Mark Thompson is the creator of Wordpress Goldmine, a training manual (and much more) for people interested in getting started, or getting better at affiliate marketing. Recently, he came up with a fun contest for the owners of Wordpress Goldmine – to see which one of us could rank the highest for an obscure keyword phrase. The phrase we came up with to focus on was “Website Promotion Exercise”, since that was exactly what we were going to be doing.

Well I thought “I’ve got a lot of much better money-making things to be doing” and figured I’d just let this one go by. But just as quickly, I put that thought out of my head and replaced it with “Hey, this might be something I can win, and even if I don’t I might learn a thing or two!” So I decided to give it a shot, and here’s my first effort.

Here’s my plan – let’s see how it works:

First, I’m going to write a short article, somewhere around 500 words or less. (If you’re reading this article on www.onlinebusinessbuffet.com, then you’re reading that very article right now). I’m going to do my best at using the term website promotion exercise three or four times in the article, in strategically placed areas.

Secondly, I’m going to write the article in several short paragraphs, as that’s the requirement of the tool that I’m going to use to create back links. Back links are simply links to your primary article from various websites and/or blogs. The more quality back links you have to your article, the higher it’s going to rank on Google.

Next, I’m going to use that tool to create thousands of unique articles that get blasted all over the web. The tool is called Unique Article Wizard – it’s the best thing I’ve found for creating quality back links.

Then, I’m going to promote the site at several different social bookmarking sites, once again creating quality back links to my original article, and at the same time hopefully getting those articles listed in google, too.

Lastly, I’m going to use another inexpensive tool, RSSBot, to submit my blog to many different Feed Aggregators, once again to create quality back links to my article.

That's my plan – check back to see how my website promotion exercise performs!

By the way, if you want to learn all about creating money-making “mini-blogs”, take a look at Wordpress Goldmine. Not only do you get the book itself, but you also get access to his member’s only forum, where you’ll get continuing education from the other members and Mark himself on the ever-changing world of affiliate marketing. My opinion? It’s the most important investment I’ve made. It’s enabled me to create an income that’s growing every month, and allowing me to get ever closer and closer to quitting that dreaded deadly day job!

Backlinks are links back to your website from other websites. If you post an article in ezinearticles.com or on Squidoo or Hubpages, and you have a link to your blog or website in that article, that's called a backlink. Pretty simple.

What's the big deal? Why do I need backlinks?

One word - Google! Google likes backlinks, especially ones that are correctly formatted and are from credible sites. The higher the Google Page Rank of the site where your backlink is, the more Google likes it. And when Google likes your site or blog, they rank it higher for the keyword you're targeting. The higher you're ranked, the more you're going to get clicked, and the more money you're going to make.

Therefore, the more backlinks you have to your site the better.

What do you mean "correctly formatted" backlinks? Can't I just put my website url out there?

Well, you can, and that does help, but the best way to do it is to have anchor text. Anchor text is simply the keyword you're trying to target made into a link. Important! That same keyword must exist on your website! What? I don't understand what that means!

Here's an example. Say you've done your keyword analysis research and have decided that a good keyword to focus on for your website or blog is "maple tree". What you want to do is use "maple tree" in the title of your page, several times on the page itself, and hopefully in the url, for instance http://yoursite.com/maple-tree. Then, in the article you post out there to create the backlink you use "maple tree" as a link, and link it to http://yoursite.com/maple-tree. That's it!

How to check backlinks

The website I use to check my backlinks is http://www.inlineseo.com/blog/2008/03/17/how-to-check-how-many-backlinks-your-site-has. This site has many different options for checking your backlinks. The one I like is the first one, but it's not always working right. It's http://seopro.com.au/free-seo-tools/link-checker. Go take a look. Put in one of my more established sites, http://www.networkmarketing4today.com and see how many backlinks I have. It should be quite a few - last time I checked it was 74. This isn't always totally accurate - I know I've got a lot more than that, but it will give you an idea. I credit that fact that my site has a Page Rank of 1 and rising with how many backlinks I have.

OK, OK, so back to "how to get backlinks"! What's the secret?

The most important tool I have found in my opinion for increasing my traffic is Unique Article Wizard, or UAW. Unique Article Wizard is an online program that takes an article you have written and helps you create thousands of unique versions of it to post around the internet. Unique is important, because you don't want the same article out there thousands of times - Google punishes duplicate content.

I'm not allowed to say how it works, but suffice it to say that it doesn't just replace words with synonyms - that creates articles that don't read naturally. It actually creates unique articles that read like a human wrote them - because one did! You have to spend approximately ½ hour extra on your article to prepare it for publication.

So what does this do for you?

Basically, what this software does is submit your unique articles to hundreds or thousands of different blogs and websites for publication, depending on your niche. You include 2 properly formatted links to your site in each article, and if the blog decides to publish your article, voila! You have 2 backlinks! Not only that, but you can easily change the anchor text on your backlinks, so that you can target different keywords with the same article.

The software also allows you to release articles all at once, or a certain number per day. Their suggestion is 50 per day, as this builds links over a period of time, which is natural. The other neat thing is that whenever you want to post a copy of the article somewhere else, for instance on Squidoo or Hubpages, all you have to do is click on the article and it gives you a totally unique version, with a resource box at the bottom with your two links. I use it all the time!

Seriously, I feel that this is the most important purchase I've made for my business, and it has totally helped me to solve the problem of how to get backlinks. Click here to learn all about Unique Article Wizard today!

Micro-Niche Finder is the keyword analysis research tool that I went with when I decided to buy a keyword analysis research tool instead of continuing to rely on the free keyword search tools.

When I started my online business, I tried to keep the expenses to a minimum. Believe me, there are a lot of tempting offers out there that promise to make you a million bucks. You've just got to keep your credit card in your wallet. And that's not easy. Everything sounds so good! That being said, I think it's important to invest in a good keyword analysis research tool. There are many of them out there, and some of them are pretty expensive, so be careful.

I found Micro-Niche Finder to be the right combination of ease-of-use, features, and price. You put in a keyword you want ideas for, and it returns the top 200 words and phrases that it feels are relevant, with the approximate number of searches per month listed next to them.

One of the cool things about Micro-Niche Finder is that it gives you all kinds of terms that don’t even have the word you searched for in it. Why is this important? Say you search on network marketing. Not only does it come up with terms like “top network marketing companies” and “successful network marketing”, it will also show you terms like “residual income” and “work at home”. It’s really great at providing lots of long-tail keywords that you never think of. This is the key to internet marketing, finding the search terms that everyone else isn't focusing on.

My biggest problem when I got started in internet marketing was thinking of good keywords. Keywords are one of the three most important parts of the process. The other two are quality backlinks and good content. If you don’t targe keywords that people are searching on, it doesn’t matter how good your website is. People just aren’t going to find it. That’s why I recommend a good keyword analysis research tool, like Micro-Niche Finder. It will show you those keyword phrases.

Once you’ve got a list of 200 words, you can go through and check the ones you think are interesting, then click a button and it will give you the exact phrase matches for all those words. This is an important step to determining which phrases you should target. Once you’ve determined which of those you want to target, one more click will give you the “SOC” or “Strength Of Competition” factor. This is a number that Micro-Niche Finder has come up with that will let you know just how easy or hard it will be to get ranked by Google for a certain phrase. It takes 3 factors into account - and it’s critical to your success!

James Jones' policy is that once you purchase Micro-Niche Finder, you're eligiblel for upgrades for the rest of time! Right now, the price is very good, but he's constantly updating it, and usually the price goes up whenever he comes out with a new version. You can click here for more information – you’ll have to give your email address, but he doesn’t bug you much. Once you give him that, you’ll be able to view 5 videos showing the power of this keyword search tool.

Just go watch the videos and make up your own mind. And when you do decide to purchase the product, let me know and I'll give you some hints that I've learned that have allowed me to get the most out of it.  In my opinion, buying Micro-Niche Finder was the best money I’ve spent on my internet marketing business to date – I use it at least 10 times every single day. Decide for yourself – watch the Micro-Niche Finder videos today! If you’ve got any questions, feel free to contact me and I’ll get back to you right away.

Thanks!

Matt

P.S. See the title of this post, Keyword Analysis Research? I got it from Micro-Niche Finder. Believe me, I never would have thought of it on my own. There are a bunch of searches every month on that term, and the "SOC" is pretty low, so I can be assured of coming up on the search engines quite often and quite high with this article.

I have three new best friends, but they don't know it! As far as I'm concerned, anyone that can help me make money is pretty special to me! These guys are smart, and I'm hitching my wagon to whatever they're doing! Their names are James Jones, Dr. Noel Swanson, and last but certainly not least, Mark Thompson. In fact, I think Mark's my favorite because he got me started with micro-niche websites and introduced me to the other guys. Well, not so much the other guys, but their products.

Who are these guys and what are their products?

Mark Thompson is the creator of Wordpress Goldmine, an awesome ebook explaining how to make gobs of money by building and promoting micro-niche Wordpress blogs. Please read my Wordpress Goldmine Review for more information on this product. You can also learn all about micro-niche blogs by clicking here.

James Jones is the mastermind behind Micro-Niche Finder. If you're doing any kind of internet marketing, you know the importance of keyword research. Google makes the internet marketing world go around, and if you don't know how to get your listing on the first page of Google, you're dead in the water. That's where Micro-Niche Finder comes in. There are lots of keyword research tools out there, but after extensive research I went with Micro-Niche Finder because of the combination of ease of use, features, and price. Read my Micro-Niche Finder review to learn more about this necessary weapon in your arsonal.

Dr. Noel Swanson. His product is called Unique Article Wizard and it's just that. It's a product that creates thousands of unique articles from articles that you write, and automatically distributes them around the internet. This tool is critical for two reasons:

First, you don't want duplicate content out there. If you write an article for your blog, you don't want to post it on Squidoo or Ezinearticles, too. Google will see that the 2 articles are the same, and will penalize you in the search listings - they don't like duplicate content.

Secondly, for Google to be impressed by your site, and therefore rank your listings higher, they like to see backlinks to it. Unique Article Wizard will help you create thousands of those, which will drive your search listings to the top of the big "G".

Click here for more information on Unique Article Wizard and try the product out for a month to see if it works for you. As far as I'm concerned, it's a must-have!

These 3 tools will get you going on establishing yourself as a web-entrepreneur in short order. If you have any questions about any of them, please don't hesitate to contact me directly.