{!date dayname+0}, {!date long+0} Dear {!firstname_fix} Today I am at the Spring Convention of the Professional Speaking Association, of which I am currently President. We have over 100 professional speakers at the event in London and we will be sharing our best practices and ideas for improving our speaking businesses. But one of the things I am most looking forward to today is when I hand out the "Regional Awards". These are our way of recognising the people who help make the PSA tick across the country. Without their hard work and dedication, the PSA would not thrive. And thinking about this reminds me - how often do we reward the unsung heroes of our own businesses? The postal worker who delivers every day without fail? Or the office cleaner who always makes sure everything is polished? In their own way, these kinds of people make our businesses tick. Perhaps we should give them awards too.
YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED: Has article marketing had its day? Article marketing is where you write an article, submit it to an article distribution site and thereby allow other website owners to copy your content onto their website. The deal is they must include your links and biography - they get content, you get reputation and a useful link back to your website. However, recent changes to the Google algorithm imply that article sites are no longer worthwhile using. The reason is that "content farms" are of little value to Google because they often have low quality articles that appear designed only to trick the search engines, rather than provide true value to readers. So, Google will now be treating article sites rather differently, suggesting of course that this will impact upon your search engine benefits you supposedly get from being on such sites. Across the internet at the moment you can find all sorts of nonsense predicting the end of article marketing and suggesting that Google's changes to its algorithms will spell the end of article sites. However, I think the downgrading of article sites by Google is the best thing that could happen to them. Here's why. Article marketing only works if people read the articles. If no-one reads the material, it can bring you all the "Google juice" it likes, but it will be all for nothing. Ultimately, someone has to read your content. And people are only going to click on the links in your articles if your material is of value, professional and high quality. Otherwise those links are just window dressing. Whichever way you look at things, only quality content is worth producing. What Google is effectively doing is slamming the door on poor quality garbage. In turn, this means that the article distribution sites will, over time, lose their low quality content in favour of the higher quality material. And that means whether you are the article author or the re-publisher, these sites will have more, not less value to you. In essence, Google's recent change to its algorithm have made article marketing even more useful - but only if you produce high quality articles. The change also means that article marketing sites can now attract top-end, high quality sites to use their service. This will further improve the kind of content available from the distribution websites. And that means only one thing - i f you are not using sites like Ezinearticles.com you will lose out as your high end competitors cash in.
WHAT I LEARNED THIS WEEK: It is worthwhile making friends with a celebrity This week I wrote a blog post about being yourself on Twitter, based upon research on the way academic credibility can be established using this social network. Unbeknown to me, Professor Brian Cox read my blog and thought it was worthwhile letting other people know. So he sent out a Tweet with a link to my blog post saying it was a "Very interesting article". The Prof has over 250,000 followers on Twitter, thanks to being the most high profile particle physicist in the UK and the only one who has been in a pop band with a Number One Hit. Gosh, I thought, things can only get better now. I was right. Within just a few hours my website had been visited by the number of people I normally get in a month. My site was a big hit. Then, the article was Tweeted by the BBC itself, leading to masses of traffic - at one point there were over 500 people live on my site, resulting in a crash of the database and some of them getting error messages. Luckily I was able to solve that quickly, but it demonstrated how popular my blog post was, thanks to two key Tweets from people with a large following. To get more traffic you don't need to pay for it using Pay Per Click. Nor do you need to spend thousands on "SEO". Instead, all you need is to make friends with a celebrity. Get them to send out a single Tweet an you'll have loads of visitors..!
THIS WEEK'S "MUST BUY": How to Write and Sell Simple Information
To find out more about this book visit: http://uklik.me/howtowriteandsell
AND FINALLY: From this week's blog... One in three people online have used an online dating service at some stage in their life. Indeed, a study a couple of years back showed that online dating is much more successful in finding a partner than traditional forms of dating, such as meeting people in a bar. Read More About how The Guardian got it wrong: http://uklik.me/gce16o
Kind Regards
Graham Jones Web:
grahamjones.co.uk Tel: +44 118 336 9710 If you no longer wish to receive this newsletter than you can delete your name from the mailing list by clicking this link: {!remove_web} Affiliate Links: Some of the links in this newsletter are affiliate links providing me with a small commission when you purchase the item. However, I only use affiliate links for products which I personally value. |
