Right now there is a contest going on at ezine articles. If you are not already aware (you should be) then you know that Ezine Articles is a great place to submit articles to get better rankings, traffic and more.

The contest is actually just a forced article writing program but it is called HAHD. This is 100 articles in 100 days. Do you think you can write one article a day for 100 days? The single article is not difficult but the really problem for almost anyone is consistency. There is a great prize in this contest, an Ezine Articles coffee cup.

Anyway the 100 articles in 1oo days started at the beginning of this month and I am as bad as anyone, I haven’t submitted one article yet. But instead I thought I would jumpstart things by giving you 5 great ideas for why you should submit articles during this 100 articles in 100 days contest.

1. Backlinks – The single best reason to me to get articles published is not to push traffic to landing pages but instead to get links to those landing pages. This is the best way to rank higher in the Google Serps and get yourself a lot of organic traffic

2. Traffic – The articles themselves are the best way to easily get traffic to a page that could be difficult to rank for. Weight loss traffic, debt and credit sites, are hard to rank well for and 100 articles with all those links could definitely get you hits and sales.

3. Creating a habit – Writing consistently is a habit that will make you a lot of money over time. It is easy to read forums and check stats but really the only way to make a difference in your finances is to actually make those action habits a reality.

4. Becoming a better writer – Writing a lot of articles makes you faster and consistently as well as improve your research and automation processes. I have always found that my mind works a lot better when I am doing a lot of article writing and that can be the case for you too.

5. The awesome coffee mug – I may have 100 coffee mugs already but I really love the mousepad ezinearticles sent me last year so why not add a mug to the collection.

I am in fact kind of lazy and I hate to admit it, thanks to my article writing process though I seem to do ok. I am on the computer all the time but i spend a lot of time analyzing stats and markets and keywords. I sometimes think that the technology around me is one of my worst enemies.

One of the things that has made the most difference in my internet marketing success is the backlinks that I have gotten from article directories. I use the following article directories extensively:

EZineArticles
Go Articles
Hub Pages

I may have had a lot of success in the past with articles thanks to my article writing process but I have to say that I will go and write an article and then submit it and not do anything for a while. The real problem is scheduling time every day to execute the process and here is a new process that I have created and am taking advantage of this weekend

The most important thing that you can do to improve your article writing process is of course to write a lot. Write article titles with notes, write everyday at a certain time, start keeping notes. No matter what you do if you are always writing and keeping notes of things to write about then it will be really easy to improve your article writing process very quickly.

Article Writing Process

Writing article titles – An important part of the article writing process as this gets me started. Come on all we really need to write a lot of articles is the titles and then we will in fact have something to flesh out. To do this I just created a bunch of text files and then renamed them with a proposed title eg:writing articles that bring customers.txt. There are two things at work here. First is the title that I will use that is keyword rich (no research just what I would like to use) and secondly it gives me a focus for 400-500 words of content.

Writing bio boxes – This  has always been a problem for me. I write articles and have a bio box but they are all over my computer in little text files so what I have done is added one text file and added all my bio box text including hyperlinks to the one file so no matter what I am writing about I have a bio box right at my fingertips. This keeps the flow going in my article writing process by stopping me from having to find the links to promote.

How else can you streamline your article writing process with bio box info? Well first Ezinearticles.com will allow you to add 3 personal bio box texts to select through so make sure to have these setup anyway. The other thing you can do to make bio boxes easier to write is to create a bunch of links in that file of mine that are <a href=”link”>keyword</a> just fill out a bunch of those with every one of your money pages and fit as needed when you submit an article.

Writing articles – I use the tried and true article writing process method of one or two intro paragraphs, 3 or so bullet points with expansion, and then a closing paragraph that will really pull it all together. This is all I need to get 400-500 words.

Most teachers will tell you that teaching should be a process of tell them what you want to teach, teach that info, and then tell them what you taught them. This is a tried and true method as the intro will setup your content and then the closing will ingrain the information to your readers. So try to use this process of

1. 100 words – intro
2. 400 words – content in numbered or bulleted list
3. 100 words – Wrapping up the content in the points above

Pulling it all together for article sites – To capitalize on your content either on your own site or on  other sites it is important to be able to rank for something. Far too many people just write a lot of stuff and post it with no idea how someone will find it (hint: Google brings most sites 80% of their visitors). Do a quick sweep through your article and make sure that you are 2% or so keyword rich and if you make sure you title and tags use that keyword as well.

Finally, if you can do your closing paragraph after your hook in your bio box. This will  make your article seem like it ends after your links instead of with your links and your clickthroughs will be higher.

Article Writing Process Closing

Is this the same thing that is holding you up? You can see that my article writing process is all about efficiency so that when I get started writing I do not have to stop for bits of other stuff breaking my focus. We all know that if you break down the income that you make you can probably make a good income on just writing a bunch of articles like this very one. So far this article itself is 443 words. I bet you could do lots of these as well, am I right?

Follow this article writing process everyday and see if your production increases, I am confident that it will.

Writing great articles is a core to your internet business. Not only is it a way to get traffic directly to your money pages but it is also a great way to build backlinks to your site through both the ezine articles site and anyone that uses your articles (as long as they keep your links intact).

Here is a great and prolific article writer Sean Mize with some tips to writing really effective articles.

1. Always use effective titles. Kick-start each of your articles by using titles that will make your audience want to read your articles. I wouldn’t lie about it; writing killer titles isn’t always easy but this is something that you need to learn and master as soon as possible. Remember, the success of your articles will largely depend on the effectiveness or attractiveness of your headlines.

2. Always start strong. Make it a point to put the most explosive information you have on your first paragraph. You would want to get your readers on the edge of their seats and you would want to hold their attention as long as possible. Kick-start your articles with intriguing questions or jaw-dropping statements. Ensure that these will help you make your readers want to read your articles until the end.

3. Make your articles informative. Don’t make your readers feel that they just wasted their time on your articles. Make them happy by giving them every information that they are looking for. These may include the solution to the things that they’re going through, answers to their burning questions, guides that can empower them to do certain things on their own, and useful tips and techniques.

4. Deliver well-written articles. It’s not enough that you give your readers useful information. To really satisfy them, you also need to give them great reading experience. You can do this by making sure that your articles are well-written. Your grammar usage must be perfect and you must use the most effective words at all times.

5. Ensure that your articles are flawless. Spend a couple of minutes checking your articles before you post them online. Ensure that they are free from annoying errors and make sure that your content flow smoothly.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article writing success, “Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide”

Download it free here: Article Writing

Headline says a lot but it is in fact true. We all know how hard it is to build an online business. All the big hitters and gurus make is sound like it is really easy to make money appear out of thin air but we all know that his is not true.

So how would you be able to change you business overnight?

If I look at my day and what I actually achieve there is only one thing that really matters. Building backlinks to my content and building the content itself.

I have run across a couple of principles that are easy but true and that you can implement in your day planning or week planning and will give you more control.

The first principle is the 80/20 rule. We all know this rule but never really take advantage of it. Here is how you can take advantage of this right now. 80% of your income will come from only 20% of your content, pages, and sadly, your time. This means that all of that surfing for ideas. researching and everything else that is not building your personal inventory of links and content is wasted time. I spend a lot of time split testing, blog theme tweaking, and pissing around and I have to say that all of this time is completely wasted.

The second principle is the Parkinson Principle. The Parkinson Principle says that the more time that you give to a task the bigger that your mind makes it. We see this all of the time. You “research” a new niche, lets say dog training cause that one is oversaturated, and after a while you realize that you do not know much about it so you read forums, do keyword research, look for blog headers, go to the store to look at what there is for dog training and before you know it you have 150-200 subjects that you can write about. Well no one can write that much content at one time so you leave that and move on knowing that this is a great thing that you will have to get to when you have time.

Does that sound familiar, it is with me.

So this is what you need to do. Do the minimum instead of trying to get it all right. Right an article. post, or other content and don’t worry about the keyword density, write with just the end users problem in mind. If you already have a bunch of half finished blogs or domains just get some kind of content on them and then use Google Analytics tell you if the content was worth the 20 minutes or so to write it.

I have come to understand that it is not the lack of knowledge that holds you back but the sheer impossibility of putting any of your content up in a perfect state. Perfection is for the Olympics, or job is to get content up for people to see.

I have been struggling a bit with keyword research for my different niches and lately have been using Google Adwords Keyword Search to find new keywords and then doing a search of the keyword phrase in ” ” in Google to see how much competition that I have and I use the SEO book Firefox extension to get the relative strength of each of those sites.

Well this is a bit too manual for my taste and I am always looking at a way to automate any of my processes so that I am spending more time creating content and less time working on keyword research, lets face it most people, especially me will spend way more time looking for keywords and niches than creating content and I consider myself really good when creating a lot of content.

Micro Niche Finder vs Market Samurai

In looking for more tools I ran across Market Samurai and Micro Niche Finder. Market Samurai seems to me anyway to be more focused on finding Google Adwords keywords and Micros Niche Finder is more focussed on finding keywords and phrases for articles and affiliate blogs or landing pages. I know this is not fair at all becasue they both do the same thing just in different ways. Also Market Samurai costs $149 and Micro Niche Finder is only $97. I know that cost should not matter as both products will make you many more times their investment cost if you are to use them but I am again very cheap.

So I decided to buy Micro Niche Finder. Micros Niche Finder is an app that you buy and sits on your computer. The basic way that you will use Micro Niche Finder is to type in a keyword and then you will get results from Google on related keywords and phrases and can drill down right in the interface without andy manual processes, you can get the following for any and all of these keywords:

• Competition
• Competition quality
• Actual keywords searches
• Ezine Articles related to the keyword
• Clickbank Affiliate programs related to the keyword
• Affiliate program search for the keyword
• Hot Trends today
• Brainstorm random ideas
• LSI  (related keywords) search
• Google Trends search
• Licensed and unlicensed content related to keywords

How does Micro Niche Finder automation help you?

Some of these features open in a new window and some open within the app itself but the great thing about Micro Niche Finder is that all of your keyword competition and research is taking place within minutes instead of hours and then the app even gives you a way to reasrach the term to write better content that will give your readers the trust in your recomendation for affiliate products.

There are two important things to remember when looking for a web designer:

First, it is important to go with a freelancer if you are looking for a small and simple site. You can probably get one done for $30 to $50. There are many freelancing companies on the web that you can tap into to find the designer for you.

Second, it is important that you ask to see a few sample sites that the web designer has done and that you check any ratings that may be available for the designer. This may keep you from getting wrapped up in a project with someone who will not finish or cannot do the type of job that they claim they can do.

If you cannot put together your own website to host your articles on and you don’t want to pay the extra $7 to $12 dollars per month that it may cost to get a host that offers a What You See Is What You Get website builder, then your only other option is to hire a web designer. The good thing is that, if you are looking for a very basic 2-5 page site and you hire a freelancer rather than going with a web design company, then it will be relatively easy on your wallet.

Learn to use search engine optimization techniques when writing your articles. If hiring a writer to write articles for you, you can choose one who already knows about SEO or you can supply them with a list of keywords and let them know where they should be placed and how many times they should be repeated throughout the article. Optimizing your articles for search engines will help them rank higher when someone searches for a keyword relating to your subject, which means that you will receive more visitors because more people will actually see your URL. It is a fact that most visitors don’t look past the first search engine result page and by the third search engine results page there is practically no audience left for you to promote to. What this means for those on the third or high page is no traffic. This is why it is very important for you to make sure that your articles are prepared in a way that will eventually get them to that first or second search engine results page.

How much you can make from placing articles and affiliate links on your website differs from person to person. How much you are able to make will depend mostly on how successful your site is. This means getting good search engine rankings through SEO efforts, making your site enjoyable and informative to read through engaging content, building your site around a great niche subject, how big your site is, and how many sites you have.

Some people claim to make as much as $10,000 per month ($120,000 per year) through building and promoting niche sites, however, most people should not expect this kind of success, especially if you are very new, as that kind of success usually only comes with experience and acquired skill. A reasonable income to expect from a niche site, after you have worked for months to gain traffic and are hooked up with good affiliates, may be $500-$1,000 per month. However this is recurring income, so you will make that much monthly off of the efforts you put into that one site, it is not a one shot deal.

After you have a successful site, most choose to continue to build niche sites. The more sites that you build, the better an income you can generate. Some also choose to build very fast and very short sites over sites that are slightly longer in length. It should be noted that the larger each of your sites are, the more income you will likely generate off of them.

When starting out, it is important to remember that your first site will always be your hardest, since you are just learning the ropes of the business, and that not everyone is cut out to market and promote niche sites. It may not work out for you and you may end up losing a little bit of money, but that is a risk that everyone in this business has to take.

The important thing is that you don’t give up without a good shot at it, if this is really what you want to do. Your first site may take a long time, the work may be tedious, and you may feel like throwing in the towel. However, if you give up too early, you will never know what could have been. And who knows, you may be the next great website marketer!

If you cannot or do not wish to write your articles yourself, you can search different outsourcing companies to find a freelance writer to help you grow your business and your website. These freelancers will ghost write articles for you which means that you will own all copyrights to the material that is produced to do with what you want. Freelance writers have a talent for writing, however, they would rather make quick money off of writing for others, rather than taking the time to build a niche website that will need to be heavily marketed and promoted to begin earning revenue. They are usually not marketers, but rather people who have a gift for the written word. On the other hand, those who are looking to make money from articles are marketers. They are looking to build websites that will give them long term revenue, rather than one quick payment and that is it. This Internet pool or freelance writers will open up a good opportunity for you to receive the quality, original content that you are looking for to build your niche site.

Some webmasters try to use articles from free content directories to get visitors to their site and make some money. This is mostly important for those who have just begun working as an affiliate for several companies and do not yet have any funding, yet need to built small niche websites to visitors to their site so that they can begin making revenue.

Although this can sometimes be the only option for those who are running on a non-existent budget, it is not a way that will effectively build your website or revenue. There are a few potential reasons why this may be detrimental to your business building efforts.

Problem #1 – Search Engines

Search engines will only look down upon your site if it has the exact same duplicated content than other sites. The more sites that share your content, the less it will help you achieve good search engine rankings.

Good search engine rankings are essential in getting visitors to your sit so that they have a chance to click on your affiliate links. If you cannot even get visitors, then will never make an revenue. Working on the search engine optimization of your site so that you will eventually be high enough in the results to get customers, should be priority one.

Problem #2 – Getting visitors to click

Although getting your site high on search engine result pages and acquiring site visitors is hard work, unfortunately this is only half of the battle. You must also be able to convince those visitors to click on your affiliate links. If your visitors see the same content they have seen on a multitude of other sites, they will be least likely to click on your links. This is because most people want to buy things that are recommended by people that they trust or whom they feel like are an expert on the subject.

If your content is just duplicated from other sites, you will be exposed as someone who does not really know what they are talking about and therefore will not look heavily on your product recommendations. This will reduce the number of website visitors who will be willing to click through.

Problem #3 – Author Bylines

Most free content is only given to you if you agree to place the authors byline under the article (you can get into trouble if you try to use it without following the stipulated rules). This poses a problem because most author bylines include links. When a reader gets done reading a really intriguing article, there is a strong possibility that they will click on the author’s byline link rather than your affiliate links. This is the entire reason why these authors offer free content to begin with, so that they may get their name and links out there to the public. Using this type of content may mean shooting yourself in the foot and losing possible profitable website visitors.

Once you put these three problems together, you are looking at a serious decline in revenue simply because you used free website content from article directories. Although it may be the only option for some, if you have the funds to buy your own original content, then you should go this route. If you don’t have the finds, however, you may be better off writing your own content and then hiring professional services once you have made a profit to work with.