around similar to deranged.

You get the point.

Those who want overnight results will find little use in providing their users with great content and that’s good news for the rest of us. It allows us to build something that people will trust and continue to visit (and subscribe to your list, hopefully).

When writing articles you want to do more than build it around a keyword or a title. You want to provide answers to questions. Everyone has problems and everyone is trying to find a solution to those problems. This is why you need to build off-site content on other properties that allow you to become an Authority. It doesn’t matter what the subject is, as long as you’re staying relevant to your niche.

Sure, the article will give you a chance to throw in some keywords, but this is where you want to do more than throw in a keyword in the anchor text. Add your URL. Trust me, post your URL/domain instead of a keyword and it will be just as good as sneaking a keyword in there. You can usually add 2 links per article (sometimes more, read guidelines), so use the other for a keyword, use one for your URL.

The point is that you want the reader to see the Domain, too. This is what I believe is the starting point to building a true Authority site vs. building a quick buck site. You’re getting the domain out there and that will hopefully (keeping in mind that Authority site domains do not look like keyword-keyword.com, etc) help the reader to remember your site, especially if/when they click it and arrive at the domain to read the (hopefully) QUALITY content of your site.

The point I’m trying to make is this:

1. Articles should be meant for MARKETING, not link building alone. Those are cool, but the articles should be marketing you, as an authoritative figure in your niche, to help build long-term traffic. It sets you up to get more subscribers, more readers, more conversions over a longer period of time.

2. Article Marketing isn’t a one-time thing. Building 2-3 articles isn’t enough if you’re really wanting to build your Business. You need to constantly be adding content to your off-site accounts, whether it’s via an Article Directory or Social Profiles (think Blogs, updates, etc). You should be spreading the content around, but adding content will get more traffic and builds more trust.

Again, if you’re writing articles for links, you’re doing it wrong. That’s not what Article Marketing is about… you’re a writer at that point (even if you’re outsourcing it), so the entire reason you’re writing these articles is to get people to read what you write and do what you want them to do (follow your link and get more quality content).

Also, if you’re outsourcing your articles, make sure that you’re paying for quality, not quantity. It’s great to have both, but quality is always better than quantity.

Posted by Clint Lenard | No Comments »