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“Hi Duncan, I have a question. I enjoy writing articles. I have a squeeze page, a wordpress blog, which has content auto supplied by “My Article Network”, and a sales page. How should I set up my link structure for maximum profit and effectiveness? Where should I point my article resource box links to and should I put my articles on my blog before submitting them to directories or write different material for each? Thanks” ~ Ray Burton

Hi Ray,

Based on what you’ve provided above it looks like you’re…

• Using the blog to generate traffic from organic search engine optimization.
• Using the squeeze page to generate leads.
• Using the sales page to close sales arriving directly from the blog, and the leads you’re generating on the squeeze page.

…as I write this, it’s not immediately apparent how you’re using the squeeze page on the blog (or sales letter) but it’s largely irrelevant to your question (I imagine you’re driving PPC traffic through it – and perhaps it’s being advertised on the blog or is placed somewhere in your traffic funnel that I’ve missed).

BTW – Your business model above is excellent. It allows you to cover all of your bases (i.e. it’s often easier to get organic traffic from the search engines to a blog rather than a one page sales letter – it’s better to have a squeeze page for PPC and to generate leads – and the sales letter closes the deal).

How should I set up my link structure for maximum profit and effectiveness? Where should I point my article resource box links to and should I put my articles on my blog before submitting them to directories or write different material for each?

Ultimately that all depends on a few factors;

As I mentioned above – it can be much easier to obtain organic search engine traffic to a blog than a single page sales letter or squeeze page.

A blog is going to have more content and therefore generate visitors for many longer tailed keywords as a by product of good search engine optimization. Often times for keyword terms you weren’t even targeting directly.

You also have more content to syndicate via RSS distribution, social bookmarking, social networking, and so forth – yet another avenue to generate more backlinks (and largely on autopilot) in addition to article marketing (and other link building techniques).

Of course, that’s not to say you can’t focus on getting links directly to your sales or squeeze page to try and push them up in the rankings directly. It will just require more time, focus and investment to do so.

This is because you’re relying largely on the power of the incoming links to do the work (rather than a lot of content). It will mean you’re going to need more quality links with extremely focused anchor text, and you’ll be limited to only a few strategic keyword terms – ultimately limited by your budget.

At the end of the day the choice is yours.

You could do both but I would pick one of the above to focus on so you’re not watering down your efforts and therefore the results you can achieve.

So let’s say you really want to develop that blog of yours.

Perhaps the goal is to get it up to 400-500 unique visitors per day from organic search engine traffic – and then funnel that traffic to your squeeze page / sales page (this is what we focus on doing with most of our in-house niche websites).

You can then funnel that traffic by popping up the squeeze page on your blog to capture leads directly then and there, or through strategic placement of advertisements and so forth. Basically you want to get as many blog visitors converted into leads as possible and get their eyeballs focused on your sales page.

The immediate problem you have is that the content of your blog is being supplied by My Article Network. Most of that content is not going to be unique (or unique enough) and as a result, you’re competing for any possible search engine rankings with everyone else using that content.

Sure a lot of people will tell you that duplicate content is not an issue – and to make the most of it you can compensate with more aggressive link building – but at the end of the day unique content is king because only you are providing it. It is by far and away much easier to gain rankings for.

So if you were going to develop the blog I would either focus on producing unique content for it exclusively (and then distributing some of that content around the place) and dropping the My Article Network content – or at the very least start adding as much unique content as you’re getting from My Article Network.

I think there’s something pretty important that I need to mention here.

Something that adds to a lot of the confusion surrounding duplicate content.

There are marketers out there whose business model is to simply build hundreds of blogs (auto blogs / splogs / call them what you will) and use advertising (like Google AdSense for example) to generate income.

They may also use these blog networks as a means to provide backlinks to their primary real estate to help improve search engine rankings there.

For these people, using duplicate content from My Article Network (and other sources of course – I have no problem with that network at all) is not really an issue.

By scale of volume if each one of their, let’s say 100 blogs, produces just 10 unique visitors per day each – they can generate a reasonable income from the advertising off 1,000 unique visitors per day. As a result – they are more about volume and automation rather than quality and focus.

These people will be pro “duplicate content” because it’s fast, easy and, well, can be totally automated. You’ll hear them say such things as “if you cant get traffic from duplicate content you’re doing something wrong”.

However unique content is by far and away the better option in either case.

The trouble with the above type of people is that it simply costs too much to warrant focusing on it. If they are auto posting an article from some distribution source to each of their 100 blogs, each day, then that’s 100 unique posts.

If they were to purchase 100 unique blog posts from a writer it would cost a minimum of $1,000 per day (if they wanted reasonable quality unique content). When you’re talking about people who have 1,000 blogs – well you see the problem. Not too mention that it becomes compounded by the fact that they might be in 100 different niche markets so they need to be able to have content produced on each topic.

I just think the biggest issue that a lot of people face when “discussing techniques” in forums – or learning about them via blogs or whatever – is that they forget that everyone is following a different business model to generate their revenue.

So I am all for unique content whenever and wherever possible. You control that content – and you can push it out to the above type of marketers to generate backlinks for yourself if you choose to do so.

Where should I point my article resource box links to and should I put my articles on my blog before submitting them to directories or write different material for each?

What I would do is to point all of my resource box links back to the home page of the blog, using the primary keyword term that you’re targeting as anchor text.

If you are able to include two links in your resource box, I would also include a link to a deeper page within the blog (perhaps a sub-category) and use relevant anchor text for that. Keep all of this consistent as you progress (the keyword terms pointing to the same locations).

I would always post the articles to your own blog first and allow the search engines to pick them up and index them before distributing those same articles to any third party websites or distribution networks.

That way you’re going to be the first person providing this content – and if you decide to distribute it verbatim – it will give you a slight edge in having been the first to provide it.

Ideally however – you should do both.

Keep 50% of your content exclusive to your blog only (but push it out there via services like OnlyWire.com to help it get indexed faster) – and then distribute the remaining 50% to third party websites.

Again, it comes down to how much content you can have produced.

If you can get 104 articles produced each year (a cost of about $1,040- $2,080+) – then you can have 1 unique blog post made each week – and an additional blog post  /article made each week that you can also distribute around the internet.

That might sound like a lot of money but if you put it into weekly or monthly terms it’s not. At the lower end of the scale it works out to be $20 per week – at the higher end $40+ per week. Most people spend that much if not more on junk food.

If you’re serious about things, then even paying $80 per week (or $40 per article) is not a stupid thing – you’ll get better quality content and it will pay bigger dividends long term. If you distribute those 52 articles to 200 places each there’s over 10,000 incoming links that you’re generating each year. If you can increase distribution through more sources, and you probably can, then go for it.

BTW – if you want to keep using My Article network and are seeing some benefit from it, then by all means continue to do so (pretty sure you’re earning credits and incoming links on other sites for every article you post on your own). I would however work to replace this with my own unique content over time.

Ray, and anyone else that reads this – I highly recommend you hit the print button and read it a few times. It is so simply powerful… it really is stupid.

Most people that have been reading me for a long time will know about a “Worm Composting” niche website I started several years ago now, as a case study in search engine optimization for readers.

What I have explained here is ultimately the business model we used (although a much watered down explanation of it) to generate 70,924 visitors and 147,393 page views from January 1^st 2009 to December 31^st 2009.

This is in a tiny niche market too – however because of the unique content we use – those visitors arrived from 13,759 different keyword terms.

We pay a writer (experienced in worm composting) $150 per week to answer 2 reader questions (read as $75 per blog post). The answers to those questions are compiled to form the newsletter – delivered to over 16k people each week – and are then posted as content on the blog for organic search engine traffic.

We generally take about a month off publishing over Xmas – sometimes 6 weeks – so if we take 48 weeks as an average – the cost there is about $7,200 for the content. That’s pretty expensive – you can get quality content for much cheaper – but I like the writer.

Dividing that investment by the number of visitors generated it works out to be about $0.10 per visitor – which is some pretty cheap traffic.

Not to mention that we have been VERY slack in any distribution or syndication of content on this particular website – VERY SLACK (I consider this my beer fridge website).

We didn’t do any paid advertising during that period, and still the daily visitor average continues to climb as the months go by – and this website continues to produce a consistent stream of income to prop up the beer fridge ;-0

Again – it is so simply powerful it’s stupid.

I hope this helps.

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