United Business Services

This is the follow up to our previous post “not really guru bashing“. By far the most common question we receive is “how do I get ranked” and “how can it happen quickly?”

For the average person it can happen quickly if done correctly. Of course what you need to realize is the more competitive your market is, the harder it will be to rank for your keywords.

This is why we recommend that if you are just starting out you stay away from the “make money online” market. This niche is arguably the most cut throat and competitive niche online. If you do not bring your “A” game to this market you will get your butt kicked, lose money, and most likely quit altogether.

I know you probably get bombed with emails from the “gurus” all telling you that they have the answers to how you make money. Just spend whatever the cost is for their program, usually somewhere between $197 and $1997, plus maybe an ongoing monthly coaching program, and you are all set. Get ready to run to the bank

Good luck with that!

We say, start small and learn how to tread water before you decide to swim with the sharks. You need to make your first dollar online before you can make your millions.

With that said, we want to get into the most basic ways for you to get traffic quickly. Without traffic you will never sell anything, so it all starts here.

The five basic methods are as follows:

* Pay Per Click Advertising
* Using Press Release Services
* Blog Commenting and Advertising
* Forum Commenting and Advertising
* Article Marketing

There are of course other ways to get traffic but we feel these are the most effective and likely quickest way to get the hits rolling for you.

Pay per click is the fastest way to start getting traffic as you can post an ad on AdWords, Yahoo or Bing and begin receiving traffic literally within minutes in some cases. The downside to PPC is of course the cost associated with this method. You can spend a bunch of money before you really know if your site or offer is even going to convert. Also with Google cracking down on affiliates, PPC is getting more and more difficult unless you really know what you are doing. You need to have a landing page, you need to know how to optimize your landing page and you really need to know your competition.

Press release services can be very effective if you are a decent writer. Some press services are free and some will charge a fee. We have used both in the past and the free services take a bit longer to get your release posted but the end result is both are about equally effective. The catch here is that your release will be human edited and it really needs to be well written. If this is not a strength of yours you can go to Elance and hire a ghost writer for $25-$50 to write a 400-500 word release for you.

Blog commenting is just what it sounds like. You can search for blogs that are similar to whatever product it is that you will be promoting and start commenting on them. Be careful not to spam. You should take a moment to actually read through the posts and make an intelligent, thought out contribution to the blog. In many cases you will be able to add a link back to your site with anchor text which is even better.

Many sites now run plug ins called keyword luv and comment luv. We run that on our site. You can check it out here to see how it works. Again, do not just do a “drive by” and say something idiotic like “nice post”. Add value to the conversation and it will be much more likely that your post and links get approved.

Forum commenting is similar to blog commenting. The difference here is that you want to get involved in forums that are in the same niche as what you want to promote but you also want to be able to provide help and advice in your posts. Many people in forums will be there to ask questions. If you can help with an answer many times you can create a signature files that would include your URL and be permitted to sign any of your posts with that signature which would of course be a link back to your site.

But, our favorite way to get links out there quickly is with article marketing.

Article Marketing is quick and very effective. With the proper software you can literally get your site linked to dozens and dozens of times with the submission of just one article. There are many article sites out there that you can publish to, and in most cases you will be able to use an anchor text link at the bottom of your article in a resource box that will have information on the author of the article. The author of course would be you.

Many people are scared that they will not be able to write articles for themselves. This is not nearly as difficult as many people think. For a few dollars you can search PLR article sites looking for PLR (private label rights) articles about your chosen subject. You would then take those articles and use them as a basis for your articles. You can do this by using the PLR articles as a template.

We suggest you rewrite the article in your own words as you never know how many other people will have that same article. You want to make yourself as unique as possible. Using PLR articles as templates is one of the easiest ways to do that. But we do stress – do NOT just copy the PLR articles without re-writing them in your own words. You need to be unique, and using articles in this way will save you boat loads of time as opposed to writing totally from scratch.

You then have a few choices. I am a big fan of automation myself and prefer to pay a few dollars upfront to save a boatload of time and effort but still get the same results. Basically you can sign up for dozens and dozens of article submission sites and go through the process of submitting your articles one by one. If you have hours of extra time on your hands this may work for you.

The other option is to get a little piece of software known as an article spinner and article submission software. This type of software will save you tons of time and effort by automatically spinning and submitting your articles to HUNDREDS of article directories.

However not all spinners and submitters are equal.

We have actually bought 4 different pieces of software that claim to do this work for you. I am only going to name the one we still use as it is head and shoulders above the rest of the field. One of the submitters we bought just plain sucked. Two others were barely OK but were very limited in what they could do. One cost over $100 but limited the number of sites that they submitted to, to about 20 directories. Both of the two that were just barely OK still made you go out and sign up for and verify each individual directory account. Ouch!

With that being said, we stumbled upon a piece of software, two pieces actually, one was the article spinner itself and the other was the mass article submitter. The spinner is just awesome as it lets you create dozens of different versions of your article. This is critical to prevent the duplicate content penalty. The other submits the spun article to up to 700 different article directories.

The truly awesome part of that is the fact that the software not only auto submits the articles in about 5 minutes it also goes out and signs you up for the 700 directories automatically. This would take you days to do individually. All you need to supply is a gmail account that you will sign up for for free. This is the account you will use to verify all of your directory sign ups. Don’t worry though, through an IMAP connection in gmail, the software does that automatically also.

The long and the short of it is we can write an article and submit it to a few hundred sites (each submission with 2 anchor text backlinks) and have a couple of hundred backlinks to our site with just an hour or so of work. Pretty sweet indeed.

If you are at all serious about getting your site ranked quickly you should check out the software that can make it happen for you.

In our next post we will talk a little about social bookmarking and how that improves rankings if done correctly.

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