Idea #1 Sometimes you can write a wordy comment in answer to someone’s blog post. Turn that into an article. Start by summarizing the original blog post in your own word and then work in your comment. You often don’t have to do a lot of writing to get a nice informative 400 plus word article out of a comment you’ve left on someone’s blog.

Idea #2 Other times you write a lengthy answer to someone’s email question. That can make a great article or blog post too. Here’s an example of a blog post I wrote last week that started out as an email reply:

Yahoo Site Explorer Is Gone

This could just as easily have become an article. In fact, I may spend a few minutes today and turn it into an article (by adding a bit to it and rewriting the introduction) and then submit it to a few article directories.

Idea #3 You have a report you’ve written in the past, or have PLR rights to a report. Take a section out of the report, add a few more details or further explanation and you’ve got an article. The same goes for information products you’ve created. I’ve taken small sections of ebooks I’ve written and used them as articles and blog posts. It’s a great way to drive extra traffic to the sales page of your product.

Look around at what you already have and think how you can repurpose it into an article. That way it does double duty without taking up more of your precious time.

P.S. Articles aren’t the only thing you can create from repurposed material. I create all sorts of content and reusing something I’ve already written is just one of them. For more tips on content creation shortcuts take a look at this Affiliate Shortcut Report.

I figured I’d quickly check the rankings and see if we were still anywhere to be found in Google. I wasn’t expecting much since I’d paid absolutely no attention to this post after getting it to rank almost a year ago. What I found was surprising:

The second listing is for a Facebook note about the blog post (that also happens to link directly to Tracy’s blog).

Here’s what the Facebook note looks like:

The question is … can we get Facebook notes content to rank on a regular basis and drive targeted traffic back to our niche sites this way (along with growing our Facebook circle of influence).

I’m doing some testing but for now, let me show you how to quickly and easily create content on Facebook notes via your blog’s RSS feed.

I recommend you start by creating a Facebook page about your blog or niche website. While you’re editing the page, go to the Apps section and enable the “notes” app. Go to notes and look in the left-hand sidebar. Toward the bottom you’ll see a  section called “Subscribe” with a link to your pages RSS feed and right below it a link called “Edit Import Settings”.

Click on it and you’ll be able to import your blog’s RSS feed into your Facebook page’s notes. I recommend you set your blog’s RSS feed to only show a summary to encourage readers to click through to your blog.

Of course you can also share unique content (in other words, new stuff you’re writing) via Facebook notes along with articles. I’m setting up some tests this week with articles I’ve written in the past and will report on the results within the next few days.

If you have any experience with Facebook Notes, I’d love to hear about it.

P.S. To see this Facebook notes content import in action, visit my Daily Affiliate Tasks Facebook Page here. While you’re there, I’d appreciate a “like”.

But first, let’s talk about what article syndication is.

Definition of Syndication:

The process of distributing articles, stories, columns, photographs, comic strips, or other features for simultaneous publication in a number of web sites, newspapers or periodicals in different localities.

For article syndication this means that you write and submit an article with the purpose of having it published on other websites.

How To Syndicate Articles

Here’s a very simple process for syndicating your article:

Write the article –> Submit it to an article directory –> The article is published on other websites and blogs.

From there you can modify the process in several different ways:

• You can submit your article to multiple article directories.
• You can submit the article directly to websites who will republish it.
• You can spin your article before distributing it to various article directories.
• You can post the article on your own site and offer it for redistribution.
• You can do any combination of all of the above.

Article Syndication and Google Panda

I’m sure you’ve heard people say that article marketing is dead since the Panda update. Ignore them please. Yes, some of the big article directories including Ezinearticles.com were hit pretty bad and are not getting the search engine traffic they used to get. And rightfully so.

Many of the articles on these directories weren’t written for the purpose of redistribution and syndication, but for SEO purposes. The only goal was to publish the article on a strong site (in this case the article directory) so that the article itself would rank and send traffic back to your own site and so you would get a strong incoming link to your site, helping it rank.

The end result was a lot of low quality articles being published to get those links. Since many of the articles were crap, they never got syndicated. When the article directories themselves lost their juice, many webmasters who used this quantity over quality approach started saying that article marketing is dead.

Here’s Why It Still Works!

Here’s the thing… article marketing and article syndication still work and they still work well. Writing and submitting quality articles is a great way to get targeted traffic to your website. The key is to write articles that others be proud to republish on their sites. Do that and you get the chance to put yourself and your online business in front of some big sites that can send a lot of traffic your way.

How To Get Started

I’ve been writing articles for quite a few different niches and am finding that different directories work better for different niches. Here’s my strategy for finding out what works best in a particular market.

• Write 3 or more articles.
• Submit each to a different directory.
• Wait a few days or even weeks.
• Do a Google search for your article title (in quotes).
• See which article has been syndicated on quality sites. The directory you submitted it to is a great place to submit more articles to.
• Rinse and repeat with other directories to build a list of 10 or so good sites to distribute your content to.

Once you have that list, go ahead and distribute each of your articles to several of them. I like to rewrite titles to mix things up a bit and to make it easier to track which article was picked up from where.

P.S. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below. You can also join us at Daily Affiliate Tasks to find out what I’m doing to grow my affiliate income on a daily basis.

Start by logging into the article directories that you’ve submitted your article to and see what kind of stats they provide. You want to look for traffic, but more importantly for information on how many people clicked on your author resource box. Ezinearticles does a great job with those stats.

Compare some of your articles and find out what resource box got the highest click-through rate.

Calculating Click Through Rates:

The click through rate (CTR) is simply the number of clicks on the links In your resource box (CLICKS), divided by the number of times the article was read (READS).

CTR = READS / CLICKS

Let’s look at how some of my articles are performing.

The following screenshot comes from the member area on Ezinearticles. After you’re logged in, click on “Author Tools” -> “View My Statistics” -> “Article Stats”

Looking at this, I can see that the article “How Many Backlinks Does Your Site Need” is outperforming the rest of the articles by quite a bit. It has a 10.9% click through rate. That particular resource box has my picture and the following text:

Looking for a link building program?

Go get information at http://www.EasyLinkLove.com

Since it is performing much better than a lot of my other resource boxes, I may go back and edit the others to look more like this one. I’ll also try to write more articles that are structured the way this one is.

The takeaway here is to go back and look at what’s working, look at what isn’t working and adjust accordingly.

P.S. This is just a short excerpt from one of the strategies I share in this report. The report also discusses how you can use expired domains and existing websites to give yourself an immediate traffic head start with any new website.

You’ll learn how to structure your site for fast indexing and good internal links. Last but not least, I’ll share two traffic boost strategies that will “supercharge” everything else you do to get fast free traffic.

Get your copy of “Affiliate Shortcut – Traffic” today for just $17.

But how do you go about creating that free report? The easiest thing to do is to use some articles or blog posts that you have already written and turn them into said report.

I sat down this morning and wrote a short little report about how you can do just that. Start with 5 to 10 articles or blog posts that you have already written and you can have this wrapped up within a half hour or so.

Here’s the report:

How To Turn Your Articles and Blog Posts Into Free Reports (pdf)

This is a pdf file. To download it to your computer, right-click on the link above and choose “Save As” or “Save Target As”.

Enjoy and get those reports out there. Use them to build your list and to drive visitors back to your site.

P.S. I’d love to hear what you think about the report. Was it helpful? Is there something that wasn’t clear? Let me know.

Pick A Keyword

Start by choosing a good long tail keyword. You want something with at least 3 words in it that you can quickly and easily rank for. At the same time you want the keyword to get at least a few searches per day.

If you are not familiar with keyword research, here are two posts that will bring you up to speed:

What is keyword research?

Long tail vs. short tail keywords – What to use when.

One of the reasons we want to pick a good keyword is so it will rank on page in Google for that search term. This will get us quite a bit of traffic to the article which will help us get more internal links on the EzineArticle site as we’ll see in a minute.

Write Articles In The Same Category

Next you want to look through the categories at Ezinearticles.com. Find a main category and then a sub category within that that best fits your target market. Then start writing and submitting articles for that category (again choosing your keywords wisely).

By focusing on one particular sub category, it won’t take you long to become one of the most popular authors within it. let’s take a look at two examples.

When I write articles that link back to this blog, I tend to submit them in the Internet and Business Online category and then the Affiliate Revenue sub-category.

Here is a screenshot of the bottom of the top author page for that sub category.

Writing and submitting about 80 or so articles to this sub category will get you on the top author list. That’s a good bit of writing, but certainly something you can accomplish if you put your mind to it.

Here’s another example in a completely different niche – Tea. At Ezinearticles.com you will find it in the Food and Drink category.

Just a little over 50 articles would get you second place in the top authors of this category. To get on this top author page right now, all you would have to do is write and publish 11 articles in this category. You can do that in just a couple of days.

Does that mean you should start writing articles about tea? No, of course not, unless it fits with your website and your target market. What you should do is look around for a category and sub category that you could write articles about and then stick with that one sub-category for a while unit you make it to the top author page.

Get in the “Most Articles Viewed”  and/or “Most Published Articles” Categories

Now, let’s look at how we can get some of your articles in the most “Most Articles Viewed” and “Most Published Articles” sections for your particular sub category. You may have noticed these at the end of each article on Ezinearticles.com. Here’s what it looks like:

I am sure you can imagine how much more traffic you would get from your article if it was listed at the bottom of each of the articles in any given category.

Not only will you get more direct traffic, search engine traffic to your article will also increase because of all these extra links it is getting from hundreds of pages on the Ezine Articles site.

Step One – Pick A Good Keyword

We already talked about keywords. For this strategy it is also crucial to pick a good keyword that you can rank for that also gets a decent amount of daily traffic.

Sure, there are other ways of driving traffic to your article and we will take advantage of them, but you want a nice passive way to consistently get traffic to your article without having to work at it. Keep in mind that the “most viewed” and “most published” articles are for the past 60 days, so you want to continue to get a steady stream of traffic to your article week in and week out.

Step Two – Rank In The Top 3 On Google

Your next goal is to get your article to rank in the top 3 search results in Google for your keyword. Part of this will depend on choosing a good keyword that gets a fair amount of searches but isn’t too competitive. The other part is building some links to the article to get it to rank. Here are some ideas on how to build links to it.

• Write and submit another article. Link to your site and the article on Ezinearticles.com.
• Write some guest blog posts and point one of the links to your article.
• Leave comments on a few “do-follow” blogs and link to your article.
• Bookmark the article on social bookmarking sites.

Step Three – Give It A Quick Traffic Boost

Last but not least it is time to monitor page views on any of the articles that have potential of making the “Most” lists.  Once you have a likely candidate, push it up by sending a lot more traffic to it.

Sit down and writing a few more articles and submit them to some of the more popular article directories including Isnare.com, ArticleBase.com and ArticleSnatch.com

Mention your article on Twitter and encourage people to read it and comment on it.

Blog about your article. Include a little teaser and a link to your article on Ezinearticles.com. Again invite people to read the article and then come back to your blog to comment about it.

If you have a list, email them about the article and have them read it.

All of this will quickly boost the traffic to that particular article and may just be enough to push you into the most viewed category. Of course all this extra traffic will also get your article published more often, which in turn results in more links and traffic to your own site.

P.S. The most surefire way to make this strategy work is to promote your article once it is published on the article directory. I call this “Promoting Your Promotions” and it’s one over 26 lessons we cover in the advanced link building program at EasyLinkLove.com/adv

Most of us will add the PLR articles to our sites (hopefully spending a little time rewriting them and optimizing them for a keyword), but there’s quite a bit more we can do. One of the worst things you can do is buy a bunch of PLR and then just let it collect virtual dust on your computer hard drive. Instead, go ahead and buy PLR articles, but then make sure you put them to work.

Here are some great ideas for doing just that from my friend Nicole Dean – the owner of one of the best PLR sites out there – EasyPLR.com

What Can you Do with PLR Articles?
By Nicole Dean

You may have seen the term Private Label Rights or PLR articles being tossed around frequently lately. PLR articles are articles you can buy (usually in packages or as part of a membership) that you may edit and use as you wish. Unlike free reprint articles, you are not required to link back to anyone else’s website which makes them appealing to many web publishers.

Once you understand the concept behind PLR articles, you can see why they are appealing. Most people can envision the value of adding the articles to their websites. But, did you know there are more ways to use PLR articles than that?

1. Add them to your blog.
Similar to adding PLR articles to your website, you can take excerpts and use them on your blog for fresh content. Whether you take a portion and use it as a “tip of the day” or use the entire article, PLR articles can be a huge time saver for you.

2. Send them in your newsletter.
Need content for your newsletter? PLR articles are an option. Of course, if you’re developing a relationship with your readers, you may wish to edit the articles to make them your own voice. However, you can pull a section from a PLR article – use it as inspiration — and whip out a newsletter in minutes.

3. Start an ecourse
If you purchase a package of PLR articles based on a theme, it’s quite easy to turn them into an ecourse simply by adding them to your auto-responder. Something as simple as “Five Ideas for Kids Lunches” can become a 5 day ecourse to grow a big newsletter list.

4. Use them in your podcast
Take a PLR article and use it as inspiration for a podcast. Add the content and you’re done.

5. Send them in a print mailing
Direct mailing is huge. If you have a list of postal mailing addresses, put together a free report from PLR articles and send it out.

6. Create a special report
Simply bulk together some PLR articles that have the same topic, and make them flow into a special report. Turn it into a pdf file and give it away to your website visitors.

See how easy that is? The only hard part is finding a PLR service that is high quality and fits your niche. Look around. Make sure the PLR package or membership you choose provides you with high quality articles so you can create something you’ll be proud of.

Nicole Dean is the owner of www.EasyPLR.com – where you’ll find high-quality PLR articles sold in very limited quantities. The PLR articles at EasyPLR are professionally written and professionally edited — top quality at an affordable price.

I hope you enjoyed this guest post by my friend Nicole. As I mentioned before I use her PLR quite a bit and do all of the above with it. I have also used PLR articles as the basis of chapters in some of my books and courses. They are a great way to get more content out there that will get you traffic, subscribers and customers.

One important thing to keep in mind is that it should be QUALITY PLR – after all, these articles, reports etc. are representing you and your online business. Make sure that no matter what PLR you buy and use that it is well written and makes sense. What I love about Nicole’s PLR is that it is always topnotch. Check it out at http://www.affiliatenichepacks.com/easyplr

Get Your Article To Rank

Start by doing everything you can to get as much traffic as possible to your article. The more traffic your article gets, the more clicks you will end up getting to your site. A popular article will also gain in link juice and authority over time, which means the link that’s pointing back to your own site will become much stronger.

You can accomplish this by promoting your article and building links to it which is just one of the many advanced link building concepts we will cover in my new Link Building Class.

Here are a couple of different ways you can build links to your articles:

• Social Bookmarking sites like Delicious and Stumbleupon
• Submit more articles to other article directories and link in the resource box to your first article.
• Build Squidoo lenses or Hub Pages and link to several of your articles.
• Mention them in guest posts, on your facebook page etc.

Get Them To Your Author Resource Box

Once you get visitors to read your article, your next job is to make sure they make it all the way down to the author resource box and then click through to your site. There are several things you can do to improve your chances of accomplishing this. Let’s go over them:

1. Keep It Short – Don’t write super long articles. 400 to 450 words is a good target to aim for in articles that you will be submitting to article directories.
2. Break It Up – Use short paragraphs and include some lists, indentations and quotes into your content. Break everything up into small chunks that are easy to read and digest.
3. Make It Smooth – Put some effort into creating a smooth and seamless transition from the main body of the article to the author resource box. Use phrases like “And now…” or “Next, I would like to invite you …” and make sure the call to action in the resource box is closely related to the article.
4. Call To Action – Speaking of a Call to Action, make it very clear what you would like the reader to do at the end of the article. Ask them to click on your link and then read the blog post, join your list or buy your product. Be specific and inviting. Tell them what they can expect to gain at the other end of that click.

P.S. To learn more about promoting your promotions, getting articles to rank and other advanced link building strategies, join my link building program at EasyLinkLove.com/adv

I’d love to spend the next 6 months working with you on getting tons of free traffic to your sites.

Step 1 – Find An Article

Start by browsing through some of your favorite article directories to find an article you can add to your site. I like to look at Ladypens.com and Ezinearticles.com. You can either browse through the most appropriate categories, or if you already have an idea, search for articles around the main keyword. For example, If I am thinking of adding some information on freezer cooking, I may enter “freezer cooking” or “freezer meals” or “OAMC” (for once a month cooking – a freezer cooking term) into the search box.

Step 2 – Keyword Research

Your next step will be to do some keyword research to find a phrase people are searching for. You want to find some “low-hanging fruit”, meaning finding some keywords and phrases that don’t have a lot of competition. I use the wordtracker keyword tool to do this. Any term that has less than 30 competitors (the allintitle/allinanchor column in wordtracker) is usually a good term to go after.

If you’re new to this concept, read this post: What Is Keyword Research

Step 3 -  Craft A Title

Now that you have your article and your keyword, it’s time to work on adding it to your site. Let’s start with the title. This will be the meta title of your page as well as a H1 headline on the page itself. If you are using wordpress to manage your site, just add it as the title of your post and the software will do everything else for you.

You want to carefully craft your title and make it interesting. Also try to work the keyword into the post title as early as possible.

Step 4 – Write A Short Introduction

Next, write a couple of sentences that introduce the article you selected. Use the keyword within the introduction and then transition into the actual article.

Step 5 – Copy and Paste The Article

Your next step is to add the article itself. I usually make the title bold. Don’t forget to add the resource box at the end and be sure to keep all links intact.

While you want to publish the complete article, it’s ok to make some editorial comments throughout the article if you’d like. Just make sure it is clear that those are your comments, not those of the author of the original article. You can also link to affiliate offers throughout the content.

Step 6 – Closing Thoughts and Offer

This particular step is optional. If your main goal is free search engine traffic and you’re site is monetized by something like Adsense, feel free to skip this step. If you working on more affiliate commissions though, then spend a little time writing some closing thoughts at the end and then make a recommendation for an affiliate product.

P.S. Get in the habit of adding fresh content, including publishing articles regularly to your sites and watch your free traffic and income grow.

What Can We Write About

A lot of times my first stumbling block is coming up with an idea for an article. If I’m just writing one here and there, it’s not that bad, but writing at least one article per day consistently for 100 (or more) days in a row gets a bit challenging. After all, there’s only so much you can talk (eh…write) about, right?  Wrong!

You know a lot more than you give yourself credit for and there are quite a few topics you can write articles about that are relevant to your niche and market. Here’s my strategy for coming up with 100 article ideas in 30 minutes.

Once I have my idea, I do some keyword research to come up with a good title. Next I draft a quick outline of the article. This helps my thoughts stay organized. This way I also don’t forget to mention anything important in the article.

I use the same outline concept in my blog posts, including this one. I may do this well in advance, when an idea for an article or blog posts strikes. Then when I get ready to write, I can pull up on of these drafts and write away.

The last but possibly most important part of your article is the resource box. You want your article content to flow right into it and then include a strong call to action that invites readers to visit your site. Here are some tips on how to create a link in your resource box.

I have a few more resources for you. The first is a facebook page I set up that features some of my favorite articles. Look at them for more article and internet marketing tips and of course as examples. Feel free to model your own articles after mine.

To read more about the 5th HAHD challenge and how you can participate read this blog post on EzineArticles.com. You may also want to follow the #HAHD hashtag on twitter. (I’m @susannemyers by the way). Be sure to tweet about your progress and share links to your published articles there as well.

Last but not least I’d like to invite you to learn more about how you can use your articles to build links (along with quite a few other easy link building strategies) at EasyLinkLove.com

P.S. Are you part of the HAHD Challenge? If so, let me know how you’re doing. I’m working on article #6 and #7 today. How about you?