SFI Affiliate Team News!
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Wow, good work team! Well done to Ashih Gautam, Sanjana Menon, Athar Maz for renewing your EA status. I'll send you each 5 x PSAs in March! (Today) * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Congratulations to Bianca Gant on renewing EA status! I'll send you 5 x PSAs in March and also write and post an article on the free SFI promotional website I made for you. :) (Today) * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Congratulations to Syed Jailani on getting to EA status. I'll send you 5 x PSAs in March. :) (2 days ago) * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Congratulations to Chris Bowen for renewing EA status. I have just sent you 25 TCredits and will send you 5 x PSAs in March. (4 days ago) * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Congratulations to Vishwanath Pillay and Dennis Wilson for getting to EA level so quickly! I will send you each 5 x PSAs in March! (6 days ago) * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Congratulations to Alex Jackson on getting to EA status. I'll send you 5 x PSAs in March! (1 week ago) * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Well done Sanjana Menon for achieving Silver Team Leader rank; Matt Conlon for achieving Bronze Team Leader rank Kannie Lai on becoming an EA. I'll send each of you 5 x PSAs in February! (3 weeks ago) * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Congratulations to David Pramono and Jared Getz on getting to EA status. I will send each of you 5 x PSAs in February! :) (4 weeks ago) * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Congratulations to Bianca Gant on requalifying as an EA again. I'll send you 5 x PSAs in February. Oh, and I will also make you a free Wordpress website to promote SFI, as I promised! :) (4 weeks ago) * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

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21st Feb 2012
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Author Archive

SEO Article Writing: 5 Tips For Writing Helpful Articles That Readers Love

Some people do SEO article writing. Others write articles that readers really love. The trick is to combine the two and write articles that are keyword focused but that still make sense and appeal to human readers.

I'm sure you've seen SEO articles that were anything but appealing. They were loaded with a certain phrase that was repeated very conspicuously throughout the article. The sentence phrasing was awkward and hard to understand. The article looked as if it had been written by a machine and not a real human being!

These are not the type of SEO articles that you wan to produce. You can do so much better than that!

Read the rest of this entry »

Are There Only 3 Article Submission Sites Worth Submitting To?

Some Internet marketers will tell you that "there are only 3 article submission sites worth submitting to". Perhaps you have heard this and are wondering: "Is it true?"

Answer: It is absolutely, positively not true!

Anyone who professes that there are only 3 article submission sites worth submitting your articles to has misunderstood the main goal and benefit of article marketing, not to mention severely limiting the results that they could be achieving.

Here's why... Read the rest of this entry »

Article Marketing Strategies: Understanding Links and the Search Engines

Many people create article marketing strategies without realizing how article marketing works or what the ultimate purpose of it is.

The tendency is to think that an article is published on a particular article directory or website, that people find the article, read it, then click the link in the resource box, and that is how article marketing generates traffic to a website.

Actually, the traffic that you receive from any one article on any one directory is only a small token compared to the real benefit of article marketing–increased search engine traffic.

By getting a higher ranking in Google for your keyword terms, you can dramatically transform your website, your sales, and your business.

What’s the big deal about a high ranking in Google?

Research shows that the website that ranks #1 in Google receives about 8.5 as much traffic as the #5 site.

So, if your website is currently in the #5 slot and it is receiving 3,000 unique views a month, then if it were to rise to the #1 slot you would be getting around 25,500 unique views a month.

That’s a significant increase!

If your site is currently lower than the #5 spot, the difference would be even more staggering.

Do you see why any direct clicks from articles are almost incidental compared to the traffic that you could be getting from search engines?

Here’s an image to illustrate this concept: Would you rather buy a canteen full of water or a fresh water spring?

The first option is limited, just like direct clicks from your articles on article directories can be. The second option is limitless, just like search engine traffic.

Sure, clicks from articles can add up after a while, especially if you’ve been article marketing for long time, but it is still nothing compared to what you could have if your website ranked higher in Google for popular keyword terms in your niche.

It’s All About Web Pages, Rather Than Websites…

For any site to get ranked in Google, Google first has to determine what it is ‘about’. Actually though, what is being ranked is individual web pages, rather than entire websites. When you do a search in Google, you will get a list of results, and each result is a web page, rather than a website.

Yes, Google establishes a big picture of what your overall website is ‘about’, but they do so to determine where to rank each individual page from your site.

Web pages that are on websites with closely related content speak more loudly to Google than web pages that are on websites that are more general.

For example, assuming all other elements are equal, a web page about Poodles on a general site about animals will not rank as highly as a web page about Poodles on a site that is devoted to Poodles.

Generally speaking, the more a web page relates to the overall website, the more likely it will rank well.

Is this all making sense so far? I know that it can be a bit overwhelming to undertake understanding how search engines and links work, but we’ve kept things pretty simple here. Hopefully at least you’ve grasped that the benefits of article marketing are not all tied up in clicks you get from individual articles. There is so much more to be gained. Search engine traffic is where the money is!



Steve Shaw is a content syndication specialist. Do you own a blog? Need content? Join thousands of other blogs and get free high-quality, niche-focused, human-reviewed content from quality authors sent on auto-pilot – and it’s all 100% free! Get free blog articles now.

How To Do Keyword Research For Online Marketing With Articles

Understanding how to do proper keyword research is important for getting the very best results you possibly can when one is doing online marketing with articles.

You’re not sure how to go about it?

Not a problem! In this article I will show you a simple and completely free way to get started.

Keywords are phrases and words of notable significance that Google’s customers make use of when they’re searching for actual information on your personal topic. As a website operator, you must know which words your prospective customers are entering into MSN, Yahoo, Google, etc, so you can customize your content and your website to satisfy those searches.

First and foremost, you have to understand what you’re searching for:

1 – The Supply: This is the number of web pages that are competing for a specific keyword term.

2 – The Demand: The amount of people looking for this distinct keyword term.

Ideally, these specific keyphrases will enjoy a really high demand (lots of people searching for that term) with a relatively low supply (not that many web pages challenging for that term).

It might not always be this way —depending on how combative your actual niche is, you can end up with some main keyword phrases which in actual fact have very high competition with an extremely high potential traffic reward.

What you want to avoid, at all costs, is a term that has high competition and little reward.

First Step: Determine the Demand

Use Google’s very useful and free keyword research tool to find out the demand for particular words and phrases at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Input your primary phrase–this is just a phrase related to your niche. For example, say your website is about the grooming of dogs, then you could start by typing the words ‘dog grooming’ into Google’s keyword tool.

The tools results will tell you a lot of connected keywords that you could also add to your list . You’ll be able to see just how many individual searches are undertaken each and every month for that particular key term–that is the demand.

Second Step: Determine the Supply

You must also use Google’s own search results data to establish how many other websites are competing for this term.

Go to Google and enter the keyword phrase that you are researching, putting the phrase in quotation marks (eg: “dog grooming”).

When the search has been done, you’ll be able to observe the number of results beneath the search box. the number expresses exactly how many web pages are challenging for that actual phrase.

Now, Compare the Supply with the Demand.

Is the demand relatively high? If so, you may consider this an excellent term to utilise as a main keyword.

If however, the demand is low, then it will be worth it to take on such tough competition for relatively little reward.

Your Marketing With Articles Assignment

The information that we’ve covered today is quite basic, so it’s ideal for beginners to get their feet wet with.

This week, carry out some basic keyword research using the above steps. See what can be acheived by using Google’s free tools. If you are a newcomer to keyword research, they will assist you in carrying out these straightforward searches. You will find it much easier to use keywords when marketing with articles.


Steve Shaw’s article submission service has helped thousands of business owners worldwide build traffic, leads and sales to their websites – grab his free report giving you a blueprint for attracting sustainable, dirt-cheap, long-term, targeted traffic to any website! Go now to http://www.submityourarticle.com/report and learn how to boost your traffic by up to 600%!

Marketing With Articles: Does It Really Work Or Not?

Like some other people are you puzzled when it comes to the effectiveness of marketing with articles on the Internet?

If so, read on as the aim of this article is to answer this question once and for all:

Does online article marketing work?

Article marketing works for the majority of people who do it in the appropriate way. You do not have to be an SEO mastermind or technical guru to make it work.

Online article marketing is rather straightforward, and millions of ordinary everyday, small business owners utilise it with regular success as their main marketing tool for their website.

So the question is, what would cause a person to declare that marketing with articles doesn’t perform for their business?

By far the most common reason why a person does not see the results he is seeking is this:

The person does not submit their articles consistently enough to get results.

Humans are very predictable – we want to see a massive payoff for hardly any work. It is for that reason that we start an exercise program and give up after a week or two, deflated because we do not look like a professional sportsperson already.

Too Often people tend to want instantaneous results in pretty much anything they undertake, and this is why it could be easy for some folks to get discouraged when they start their online article marketing campaigns.

Okay, I will tell you what you should realistically expect, so that you will be able to keep your determination and energy going for long enough to start seeing good results.

1. First, you will start to submit just a few articles a month. If you are submitting automatically, eight articles is a good amount every month for each website you are marketing.

Over the first few months:

*You might not see much change to your website traffic. Of course, there could be a few clicks coming from the articles that have been published around the net, and you might well experience a number of large surges of traffic straight after publication, but almost certainly not enough to really surprise you, and nothing like the level of the traffic you might get with a higher search engine ranking;

*You may not see any extra backlinks showing up for your website in the search engines at this stage;

*You may not observe any improvement to your site’s Google ranking for your websites keyword terms.

Sounds disheartening, doesn’t it?

That is why it is really helpful to be forewarned and forarmed – the initial couple of months in your campaign is when you’re building things up, but you won’t actually observe a lot of evidence of your campaigns progress.

2. You must stick with it and continue to progress with your article submission campaign. After these first few months of your activity, you should see an onrush of backlinks showing up for your site in Google and the other search engines. These are the links that you’ve been building over the previous few months. They do not appear immediately–it takes some time for Google to calculate them.

You might well also spot your PageRank start to creep up either after or before your backlinks start to show up.

In Addition, if you’ve been using keywords in your article submissions, you might start spotting your website’s initial jumps up the Google rankings. (To help you observe your ongoing progress, it’s sensible to keep a note of your ranking, backlinks and PageRank for your keyword terms before you start marketing with articles.)

3. Motivated by your initial triumph, you continue to submit articles consistently, and a small number at a time, in fits and starts and occasionally massive jumps, your site will go up the Google rankings.

Your huge “payoff” is increasing traffic from the searches people are doing on Google and the other search engines. In actual fact, this is the primary objective of article marketing —so you can obtain a higher search engine ranking so that you are able to cash in on the truckload of traffic that a really high search engine ranking delivers.

The time this process will take is very much dependent on your own specific niche and just how competitive it happens to be.

Now you understand what a great many other small company owners are doing to see transforming developments to their website traffic. So, go on and make marketing with articles work for you!



Steve Shaw’s article submission service has helped thousands of business owners worldwide build traffic, leads and sales to their websites – grab his free report giving you a blueprint for attracting sustainable, dirt-cheap, long-term, targeted traffic to any website! Go now to http://www.submityourarticle.com/report and learn how to boost your traffic by up to 600%!

Article Marketing Success: 5 Steps For Creating An Easy-To-Market Website

Here are some tips about how to achieve article marketing success for anyone who has a brand new website and is not sure what the next step is.

If this is you – don’t feel bad! Pretty much everyone who has a website has at one time felt totally clueless. Marketing a website is not rocket science, but there are some things that you need to do to prepare.

Here are 5 steps that will make your website easier to market:

1. Keyword research.

You want your website to rank highly for certain words/phrases that your potential customers are typing into Google. These words/phrases of special significance are called “keywords”.

You find out which are the best words to rank highly for by doing keyword research. You can then use this information in the creation of content for your website and online article submissions.

2. Fill your website with helpful information on your niche.

It’s a great idea to have a blog as part of your website, because it will allow you to create a steady stream of fresh content for your site.

When Google and the other search engines are ranking websites, they are trying to evaluate how good your website is at supplying people with useful information on your topic. You will help your case immensely if you will create a website that has new educational content published regularly.

3. Take the content from your blog and rewrite it into articles.

You want the content on your own website to remain unique, but you can use your blog posts as inspiration for the free reprint articles that you will write to market your site.

Article marketing is an excellent way for you to build links to your website. Building links is a way to increase your website’s search engine ranking, which in turn brings more traffic to your site. The articles that you create can also bring viewers to your website.

4. Create a resource box that uses your keywords to form the link.

Along with each article that you submit, you will include a resource box, which is like an author bio. This bio includes your name (optional, but suggested), a brief biography that establishes your expertise, a reason to visit your website, and finally a link to your website.

The link in your resource box can be formed by just typing out your website address, but a more search engine friendly resource box will have a special link that is formed by one of your keyword phrases. It isn’t super hard to learn, but you’ll need to do a little investigating to figure out how to make this special type of link on the site that you’re submitting to.

5. Syndicate your free reprint articles through an automatic article submitter.

Of course you could submit your articles by hand to a few sites, but you will never be able to match the performance of an automated article submission system that sends your article to tons of publishers with the push of a button. For the work that you’ve put into your article, you want to be sure that you get the best results possible. Getting your article onto as many websites as you can is absolutely essential for article marketing success.

You might have known about a few of these steps already – many small business owners know that article marketing is a great way to bring exposure to their businesses. Lots of times people want to jump right in with step 5 without doing the other steps, but when you do that you are missing many of the benefits that article marketing can give you.

Be sure to do your keyword research and create a website that has lots of quality information. Make your content do double duty. You can use a good quality article rewriter to rewrite  content from your own site and submit it as articles to hundreds of article directories.

Finally, use your keyword research to create a resource box that with your keyword phrase in the link.

Follow these steps consistently and you will achieve article marketing success.


Steve Shaw is a content syndication specialist. Do you own a blog? Need content? Join thousands of other blogs and get free high-quality, niche-focused, human-reviewed content from quality authors sent on auto-pilot – and it’s all 100% free! Go to http://www.autoblogit.com for more information.

Article Marketing Strategies: Using Google’s Wonder Wheel In Keyword Research

Google offers a very cool free tool that you might not even be aware of. It’s called ‘Wonder Wheel‘, and it’s extremely useful at helping you develop a list of keywords for your article marketing strategies.

When you begin doing keyword research, you have a few phrases that you know are associated with your niche. You can use those phrases as a springboard on Google’s Wonder Wheel to alert you to other related keyword terms that you might not have even thought about before.

Where is Google’s Wonder Wheel?

Where do you find the Wonder Wheel?

Likely it’s been under your nose all along and you didn’t even see it.

Go to Google’s main page as if you were going to do a search. Type in your search terms – this would be one of your keyword terms that you are researching.

Let’s say that your website is about chocolate recipes. So, you would then type in the words ‘chocolate recipes’ into Google’s search box and hit “Search”.

Now, look on the left hand sidebar for a link that says, “Wonder wheel“. Click that link.

How to use the Google Wonder Wheel

What will show up on the results looks like a sun – a circle in the middle with the words that you searched for (chocolate recipes, in this case) and then lines coming out from that with phrases that are related to chocolate recipes.

In this example, these were some of the related terms:

  • chocolate candy recipes
  • chocolate truffle recipes
  • simple chocolate recipes
  • easy chocolate recipes
  • homemade chocolate recipes
  • how to make chocolate

You can then click on any of these related terms to get more detailed information. For example, clicking on “how to make chocolate” brings up another sun with lines projecting from the center that say:

  • how to make chocolate chip cookies
  • how to make chocolate bars
  • how to make chocolate candy
  • how to make fudge

It goes on and on. Notice how the Wonder Wheel is giving very detailed information about phrases related to the initial search. You start with one keyword term that you’re researching, and all of a sudden you have a dozen additional related phrases to go off of. This is extremely helpful for doing keyword research.

Use the Tilda Key…

Here’s one more Google keyword tip: type the tilda ~ character (it’s on your keyboard) into Google’s search box and then type your keyword directly after.

The results will show web pages with words highlighted that Google considers to be semantically related to the original keyword.

For example, when I type the tilda character directly followed by the term ‘recipe’ into Google, the results include web pages with related keyword terms in bold. Some of them are ones you might not have considered to be semantically related, but Google does.

For the word “recipes”, Google has “food”, “cooking”, “recipe”, “ingredients”, as part of the results.

Interesting! This would be helpful information to anyone who had ‘chocolate recipes’ as a keyword term to know what other words Google would consider to be related. They could then integrate those words into their article. Likely those words would naturally show up in an article about “chocolate recipes” anyway, but at least you would know that they were aiding your cause in alerting Google to the subject matter of your website.

Your Assignment:

Use the Wonder Wheel and the tilda character search to expand your keyword research. The information that you gain will help you create properly optimized articles.


Steve Shaw is a content syndication specialist. Do you own a blog? Need content? Join thousands of other blogs and get free high-quality, niche-focused, human-reviewed content from quality authors sent on auto-pilot – and it’s all 100% free! Get free blog content now.

Article Marketing Strategies: How Search Engines View Your Website

As you’re trying to develop article marketing strategies to maximize the effectiveness of your article marketing efforts you will become more and more interested in what search engines are actually seeing when they look at your website.

Don’t worry, this article is not going to be filled with techy jargon that makes your brain hurt–we’re keeping things extremely simple here, but still giving you information you need taught in a way that you can understand.

This is a very simple and brief SEO (search engine optimization) lesson. When search engines are trying to determine what your website is ‘about’, they look at the following 4 factors (along with the individual pages that your site contains):

1. The text that appears on your website.

This would be the text of your titles, headings, and other readable text on your web page such as names, alternate names, and captions of images, etc. Search engines also look at your domain name, so it is beneficial to have one that includes the primary keyword that you want to rank highly for.

2. Your website’s internal links.

That means that if ‘Page 1′ links to ‘Page 2′ with the text ‘Golden Retriever Dogs’, then it indicates to the search engine that ‘Page 2′ is about ‘Golden Retriever Dogs’.

This has indications for all of the internal links on your website. For example, if you have a link to your home page that has the text ‘Home’, then that link is not telling the search engines anything about what your website is about. It would be a great idea to look over all the major links on your site and make sure that the text that forms the link actually describes what the page being linked to is about.

3. Outbound links from your site to other sites.

Did you know that linking out to other sites can help your SEO? If the sites you are linking to are relevant to your topic, and ideally if you use text to form the link that describes the page that you’re linking to (ie ‘Golden Retriever Dogs’ rather than ‘click here’), then those outbound links can also help search engines identify what your site is about.

4. Backlinks: links from other sites to your own site.

This is the biggie: Search engines regard each link coming into your website as being sort of a “vote” in favor of your site. The text that the other site uses to form the link to your site plays a big role in the SEO game. These backlinks from other sites have extra power, because they are less under your control and therefore less subject to being manipulated.

There are other elements that come into play other than the element listed above (the age of your website, the amount of interaction for example with blog comments, and the amount of time that a person spends on your site when they find it via a search engine), but the 4 indicators listed above are the biggies.

How Does This Affect Your Article Marketing Strategies?

Your article marketing strategies can have a big impact on your website’s ranking.

You write articles on the general topic of your website, and then create a resource box that links back to your site. Ideally, you would make it so that the links in your resource box used text that described what your website was about (your keywords).

For best results, use an automatic article submitter, which will allow you to distribute your content to the most publishers possible for the least amount of effort on your part.

Your goal is to build the incoming links to your website, ideally using text that describes your site (your keywords) to form the link. This is how your search engine ranking is transformed. Natural search traffic is what you’re going for. That is the key to transforming your website traffic.

Steve Shaw’s article distribution service has helped thousands of business owners worldwide build traffic, leads and sales to their websites – grab his free report giving you a blueprint for attracting sustainable, dirt-cheap, long-term, targeted traffic to any website! Go now to http://www.submityourarticle.com/report and learn how to boost your traffic by up to 600%!

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