Taking the Work out of Article Submission

Today’s e-mail is going to be rather long, but we’ve spent enough time on article marketing over the past few e-mails and it’s time to move on.

Once you have your unique articles written, it’s time to submit them to the article directories and get them syndicated onto blogs and web sites. This is where things get ugly, but the benefits of article marketing are too great to let this get in the way.

Article Submission Problems

The problems with article submission include:

• Each of hundreds of article directories have different submission criteria, and each requires a separate account, with a separate sign-up process, with a separate confirmation process. Talk about painful!
• Many article directories restrict the number of accounts or aliases you use. This is a problem if you want to use more than one resource box or want to market more than one blog.
• Article marketing’s reach is restricted to article directories. This means that in order for your article to live beyond the directory, it must be found and then manually posted on someone else’s web site. In essence, you must compete for traffic with all of the other articles out there.

Luckily, there’s a free tool that can help take the sting out of the first group of issues, and it’s called Article Submitter. You can download it here (free).

This solves some huge headaches, but causes others.

Ensuring Unique Content

You have one unique article, but now you are going to submit it to 100 article directories — goodbye uniqueness! This is where content spinners come in handy, as they rearrange and reword your content so that each submission is unique. Unfortunately, spinners can’t be integrated with Article Submitter. Also, Article Submitter doesn’t do a terrific job of formatting your articles, which is important if you want people to read them.

Plus, we still have the other problems to worry about.

“There has to be a better way,” I’m sure you’re thinking. There is . . .

The solution is to use a tool called the Unique Article Wizard. What it does is create unique versions of each of your articles, and then it automatically handles all of the account creation and alias management functions so that you can submit an unlimited number of articles, written by an unlimited number of authors, for an unlimited number of blogs. Did I say unique? That’s unique, as in each link counted by Google!

It gets better . . .

Unique Article Wizard submits to more directories and announcement lists than any other software or service in existence. But even better, it will help you syndicate your content onto thousands of blogs automatically. This is the clever part!

You see, what they’ve done is created a WordPress plug-in that anyone can use to automatically receive unique content for their blogs. Let’s say I have a blog on loans (because I do) and I use the plug-in (because I do). Whenever a new article is submitted that matches the categories I have defined on my blog, the article is automatically posted to my blog as a guest post. I get a unique post for my blog for no effort and the submitter gets a backlink from my blog as payment for that article. Everyone wins.

All the article submitter needs to do is cut and paste his or her article into the web control panel, and then submit the article for processing. Try it — the results will astound you! You might have heard me say before that “you can expect what you inspect.” What’s neat about this tool is that it publishes weekly statistics for each of your articles, showing you how many new backlinks you are generating each week.

So you get unique versions of your articles . . . submitted to a huge number of article directories and announcements lists . . . dripped in over time to look more organic to the search engines . . . and your content gets syndicated to all blogs using the UAW plug-in with a category equal to your keywords.

I’m a long-time user of this software, and I consider it one of my most vital tools. In fact, I’m also a Traffic Kahuna subscriber, which I pay $147 a month to use. That’s $147 each and every month — I do that for access to their syndication network.

Well, I just dropped Traffic Kahuna in favor of Unique Article Wizard because my results have been extraordinary. They have been going through some growing pains recently, which has been rather annoying, but I can’t deny the results.

Try it for yourself. Use it for a few months. Track your backlinks and your results. If you work this tool, you WILL get results, it’s that simple.

Also, please note that this tool is different from the Instant Article Wizard, which can be used to quickly generate keyword-dense content that can in turn be submitted with UAW. Similar names, completely different tools.

Making the Most of Your Resource Box

The most common mistake in a resource box is to link the wrong text. Because you’ve done your keyword research (you have done your research, right?), you know precisely which keywords to target.
These keywords should be the text that is turned into a hyperlink — not your site name, blog name, your name, or whatever.

For example, if you own an automotive parts store and run an auto blog, you might be tempted to close your resource box with something like:

“Dave Schnell is the moderator of the popular Auto Blog, where he . . .”

Instead, if you did your keyword research and found out that there was very high search traffic, but very low competition, for the keyphrase “vintage auto parts,” your resource box might look something like this:

“Dave Schnell helps automotive buffs locate vintage auto parts . . .”

It’s a simple thing really, but the concept is this: whatever text is linked (known as the anchor text), provides clues to the search engines as to what can be found on the other side of that link. If you build 10 to 20 backlinks with “vintage auto parts” as the anchor text, and this is a good keyword to target, you’ll find your web property dominating the search results pages.

Remember to Use This Trick

Whatever the main keyword you are targeting on your site or blog, your first handful of articles should address that keyword and point to the most relevant post or page on your web property. Your follow-up articles should point both to your web property and to your first group of articles.

This is a clever trick. By linking your later articles to your earlier ones, you are increasing their page rank, and in turn, your web property’s rank for your most coveted keyword. Additionally, you increase your article’s odds of being picked up by other blogs and ezines.

Why? Because many article services use Google’s search engine to find internal articles. So if your articles are ranked higher, they will show up higher on in-site searches, meaning more people will download and use them in their web properties, increasing your backlinks, which starts the cycle again.

Where to Submit Your Articles

The short answer is “everywhere!” Use the Unique Article Wizard to automate the process. If you’re not ready to take that tool on, then download the free Article Submitter software to help manage your submissions.

The caveat is Ezine Articles submissions. ALWAYS submit Ezine Articles by hand. They have the most rigorous approval process, and their standards are the highest, so don’t risk getting yourself on the poor content list. Always submit Ezine Articles by hand.

That’s it for the day. Sorry for the long e-mail, but it needed to be written!

As always, if you have questions about article marketing, or any other blogging or auto-pilot subject, please contact me.

Don’t Make these Article-Marketing Mistakes

In my last e-mail regarding article marketing, I mentioned using private label rights (PLR) content both for article marketing and for content creation on auto-pilot sites. I’ve received a handful of questions about PLR in general, so I wanted to back up just a bit to cover the ins and outs of using PLR content.

Plus, there’s so much misinformation out there right now surrounding PLR, I’d like to help set the record straight!

What is PLR?

PLR content is any content that you can freely modify, place your name on, and use as your own — no license fees, no attribution. The only restriction is that you cannot resell it.

PLR is ready made content, but to make sure you rank highly in the search engines, you must make it your own, and that involves rewriting it. Generally it takes me around 1 hour to write an article from scratch, but I can make a PLR article my own in about 10 minutes time.

PLR content and the article wizard I mentioned in my previous e-mail are the tools that enable me to crank out nearly 50 articles a day.

Top Ways to Use PLR Content

When you purchase it, you can do anything you want with it (aside from reselling it), but the three most common uses are:

1) Use it as web content. Some use it on niche blogs, and some on sites. I use it to populate my auto-pilot sites. I even chop up the content and use paragraphs on the eBay partner stores I’ve mentioned in the past. This is a great strategy to drive additional search traffic to your niche stores.

2) Use it for article marketing. This is my favorite use — after rewriting the content, I submit it to article directories. I prefer to use an article marketing tool like the Unique Article Wizard (this is different from the article wizard I mentioned above) so that each directory receives a unique copy.

3) Many people chop up this content and put it into a e-mail newsletter.

Top PLR Mistakes

So if PLR is so easy to use, how do people make mistakes? Well that’s easy . . .

1) They join a service that is sub-par or is part of a wholesaling network.

There are a lot of services out there that offer sub-par quality content. It’s written by writers who don’t have English as their first language, or in some cases, give content that is less than third grade level. Nine out of 10 PLR services are GARBAGE.

It should be obvious you don’t want to join these kinds of PLR memberships.

The other thing is that there have become a few wholesaling PLR networks. What this means is that a membership can offer PLR material that other memberships are offering. They get their articles all from the same source, and the articles are identical!

Why do you stay away from these? Because the service might say “limited to 300 people” but the reality is that there are 10 or 20 other places out there that are offering the same material to the same number of people!

2) They join a service that has too many members or offer backlogs to their articles.

This should be quite obvious, but places that are open to 1000 people, just aren’t the place to join (unless you are getting it really cheap!). The reason is that the more people that have the content, the more people you are going to be competing with, and the less likely people are going to rewrite their content.

3) They forget about the fundamentals of building sites

Sometimes people get into this building frenzy, which makes them just want to build site after site after site. The problem with that is that on the internet the phrase “Build it and they will come” just doesn’t apply. When you build a site, make sure that you keep the on page SEO factors right, and that you are building the site over time, slowly uploading content, and building links.

Important stuff, but it needs to be remembered.

4) They don’t make it their own.

You should never purchase PLR content and then paste it into your articles. Unless you spend the time to make these articles unique to you, they will be rejected by the respectable article directories, and they won’t rank in Google for the others.

By following the rewrite process that I’ll mention in a future e-mail, your articles will be made unique. Or, you can use an article checking tool for a more objective assessment of the uniqueness of your article. A good tool will tell you the percent different one article is from another, and will also tell you the keyword density of your article. Where do you find such a tool? Just click the link below — Blogging in Action’s Article Sheriff software is free for all members of this group.

So, that’s it for today. Look out for the next e-mail soon, and we’ll resume how you can use PLR content for article marketing.

Options for Creating Article Content

Today’s e-mail focuses on a specific piece of article marketing: creating articles. You might be tempted to cut and paste your best blog posts and use them as articles, and this does benefit you with backlinks. But you risk diluting your unique content by spreading it across the web. Better options include:

• Rewrite your blog posts: you can completely rewrite your blog posts so that the content on your blog remains unique while you submit the rewritten content to directories. The disadvantage to this method is that it’s time consuming.
• Rewrite PLR content: you can rewrite private label content and submit it to article directories. The disadvantage to this is that you don’t know how thin that private label content has been spread, so you can’t be completely confident of its uniqueness.
• Hire a ghostwriter: you can always hire someone else to write articles for you to submit to directories, but ghostwritten content is usually poor quality.
• Write articles yourself: the best option is to write new content from scratch, but this can be time consuming.

Personally, I use a combination approach. I write all my keystone articles from scratch with the help of an article research and writing tool; and I write all my secondary content using PLR content as a base. Note that these articles are used for marketing purposes or auto-pilot content only; NOT for creating posts for long-term blogs.

Article Research and Writing

Writing a good article usually takes an hour or so. Because I know that the benefits of article marketing are huge, I write many articles, and the tool I use to speed this process up is Instant Article Wizard. With it, I can research a subject and write an article in under 10 minutes, and my articles always turn out to be high quality.

I type in my research phrase, e.g. “article marketing is,” and my article wizard generates all of the research I need to create an article. It suggests content for the introduction and conclusion, and even presents me with subtopic research I can use in each of my paragraphs. I then point and click several headlines, point and click to arrange my article, and adjust the transitions. Voila! Unique, high-quality content in minutes! Look at this video to see how this works.

This is the perfect article generation tool to use in your article marketing efforts. Forget about wasted time, writer’s block, and painful research. Save that for your blog! For writing articles for article marketing, I want two things: 1) fast results, and 2) keyword dense content. The article wizard is an indispensable tool for this effort.

Rewriting PLR Content

There are PLENTY of places to find private label content online, but most of it is garbage. I subscribe to two service for PLR content: one I use to populate my niche websites and auto-pilot blogs, and the other I use for article marketing.

InfoGoRound is a perfect candidate for article marketing because of the wealth of content that is available, and because of the overall high quality of the content.

For populating auto-pilot sites, I wouldn’t be without PLR Pro, which is hands-down the best private label content provider around.

I’ll describe private label rights content in more detail in upcoming e-mails.

Article Writing Approach

Depending on the size of your niche, I’d recommend writing 8 to 12 articles per keyword grouping. If you have a tightly focused blog, then just 8 to 12 will do. If your blog covers a few topics, then make sure to address each niche.

Write three to five primary articles first. These are your keystone articles that you know are the most profitable and will drive the most traffic. You know this information because you DID YOUR KEYWORD RESEARCH, right? Then submit your keystone articles for syndication (we’ll cover this in more detail later). Your resource boxes on these articles should deep link into your blog, and the link titles must be optimized properly. For example “click here” is not a good link title; “find travel discounts” is a good title (provided you have a travel blog).

Conclusion

Whatever you do, make sure that the articles you submit for article marketing are entirely unique. The best way to do this is to research and write articles from scratch using the article wizard. Private label content is another good option for secondary content, but always focus on your completely unique articles first. Don’t forget to check out Instant Article Wizard.

Article Marketing is a Blog Promotion MUST

To continue on with the blog promotion theme, another highly effective way of redirecting traffic to your blog is through article marketing. I mentioned article marketing in the Blogging in Action book, but I wanted to call attention to it again because it’s a technique that I strongly recommend you utilize in your promotion efforts.

Short of purchasing links, article marketing has the potential to build more valuable backlinks than any other promotion method. I’ve been able to generate over 100 NATURAL backlinks in six months through the use of article marketing. These links “drip” in, giving them a very organic and valuable pattern.

To give article marketing the breathing room it deserves, I’m going to devote a few tips to it, covering strategies for article marketing, the directories to target, how to syndicate your content onto relevant blogs, and more.

For today, I just want to touch on a technique I use to make article marketing more effective.

Remember, from your resource box, you get a backlink from the article directory itself, and you get a backlink from each web site or blog that uses your article. But you can make those links even more powerful by targeting a subset of your articles as the keystone articles. You do this by posting your main keyword article first, deep-linked to your blog. Your supporting articles are posted later, pointing to your original articles and to your blog. This builds the PageRank of your keystone articles which in turn builds your blog’s PageRank.

Simple, clever, and almost no one does it! We’ll discuss this technique and a few other clever ways to build lots of traffic through articles in the coming days.

10 Sure-fire Ways to Redirect Traffic to your Blog

Okay, today we’re back to business and we’re going to talk about what might be your best friend or your worst enemy: traffic! I’m going to briefly discuss several ways that you can redirect traffic
to your blog, and we’ll review each of these ways in more detail in future tips.

Before we start, I want to remind you of an important concept related to traffic: you don’t push traffic, you don’t drive traffic, you don’t pull traffic — you redirect it. You can’t force it to go where you want — you find the source and you alter its path so that it meanders to your destination.

SEED YOUR BLOG PROPERLY: Traffic starts with content, so the best thing that you can do to redirect and KEEP traffic is provide your readers with exceptional content.

POST NEARLY EVERY DAY: You must post frequently if you want to create a six-figure blog. After six months, you’ll begin to notice declines in your levels of traffic that correlate directly to pauses in your posting frequency. As a side benefit, if you post frequently and update your XML sitemap after every post, you’ll soon see Google visiting your site within 1 hour of any updates you make. It really CAN be that simple.

USE TRACKBACKS: if you’re using Wordpress, this is handled automatically for you. If you’re not, make sure that you add a trackback for each article you reference. Also, make sure that you’re writing posts that are candidates for trackbacks — not every post, of course, but at least once a week.

USE THE BLOG LOVE FINDER: use the Blog Love commenting tool to leave comments on popular blogs. While there, if it’s highly relevant, mention a few direct links to your blog posts. It’s a legitimate way to earn both traffic and search rankings, provided you stay on topic and don’t spam. You can also use Comment Kahuna, which is free software, to help you find good blogs to comment on. Just make sure that your posts are on-topic and helpful!

BEST: Use an aged domain; GOOD: Use your own domain. You really must use your own domain name. It is a highly effective way to begin future-proofing your blog. You should also be using a quality platform like Wordpress. This is not to disparage other platforms, but Wordpress just happens to offer better features and performance, and will be around for the long haul.

Ideally, your own domain is also an aged domain; i.e. your domain has been registered for several years. I have some anecdotal evidence that shows that Google lets blogs out of the sandbox faster and backlinks are counted more quickly when using an aged domain.

USE YAHOO! ANSWERS: for each of your anchor posts, search Yahoo! Answers for related keywords. An easy way to do this is to analyze each post with a keyword analysis tool (you ARE using one by now, aren’t you?). When you find a question related to your post, answer the question and provide a link back to your post.

Hint: we offer a book, video, and audio course on Yahoo! Answers to owners of the Blogging in Action program.

ANNOUNCE YOUR BLOG WITH A PRESS RELEASE: the best free PR services are i-newswire and openPR. Be sure to read up on the format of a proper press release before submitting one!

WRITE FOR BEGINNERS: whatever your niche, be sure to include posts for newcomers to the niche, and use your keyword analysis tool to make sure that you’re serving all new readers, e.g. “Your-niche
101,” “Your-niche newbie,” “Your-niche beginner guide,” etc. Beginners make up the majority of readers and are hungry for your information. They are the most likely to become long-term subscribers.

BLATANT RSS FEED ICON: make your RSS feed icon big and bold so that it absolutely, positively cannot be missed. End each post with words similar to “for more blah blah, be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed.” Sometimes that’s all it takes.

USE KEYWORD RESEARCH to effectively target your blog posts. Yes, keywords are THAT important. You should use keyword tools to help determine your niche, to help determine your content, to help
determine your blog post titles, and to determine the keywords that must appear within each post. Read more about the advantages of keywords.

Attract a Flood of New Readers with Linkbait

Boy, do I love linkbait. A good linkbait post could drive more traffic to your blog in one day than you’ve had in the previous month. The best part about linkbait is its viral nature. For months after, you’ll find backlinks popping up here and there, gaining you more traffic and improving your search rankings in the process.

LINKBAIT IS TRAFFIC GOLD!

Linkbait: A Rough Definition

It sounds evil, doesn’t it? It sounds as if you’re setting a trap for your unsuspecting readers to fall into, ensnaring them within your blog. In reality, the practice of linkbaiting has morphed so much that today’s linkbait bears little resemblance to the linkbait of two years ago.

Linkbait is a unique, useful, and often provocative blog post that people respond to by linking to it and sharing with others. Linkbait targets link-friendly audiences, as its goals include traffic, visibility, branding, and backlinks.

Simple, right? Linkbait is nothing more than a good blog post that people want to link to, but it’s so very effective because it combines the practices of viral marketing with a popular topic or meme.

Linkbait: What it Isn’t

Linkbait is not the traffic silver bullet. It has limitations. Linkbait is terrible for converting browsers into long-term subscribers, it doesn’t work well for ad click-throughs, and is inappropriate for an emotionally sensitive topic (controversial is okay, however). Linkbait rarely makes much money or even pays for the direct traffic bandwidth, but you write linkbait for its indirect value. And therein lies the gold.

• Linkbait helps you gain mindshare and brand recognition.
• Linkbait generates powerful backlinks from web properties of authority.
• Linkbait can have a dramatic effect on your search rankings.
• Linkbait is great for capturing the attention of influencers.

Building a network of influencers is a major theme in the social media section of “Blogging in Action” because it is such a valuable concept. When you build a network of influencers, you can write your own ticket. It’s like being able to turn on a firehose whenever you want to drive traffic to your blog, and its value can’t be underestimated. The step-by-step plan I outline in the book will help you build this network.

How Linkbait Builds Traffic

Once a unique or trendy post is written about somewhere, it gets picked up and dragged across the web by citizens of numerous online communities. Social tagging and popularity ranking sites help give the post visibility to hundreds of content creators, who then happily link to you.

Everyone wants to be part of the “in” crowd, especially in the online world where people are trying to carve names for themselves. This attitude encourages linking — no one wants to be left behind, and everyone wants to appear like a leader, so your linkbait spreads widely and quickly like a virus.

Above I mentioned that the power of linkbait is in the indirect traffic. Here’s more of what I mean by that, described purely from the traffic perspective:

1) When your linkbait is launched, you get the immediate direct traffic spike.

2) Linkbait attracts a long tail of links. The long tail is the concept that our search traffic is shifting from a small number of keywords with huge traffic, to a massive number of niches with less traffic. It represents the sophistication of searchers and the specialization of the web.

3) Long tail links generate residual traffic, directly from those links.

4) Search engine rankings improve, driving more search traffic.

5) Steps 3 and 4 repeat indefinitely.

I refer to this phenomenon as the traffic boomerang.

5 Characteristics of Good Linkbait

1) Linkbait is remarkable. Your content needs to be amazing. Choose topics that other people wouldn’t like to touch — maybe it’s too touchy, little formal research exists, or it would require too much time to address — and do it wisely. If you are making a claim or a counter-claim, be sure you can back it up to avoid any bait backfires.

2) Linkbait is original. You must tackle something new, or tackle something old from a new perspective or it will not attract eyeballs and will never spread.

3) Linkbait is trendy. The “in” crowd likes to spread “in” ideas. Browse Digg, del.icio.us, and Twitter to see what’s getting a lot of press.

4) Linkbait is useful. The more useful your linkbait, the better your chances for keeping a percentage of the direct traffic, so be curious and information-possessed. Get as much information as you can.

5) Linkbait is long tail. Be laser focused. The more specialized your topic, the better you’ll do.

Add Linkbait to Your Arsenal

Whatever your blog’s focus, whatever your audience, whatever your purpose — write linkbait. It works. It requires an investment of time in writing the post and building your network of influencers, but pound-for-pound, you won’t find a better way to open the traffic floodgates than to write linkbait that connects with readers and spreads like a virus.

But don’t get carried away. All of your posts can’t and shouldn’t be linkbait. Stick with the posting schedule recommended in Blogging in Action and add a good piece of linkbait every month — AFTER you build your network of influencers. Your ideas won’t spread without them!

We’ll discuss linkbait in more detail at a later date, especially to give you some ideas on how to create the “hook” in a linkbait post. There are several tested formulas that I’ve found to work, and I’ll share those with you.

Essential Blogger Task: Research your Keywords

One of the first things that I tell anyone who is blogging — regardless of whether they are brand new or an experienced veteran — is that they MUST pay attention to the keywords they are focusing their content around. And if they aren’t focusing their content around a carefully selected group of keywords, they had better start doing it NOW.

For the same reasons that choosing an effective niche is so profitable, so is keyword selection. In fact, using keyword research to help select your niche is the best strategy for starting a new blog. Please do it. You will thank me later!

Ignore keywords at your peril. Weeks and months of hard work can be quietly undermined by poor keyword selection. Get it done right!

I use keyword research for these reasons:

• It enables me to focus my blog’s content tightly on a niche
• It enables me to gaze into a crystal ball and predict what story titles will attract the most new readers
• It enables me to find out how much competition I have in a niche
• It helps me bring in highly qualified traffic
• It allows me to see how much search traffic there is for a niche
• It saves me tons of time I would otherwise waste on research or deadbeat keywords

All of which lead to more relevant content, which is the cornerstone of highly profitable contextual advertising. Profitability isn’t everything, but we all have to eat!

Keywords are so important that I address keyword topics exclusively in another member group. To learn more about keyword research or to join this group, visit the keyword research group page. I am giving away two free e-books, “AdSense Arbitrage” and “AdWords Made Easy,” for new members of this group. I hope you’ll join us because we have plenty of great tips to share!

How to Get Your Blog Indexed in One Day

If you’re up for it, I thought we could discuss something fun today. This is one of my favorite white hat tips for new blogs, and why more people haven’t thought to use it is beyond me. Be that as it may, this is a great way for you to get your blog listed in Google’s search index in under a day.

Really, I’m not kidding! One day is all it takes to get listed in Google’s index if you use their bots to your advantage. This works consistently in most niches where there is already some high-quality competition. So let’s get out hands dirty.

The Traditional Method

To show up in the search results pages, your blog must be listed in the search index. Makes sense, yes? To get listed in the search index, you would traditionally go to a search engine’s ‘Add URL’ page, enter some brief information about your blog, and then wait for the spiders to visit your site.

Spiders are just bots that scour the web, moving from link to link trying to build up a listing of all of the content out there. The problem is, these spiders are busy, and your new blog isn’t on the top of their priority list, so it could be several weeks before they come knocking on your door.

With my technique, we’re going to convince these spiders that your new blog is their priority, because your blog serves their readers.

Theory Behind the Technique

Search spiders are so proficient these days that it seems silly to wait until THEY have a free moment to visit your blog, when you can just insert your blog into their high-priority work queue.

So we need to make sure that they have a clear path to your blog from another site in their index that is already popular and is being updated. If they have that clear path to you, they will want to index your blog as quickly as possible because the perceived value of your blog is related to the blog where they found your link.

So all you need is a backlink from a blog that is frequently updated. That’s it! And the easiest way to get a link on a blog is through the comments. Now, I’m not talking about spam or a ridiculous “blast your ad” approach. I’m talking about placing a highly relevant, helpful link on a popular blog that the spiders will want to follow.

The Technique Explained

So here’s how we’re going to proceed:

1) Your blog should already be seeded with content, and preferably you have a few days’ worth of additional posts at the ready for the next few days.

2) Find one of your compelling anchor posts, and search Google for a complementary blog post that would fit well with your post. For example, if your post is on rehabilitating a torn meniscus, you might search for a running blog that has a blog post discussing common injuries. Just make sure that your comment and post will add value to the readers of that blog. You are not spamming them, but participating in the conversation and offering them something of value. In short, you are being a good blog citizen.

3) Once you find a blog post, you’ll need to view the source of the page to see if the blog uses the “nofollow” attribute in comment links. Quite a few popular platforms, including Blogger and WordPress, use nofollow by default. If you remember from the “Blogging Revealed” e-book, nofollow tells Google not to follow a link to its source, and is commonly used to prevent a blog from “leaking” Page Rank.

4) If you find nofollow, move on. Otherwise, post your comment on this blog, pointing back to your top-level domain name in the name field and pointing to your individual blog post in the comments field.

When Google comes to this blog to index its new content, your link will be picked up by the spider as a related reference, earning you quick access into the search rankings!

5) On the morning after you perform this, query Google for your domain name. If you show up in their results anywhere, your blog has been indexed. Congratulations!

But We Can Make it Easier

You’ve already seen the downside to this approach: it can take some time to find a relevant blog where you can place a good comment. The hardest part is finding a blog that permits its links to be
followed, and this is absolutely critical to this technique’s success.

What would make this easier is if we could just search Google and let them tell us which blogs in its results pages allow us to post comments that will be followed by the search index spiders. And that is exactly the task that the Blog Love Finder performs for you. You can use this tool to:

• Keyword search the top 100 to 500 Google results, and return a list of blogs that do not use the nofollow attribute
• Find the Alexa rankings (to see how popular a blog is) for each blog returned
• Keep track of your comment campaign by indicating which blogs you’ve already commented on

It’s a very simple tool and it’s free for you as a member of this group. Every good blogger should have a healthy toolkit and I try to keep all owners of the Blogging in Action book very well-stocked with tools of this nature. They really can make your life simpler and your blog better — a winning combination. Download the Blog Love Finder here.

Download the file, extract its contents to your PC, and then run the installer, following the prompts. Once it’s installed, enter your Google search keywords in the first field and wait for the results. It’s guaranteed virus-free, spyware-free, and easy to use. For more information on how to use it and to see it in action, see this video tutorial I’ve created for your use.

If you could, I’d really like to hear from you. When it’s time to submit your blog to the engines, shoot me a quick note to let me know how quickly you got your blog included in Google’s index. So far we seem to be hovering around one day.

For more great tools and techniques, be sure to download the full Blogging in Action program.

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