I’ve taken huge strides forward in my online businesses and I hope you have too. I finish the year more knowledgeable than I started it and that’s a good thing. There’s been some failures. Some things I’ve tried haven’t worked, some paths I’ve headed down have been impassable and I’ve had to retreat and regroup before moving on. And that’s a good thing.

I used to think failing meant I wasn’t good enough to succeed in a certain thing, now I’m wise enough to realise that failures are just experiences from which we can learn. Great teachers and not something to take personal.

I failed in a few ventures I tried earlier in the year. It doesn’t mean I won’t try again. It simply means I stop and take stock, identify where I was weak and what prevented me from moving forward, plug the gaps in my knowledge, regroup, and move forward again.

I’ve moved my online arts business forward and developed business models in other areas like affiliate marketing. I’ve got a few site up and running and have plans for many more next year. I still believe that EBay presents the fastest and most cost effective way into an online business. From EBay it’s a natural progression into other online business ventures.

I hope your own venture into an online business is succeeding and that you are enjoying it. If you are thinking of starting but keep waiting for the perfect moment. It’s never going to come because your definition of the perfect moment will keep changing.

My advice to you is just start, jump in and start whatever it is you are planning to do. I’m a great believer in learning from firsthand experience.  You’ll be surprised at the hidden strengths and resources you possess. And you will succeed.

So I would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very Happy Christmas and a Wonderful, exciting and prosperous New Year

Thank you

Paul

You need to approach this like every other part of your business, in a logical and systematic way. You cannot just sit back and hope traffic will just appear. You need to go out there and get it. If you’ve ever walked down the tourists streets of a European city you’ll see shop keepers stood outside trying to get you in. they know passing traffic is no muse to them. They need people inside their shop. It’s the same with our websites; we need people to visit them.

So how do we achieve this?

There’s a number of ways and I intend to discuss them all in a series of articles over the next week or two. The first way is called “Article Marketing” this is one of the most effective ways to bring traffic to your site. I use it for all my sites and I can vouch for its effectiveness. My web stats have proven time and again that article marketing works.

The system is quiet simple. You write short articles about a topic related to your website and post it to an article directory. This gives you a number of benefits. The first thing you get is a link to a highly ranked website, this will raise your exposure in Google. The next advantage is that a site like Ezine articles for example is visited by hundreds of thousands of people every day, some of them will be looking for articles related to your subject matter. They will read your article and usually click on the link to your website at the bottom, and visit your site for more information.

If you’ve written a good informative article, some people will take it and place it on their own websites, giving you more links and more exposure, bringing more people to your site.

Above is a screen shot of part of my Ezine articles account.  I wrote an article called “Archers in The roman Army” to promote an archery site I have. You can see by looking at the graph that so far 2,677 people have viewed the article. Many of them, I can tell you, have used the article on their own sites and almost every view resulted in a click through to my site. This one article was instrumental in bringing lots of traffic to my site. It took me less than half-an-hour to write and it is still bringing traffic to my site and will continue to do so.

If you want to see the power of articles. Go to Google and type in; Archers In The Roman Army and you’ll see my article there in number one spot.

Article marketing is a powerful way to raise the visibility of your website. You can even use it to bring people to your eBay shop. And the best part is that it’s a free way to gain traffic, and once you’ve written and posted the articles they will constantly bring traffic to your site. You will not get traffic instantly with articles but over weeks the traffic will come if you have wrote the article correctly.

Article marketing does require a little effort but like everything else, the more you do it, the easier it becomes. We have to accept that running an online business, like any business, requires effort and work. Things don’t happen without you first putting in the work.

I know many people fall for the “get rich without doing anything in a month “schemes that are all over the internet. In reality to make an income on the web you need to work at it, you need to put the time in and the results will come.

So let’s look at how we can get started with article marketing.

There’s a correct way to write articles. Get it right and you will reap the rewards in lots of traffic, get it wrong and your article will languish on the article site without anyone seeing it. You need to get every part of the article writing process right. So let’s begin using my article “Archers in The Roman Army as an example.

The Title

This is absolutely crucial to your article. Your title will be instrumental in whether people decide to read it or not. It needs to grab the eye instantly. The title must be focused and on topic. It must describe what the article is about. The title of my article, Archers in The roman Army leaves no mistake what the article is about. Web surfurers are busy people, they won’t hang around for long, you have maybe two seconds to catch their attention. Your title is also essential in determining how Google will rank the article. The title of an article is one of the major factors in getting it ranked. So think carefully about your title. It needs to be succinct, on topic and descriptive.

Using Key words in your article

Keywords are essential to choosing a successful title and getting your article ranked. You can’t just choose any title. You need to use words that people are searching for. If you’re not familiar with keywords and how to use them you need to study this subject. Keywords are crucial to your online success. You need them for everything you do online, building a website or writing articles require a knowledge of keywords.

If you don’t use keywords you are just wasting your efforts. Your articles are unlikely to show up in search engines and few people will get to see them. So we need to target our articles. We need to aim them at the audience we want to attract. A keyword is simply the word or phrase people type into search engines when they are looking for something. Here’s a simplistic example. If I’m looking for information about how to remove a broken key from a lock. I go to google and type in “removing a broken key from a lock” I press search and get pages of related information. If  I’d wrote an article with the title “How to remove a broken key from a lock”, there’s a good chance my article would show up on the page. Why? Because I’ve used the keywords in my article that people are using to search on Google. Here’s a quick start guide to using keywords.

Don’t get confused by thinking a keyword is one word, it usually isn’t and doesn’t have to be, it can be a phrase, for example “improving my tennis serve” is a keyword. You’ve been using keywords all the time. Every time you conduct a search online you are using key words.

I don’t want to go too deep into keywords in this article but there are two types of keywords; Long tail and short tail>

Long Tail:

Here’s an example of a long tail key word: Cheap hotels on golf courses in northern Spain” This is a long tail key word. It is focused and specific. Your search is targeted.

Short Tail: Golf hotels Spain, This is a short tail key word, not as targeted and not as many words.

You will get more results for short tail key words but there will also be more competition for them. In many cases the competition will be so fierce that you have no chance of ranking for that key word. Here’s an example of what I mean. I’ve just gone into Google and typed, “Make money online” into the search box. It returned me over 165 million pages for that key word. You have absolutely no chance of getting that keyword ranked. We’re looking for around 40000 page results or less for our keyword to give us a chance of getting ranked. We have more chance of getting ranked for long tail key words.

So let’s do some keyword research. First go to this website; https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

This is google’s keyword research site, you’ll see the following page;

This is a great free tool for keyword research. It will give you all the information you need to find the right keywords. Let’s say I’ve got a golf website and am looking to write an article to promote it, so I type “golf swing” in the search box and press get keyword ideas button. It will return me hundreds of words, along with data associated with those words.

Now we need to analyze the data. What we’re looking at is the “Global monthly search volume” we don’t want keywords that are too competitive for us to rank for. We are looking for monthly search volumes within the 1500 to 2500 range. This will give us keywords that we can rank for. Go down the list and click the “add” button at the side of all the keywords that fall into this category. This will save them for you in the right hand side of the screen. You will also be able to print them out to excel or notepad for further research later.

A little note here, this is not an exact science but it’s close enough for us to use. You can go a little higher or lower than the range I’ve suggested. Once you’ve gone down the list and saved all the relevant key words, change the phrase and search again. You want as many keywords as you can get.

Once we’ve got our keywords we then need to see what the competition is like for each word. This is easy to do. Taking our key words we go to Google and start to type them in the search box one at a time and see what results the search brings.

If I type 2golf swing” into the search You’ll see I’ve got 10,600,000 pages. Whoa! This is way too much for us at this stage. We’re looking for something with 40,000 pages or less. So “golf swing” can be discarded. We can’t use it, it’s too competitive. If you’re an experienced marketer, and you’re prepared to spend months working at it, but we’re not at that level and we don’t want to spend months working at it.

So we go through our list of key words until we find some that fall into our range. At the end of this research you should have a list of keywords that you can use to target your articles around. So we can begin writing our articles. Try to get the key word into the article title and use it once in the first paragraph.

The article body

The article body is where you present your article. The body needs to contain the keywords you have targeted. It also needs to be informative about the subject you are writing about and well written. A badly presented, disjointed article will have readers clicking the back button. The objective is to get traffic to your website. The link to your site is at the bottom of your page as I will explain later. You need to write an article that will keep readers interested so they will reach the bottom of the page and look at your bio, from there they will, hopefully, click on your website link.

So make the article informative, interesting and easy to read. You don’t need a PHD in English, you don’t need to be a journalist you just need to put your article down in simple plain English.

Write as though you are having a conversation. Obviously your article must not contain any spelling errors, and there’s no excuse for this with word processors. Your article should be easy to read and scan. In the 19^th century it may have been normal for someone to pick up a 400 page book, light a candle and sit there for six hours reading it. But they didn’t have computers. Today websurfurs are looking for information that they can scan quickly. With this in mind format your article to make it easily readable.

Take a tip from the newspapers about this. Use short papragraphs. Put plenty of space between them. Take two paragraphs and turn nthem into four. It makes it easier on the eye and will retain your reader’s attention. A popular way to write an article is to make use of bullet points.

• These are easier to read
• You can group your information into sections and present it like this
• People love bullet points
• Information can be assimilated quickly. Leading the reader to the end of the page and towards you link.

You need to be careful with your article that you don’t give too much information away. The objective of the article remember is to get people to your website. If I’m a locksmith writing an article about how to remove a broken key from a lock. I will not give all the details about how to do this in my article. If I did there would be no point in the reader clicking through to my website. I would provide enough information to keep the reader interested while holding out the promise of more detailed information on my website.

The article should be related to your website. Don’t write about repairing a dent on your car if your website is about fishing. The reader is reading your article because it has attracted his/her attention. They will only click on your website link if there’s more relevant information there.

Length Of Article

The optimum length is generally considered to be between 300 and 400 words. If you’ve written a 600 word article then break it up into two articles. The more articles you have the more traffic they will generate. You should not promote your website or products in the body of the article. This is reserved for your bio. Trying to promote in the body is a big turn off and will lose you readers. The body of the article is where you are giving good information away. You are providing value and asking for nothing in return.

Bio Box or Signature Box

This is the box at the end of the article and is important to getting people to click through to your website. This is the whole point of your article marketing efforts. This is what you want people to see. All the effort you’ve pt into writing your article is to get people to look at your bio box and encourage them to click through to your website.

Put some information about yourself. If your website is about fishing then mention your expertise in this field. Put a call to action in the bio box. For example “click here for more information about pike fishing. Or visit www.yoursite.com for more super fly fishing tips and a copy of my free report.

Once your article is submitted then repeat the process. The more articles you have the more traffic they will generate.

This was a sad post but it contained some of the problems that most of us middle-aged people will be familiar with. How many of us had to buckle down in a mundane job for years because we had the commitment of having kids to look after. We had to bury our dreams to face the responsibilities of raising our children and paying the mortgage. Before we know it half our life has passed us by.

We reach middle age with debt from raising our children and paying them through university. Some. Like the depressed poster in the forum, surrender into a life of weekend drinking sessions to hide their disappointment. They accept that they will never climb out of the hole they have fallen into and continue drifting through life on auto pilot.

It doesn’t have to be like this. We may have had to accept a situation that was not to our liking. We may have had to stay in a job that we didn’t like so we could pay the bills and provide stability for our families. When we reach middle age however we have two roads we can take. We can, like the poster on the forum, accept a life of meaningless automation and drowned our disappointment every weekend.

Alternately we can use all the advantages that middle age has. Like for example when the kids have gone we have lots of free time on our hands. Our expenses reduce (not too much I know as we continue to help our children with house purchase, weddings.) Now is a good time to take stock and see what positive action we can take. Most of us will have reached middle age with some debt. If you have had children this is unavoidable.

Now is a good time to start that business you have always dreamed of. There’s no need to take any drastic action like leaving your job. Not yet anyway. Starting a part-time business is relatively easy when you have the time and you are not tied down with children duties. Getting rid of the debt and building a pension pot will not happen through the traditional means of turning up day after day to your old job.