This is an interesting video about the merits of article marketing for SEO. For the most part I agree with the points Rand Fishkin makes, though I disagree with the premise that directories are worthless. (Okay, he doesn’t say worthless, but he does imply it.) I’ve had my own articles picked up from EzineArticles.com and republished on some very high-profile sites, which gives me an important backlink to my site. I’ve also had many of them picked up by scraper sites and not attributed. Unfortunately, that’s just part of the cost of doing business, and I refuse to waste my time hunting down the perpetrators.

The takeaway – and I do agree with this – is to stress quality over quantity in all your article marketing efforts. One quality article is better than 100 junk articles pounded out ten at a time by an English-as-a-third-language “writer” you found on Craig’s List. One placement on a quality directory is better than 100 placements on here-today-gone-tomorrow article directories. You know the ones. They all look alike because they all run on the same software, and you distribute to them via some automation tool that both spins and uploads your articles. One link from a recognized authority site is worth 1,000 links from low-class, accept-anything-that-vaguely-resembles-English article directories.

Content might be king of the Internet, but when it comes to improving your search rankings, content alone won’t do it. You need links, and lots of them. Take a look at the search results for the phrase “weight loss programs” (click images for easier reading).

Now look at the number of inbound links each of those pages has – and note that I’ve filtered out internal links, so these numbers represent only offsite links.

Now this is not to say that one-way, inbound links are the only factor in high search rankings. Clearly not, or that second choice would not have made the cut with only 192 links. But you can see that backlinking should be a big part of your overall SEO strategy.

It’s also the part most everyone seems to have trouble with – trouble with knowing where and how to get backlinks, and trouble with actually doing the work. That’s where 5000 Backlinks comes in.

Lists, Lists, and More Lists

5000 Backlinks is not a miracle-working, answer-to-all-your-Internet-marketing-needs kind of program. You won’t find any promises of instant fame or wealth, or any videos of famous marketers working from their new beach-house. This is a practical guide to generating massive amounts of backlinks in a short period of time, but you still have to do the work.

Inside 5000 Backlinks, you’ll find ten lists of various sites you can comment on, post or trackback to, or register at. They’re divided into sections to help you quickly find what you’re looking for, such as dofollow forums, PR9 sites, .gov and .edu sites. In total, there are 4,698 links (not quite 5,000, but who’s counting?) including the “special” links designed to be used with the Instant Indexing Guide. In addition you get a year of updates, with 60 new links each month. You also get a tutorial that shows you how to find your own high-ranking blogs, forums, .gov and .edu sites.

What’s Missing

5000 Backlinks is not without its problems. First, in terms of niche, the sites listed are all over the map. Not every site will be a good place to leave your link. Not even most of them. Second, many of the sites are either no longer being updated, no longer accepting comments, or (in the case of blogs) no longer using a DoFollow plugin. Plan on spending a few days just going through this massive list of links to find the ones that are relevant to your site and which are still current.

In addition, there’s not much in the way of explanation about how to use the package. The Daily Action Plan asks that you choose three pages from your site every day along with your keywords, and go out and link each page to five sites from your list. On the surface, that seems simple enough, but what about blog comments where keywords are frowned-upon? Or forums where the only link allowed is in your signature? Do you then change your signature every day? Then there are the links to the front page of a site, not the actual blog or forum. You have to find that on your own. While there are some good links you can use, you’re left on your own to figure out the details, because 5000 Backlinks doesn’t tell you.

Still a Great Value

Even with these problems, 5000 Backlinks is still a fantastic value. If nothing else, you’ll discover hundreds of DoFollow forums where a signature link – and active participation, not spam – will bring you some high-quality traffic. I’ve also found several blogs on government and education sites that are great places to comment and trackback, not to mention good sources of research for niche blogs.

I’m using the 5000 Backlinks lists right now to build links to my professional site, AllQualityContent.com. I’ll be keeping an eye on the progress and posting updates as time goes on, so you can see exactly how the program works.

If you’ve got good content on your site and you’re struggling to climb the SERPs, backlinks are the next thing you need to tackle. 5000 Backlinks will give you lots of options for getting a variety of one-way, inbound links, and if you’re willing to put in the work, you’ll see positive results.

I just bought a new PC – a nice big desktop model running on Windows 7. Of course it came with loads of free trial software, most of which (Norton) I uninstalled before doing anything else. I was also going to uninstall Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 – Open Office has served me well so far, and it’s free. But I’ve got a 60-day trial on Office, and being the software geek that I am, I thought I’d give it a try.

And I have to say, I’m going to buy this one. What a treat!

Microsoft – for once – makes it easy to set up your blog. Just enter your blog address, user name and password, and you’re ready to start publishing. You do need to make sure you enable XML-RPC remote publishing protocol on your blog. On a WordPress blog you’ll find it under Settings/Writing.

Uploading pictures is easy, as well, as long as you don’t want to do anything fancy with the file locations. I can’t seem to make it put my pictures in my image file, so for now I’m going to have to be content with using the WordPress media file locations. Microsoft also has a cool new tool (well, new to me, at least) for dealing with pictures: the Microsoft Office Picture Manager. It’s great for doing fast edits like cropping and resizing, without taking the time to open a full graphics package like Photoshop. It also remembers shortcuts to all your photo libraries, so if you’re like me and you keep pictures for your blogs in separate folders, Microsoft Office Picture Manager lets you see them all in one place.

Of course the best part of using Word 2007 to publish blog posts is that you have all the features of a complete word processor right at your fingertips. Powerful spell check, grammar correction (be careful with this one!), and formatting is super simple with Microsoft Word. The only thing I found lacking in this area is the ability to apply heading styles. For me, that’s not such a big deal, since I like to publish my posts in draft form and go into my WordPress dashboard for final clean-ups anyway.

One other thing missing from the Word to blog interface is tagging. Word 2007 does support categories with a drop-down list, but there doesn’t appear to be any way to add tags.

Overall, I’m looking forward to giving Word a shot at handling my blog posting needs. If you’re interested in checking it out for yourself, Microsoft offers a 60-day trial on Microsoft Office Professional. That’s probably way too much software for you – I know it is for me – but it will give you the core products like Word and Excel as well as all that other stuff. When you’re ready to buy, Amazon has the best price on Microsoft products.

The first thing you must do, before you can set up a blog, before you can write killer content to bring the masses to your door, before you can get rich selling information products, is choose a domain name. Your domain is your address. It’s the map to where your site lives, and if it’s a good one, it’s descriptive of your business or your niche.

As more and more people begin setting up shop online, good domain names become harder to find, which leads people to come up with other ways to get the domain they want. But are these domain tricks a good or a bad idea?

.com, .org, .net

In the town where I live, the person in charge of naming streets is terribly uninventive. The old standbys are good enough, it seems, so we have 28th Street, 36th Street, 48th Street, and the like. The trouble is, we also have 36th Avenue and 48th Avenue. So whenever you give someone directions to a home or business on one of those streets, you have to be careful to clarify exactly which one you mean.

I see a lot of new Internet marketers who, when they find their idealdomain.com is not available, excitedly snap up idealdomain.org or idealdomain.net, then wonder, “Is the .org or .net okay for SEO?”

Actually, the domain name has very little value when it comes to SEO, but more on that later. What these newbie marketers should be concerned with whether they are sending potential readers to the wrong house in the wrong neighborhood. And that is exactly what they are doing, because a high percentage of Internet users, when entering URL into the address bar of their favorite browser, will automatically add .com on the end. Just like that, your traffic is landing on your competition’s site.

The moral of the story? Buy the .com or don’t buy anything. Find a .com you can live with, rather than choose a .org you love, because it’s not worth the loss of type-in traffic just to have a cute/clever/keyword-laden domain.

Dash Dos and Don’ts

Just don’t. Never use a dash in a domain name.

Imagine, you start up a nice little business, and you’re doing okay, but you want to branch out, get some more traffic. You decide to try podcasting, or video marketing. In your very first podcast you say “Hi, and welcome to Great Gardening Tips. I’m your host, Ginny Gardener. You can find our show notes at great dash gardening dash tips dot com.” Sounds a lot worse than it looks, doesn’t it?

Never buy a domain name with a dash in it unless you plan to never speak the name out loud. And even then, you’ll lose the type-in traffic, because people won’t type dashes any more than they’ll remember your domain is a .org.

You Have to Use Dashes to Get Good Keywords

You don’t need keywords in your domain name.

There, I said it. Let the debate rage. (Seriously, leave a comment. I’d love to hear your reasons why you must have keywords in your domain name.)

Here’s the thing. If you happen to have a domain that has good keywords then you will get some SEO benefit, but not from the Google gods directly. You will get a benefit because when people link to a site, they tend to use the site name. So if your domain is dogtrainingtips.com, people will most often link to you with the anchor text “dog training tips” which is a nice keyword phrase.

My advice? Use keywords if you can, but don’t sweat it if you can’t.

Avoid Clever Uses of Numbers and Odd Spellings

There’s a business near me that delivers food from local restaurants. Kind of a take-out delivery service. I’d use them, if I could remember the domain name. They advertise on billboards, so I’ve seen it a thousand times, but I cannot remember it, simply because it’s some combination of abbreviations and numbers that someone thought was clever. gr8dinner.com or something.

Think about it. I’m an Internet marketer. I live on the Internet. My Google-foo is strong. I brainstorm domain names for fun. If I can’t remember their domain name, I promise you no one else remembers it either. They’d be much better served with a boring old domain than one that’s clever but hard to remember.

The same goes for substituting z for s, x for ks, or any other phonics trick. Instead of being memorable – which I’m sure is the intent – you just make it difficult for people to find you.

Now I know you’re all out there whining that all the good domain names are taken and nothing is left but dashes and crazy number combinations. Not true. It might take a little longer to find a good .com than it did a few years ago, but there are still decent domain names to be had. You just need a little patience.

Want to learn affiliate marketing? The best way is to learn from those who are doing it successfully. Here are 7 resources you can use to learn the affiliate marketing strategies successful marketers are using to make money online every day.

Super Affiliate Handbook by Rosalind Gardner

The Super Affiliate Handbook is the bible of affiliate marketing. If you don’t yet own a copy, this is the place to start. This 200 page ebook walks you through the process of affiliate marketing from start to finish. Rosalind covers everything from registering a domain name and choosing a hosting provider, to negotiating a commission raise.

Self Starters Weekly Tips with Lynn Terry

Lynn Terry is an amazing teacher and mentor. Her income is primarily derived from affiliate sites that sell physical products, so you won’t see a lot of hype about ClickBank products or any sleazy tactics. She uses ethical methods – mostly free – to drive traffic to content-rich sites that add value to the net instead of just cluttering it up.

Affiliate Marketing Sweetie by Melissa Ingold

The name says it all, right? Melissa is another ethical marketer who shuns the get-rich-quick schemes and instead uses sustainable business practices to grow the affiliate marketing side of the Sweetie empire.

Niche Affiliate Marketing System with David Perdew

I attended NAMS in January, and all I can say is Wow! NAMS is a small (less than 200 participants), hands-on seminar where Internet marketers – from the uber-newbie to the highly successful – learn the ropes. The attendees are placed in groups according to their needs, so beginners aren’t in over their head, and more advanced learners aren’t bored. The instructors are available for one-on-one consultations to help with everything from setting up your first WordPress site to tips for managing an army of your own affiliates. The emphasis is on learning affiliate marketing, but the attendees (and the instructors) have a variety of business models, from copywriting services to full-on outsourcing companies.

Affiliatenaire by Jimmy D. Brown

Affiliatenaire is a year-long membership program that includes small, doable tasks laid out for you in a step-by-step format, one lesson at a time. Each lesson arrives as a PDF, generally about one per week, and each builds upon the last to help you create a strong affiliate marketing foundation. Again, this course starts at the very beginning – choosing a niche – so it’s ideal for someone just starting out.

Note: This course is going off the market soon, so if you want in, do it now. Don’t worry about losing out, though, because when it does retire, all current subscribers will continue to have access through the end of their membership term. Click here to sign up.

InfoProduct Killer by Craig Kaye

Craig’s system is new to me, but I’m reading rave reviews about it from the likes of Tiffany Dow and Debra Conrad, so I’m already impressed. Again, the emphasis here is on affiliate marketing for physical products. No shady ebooks or other deals that make you question the ethics of the promoter. I’ll be posting a full review soon, but in the mean time, you can check it out here.

Warrior Forum 

Okay, so far every resource I’ve listed requires a bit of a cash outlay. Not a lot, but some. If you’re looking to get your feet wet without spending any money, check out the Warrior Forum. It’s the largest and longest-running public forum dedicated to making money online, and there are some genuinely helpful people over there. Most of the threads are about promoting ebooks and other digital products, and most of them are either about weight loss, getting your ex back, or how to get rich as an Internet marketer. But take a look, have some patience, and you’ll find some real gems.