Marketing Launch
December 26th, 2007 | by ScottIt appears that you're new here, if you like what you read, please subscribe to the news feed or sign up for the Leap eTips news and updates email list. Thank you for visiting :)
This is part 5 of 10 in the Niche Network Marketing with LAMP series.
A short preface is in order for this installment. Under optimal conditions you will have at-least a small budget on hand to enhance your marketing efforts via paid advertisements (links, banners and etc. on related sites) and/or Pay Per Click campaigns. These methods aren’t essential in the long term, but will provide you with a faster start.
However, I’m trying to provide this series on Niche Network Marketing in a manner that anyone should be able to do–and afford–so what follows are the free steps I take in marketing a new Niche Network as I’m developing it. Please read them with the understanding that it’s best–though not crucial–to be able to compliment them with some of the paid options I’ve mentioned above for maximum initial impact.
First, prior to anything else in this step, you’ll need to ensure you have two sitemaps ready for your site. Some blogging and other CMS software have sitemap options pre-installed. These are good, but even they usually only provide a single XML (Google preferred) sitemap file. What you want are an XML and a pure text URL list (Yahoo preferred). Yahoo seems to be able to pick up your pages from an XML sitemap, so this may seem like overkill, but in my own non-scientific testing it seems as though Yahoo picks up pages faster if you provide the pure text URL list sitemap with the XML one, so I strongly suggest creating and keeping both.
There’s a nice, free tool available that automates the whole sitemap process, and will create both the XML and text based files for you. It’s called GSiteCrawler and you can find it at http://gsitecrawler.com
Once you have both files, just upload them to your primary niche site and be sure to link to them on your main site page. You can then go to Google and Yahoo and submit your sitemaps. At Google only submit your XML sitemap file. In Yahoo you can submit both the XML and the text based files.
Now it’s time to get into some dirty work. You’re going to need to create (or pay someone to create) 8 thorough, well written and useful (to readers) articles around your primary niche topic.
These can not be fluff!
They must be as informative, entertaining and engaging as you can possibly make them.
They must also be well crafted!
You’re going to create each article using 2 of your keyword phrases. In each case, the article itself should be focused around one of your “Off Site” keywords. These are the highest competition keywords you have researched earlier. The article title should contain the keyword, it should also appear in both your opening and closing paragraphs of the article; and if you can use it at-least once more in the body content of your article that’s great too. Just be sure that it fits into each use naturally. You CAN NOT keyword stuff in these articles (and you really shouldn’t do it anywhere else either) or you’ll ruin the foundation of your whole network. Trust me.
When you have the article completed you’re going to select a keyword from your “Longtails” keyword list (I’m assuming you created the 3 keyword lists as described in part 2) that will be the anchor text for the link in your Author’s Box when you submit the article to a publishing platform. The link itself should point to your primary niche site.
For best results, the anchor text keyword should seem naturally related to the high competition keyword you created your article around, so it’s actually a good idea to select both keywords before writing your article. This way you can find two that are closely related and that should help make everything more natural once published.
Repeat this process over and over until you have 8 perfect articles ready to publish. Notice that I emphasized the word perfect. That was to stress two points. The first is that you should approach every aspect of building a niche network with a goal of perfection. It’s hard work to get everything right, but by striving for perfection you will give yourself the best possible chance for success.
And second, to reiterate that these articles must be of high quality and value to readers. They can not be fluff or junk.
Once you have all 8 articles ready, you’ll want to submit 2 each to the following article directories: eZineArticles, GoArticles, SearchWarp and Content Caboodle.
NOTE: There are a lot of theories and debates over how to submit articles, whether they should be submitted to multiple directories and etc. I’m only going to say that I suggest you manually submit every article, and only submit each one once to a single directory. That’s why you create 8 articles, so that you have enough to submit 2 to each of the 4 directories I’ve mentioned.
In the interest of candor and full disclosure I am involved with the Content Caboodle web site and business. That’s not my motivation for including it here, but I think it’s only fair that readers be aware of my involvement there. I have 2 reasons for adding that site to the list of directories. First, I know that Google is showing it a lot of love since it went online and newly published articles are being indexed within hours every day. So this is great for building your SERPs and search engine traffic.
And second, because unlike any of the other article directories listed, Content Caboodle pays authors for submitting quality articles. Article directories make money from advertising to visitors. Content Caboodle does as well, however keeps the advertisements low-key (a single ad on each page). Still, understanding that the directory makes more money from more page views, and that quality articles always generate more readers (page views), Content Caboodle pays authors a flat-rate per page views their articles receive, so it’s beneficial to everyone–authors and the article directory–to have high quality content being created and submitted.
After you’ve submitted all 8 articles you’ll want to watch for when each gets accepted and published. GoArticles and SearchWarp publish instantly, however eZineArticles and Content Caboodle both go through a manual editor’s review for quality and email authors upon publishing.
As each article is published on a directory, you should then submit them to any relevant social communities that you can.
Do Not SPAM Social Networks!
I’m not advocating that you blindly submit your published articles to every social network out there. I’m saying that where the topic of your article is something that makes sense to submit to certain social networks then you should submit it to those networks only. You should be actively involved in the social networks you joined from part 4 of this series (if you’ve used them each daily as I mentioned), and should have a solid understanding of what topics will fit which networks by now.
It may seem odd that I’m telling you to essentially promote pages on another web site (the article directory’s page holding your article), but the point here is that you’re developing a web of linking and traffic flow for both humans and search engine bots to follow around, and everything about this web of linking is ultimately pointing back to your primary niche site in the center.
As just one example, lets say you create an article titled “Article A” and submit it to Content Caboodle. Once it’s published you then submit it to Digg. Now we can follow the trail that humans and bots will find:
The submitted listing appears on a Digg page, that links to the article page on Content Caboodle, which has a link in the Author’s Box to your primary niche site–and it’s all related! That’s important because it means the humans are interested (and likely have a growing interest with each step along the way) in your topic, and the bots just love related linking.
Maybe your niche is something technical, so there’s a submission on Digg in the “Technology News” section that links to this article on Content Caboodle in the “Computers and Technology” section, that then links back to your site which is in this technology niche.
That’s how it all starts to come together, and it happens with each social network that you submit each article to.
But again, and I really can’t stress this enough, it all only works if you create quality content and articles to begin with, and if you’re selective and careful in your social network submissions to only submit pages that will be relevant and interesting to the communities. Take any short cuts along the way and you’ll blow it.
Part 6 of the series should be available in a day or two so please check back, or better yet subscribe to my RSS newsfeed and be sure to get it as soon as it gets published.
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