Having someone else publish your article is a great way to bring traffic to your website. It’s a chance to get attention from people who may be interested in what you have to offer, but haven’t heard of you yet. Not all articles are published to websites, however. Some are only sent to a newsletter or ezine list. Does it matter whether your article is published on someone’s site versus their newsletter?

The benefits can be different for each, but it’s not something I stress about, personally. The main thing you want from your articles is exposure to a new audience.

Website Publication Benefits

The benefit of having your article published on someone else’s website goes beyond the initial exposure to human visitors. An article on a website usually stays up for years, potentially giving you traffic for years to come. Links in the article may provide you with benefits for your search engine optimization efforts. It’s a pretty good deal when it’s done right.

Newsletter Publication Benefits

The publication of your article in a newsletter has similar benefits, except it may be for a shorter time. How much initial benefit you get depends on how big the list is, how engaged they are and how relevant they find the information you’re sharing.

If it’s a big list, but they send out so many emails that many don’t get opened, your article may get lost in the shuffle, no matter how well written and topical. You have to be careful when choosing newsletters to offer an article to, because some won’t be worth the time.

Some newsletters also get published on websites, so while there’s no guarantee of later visitors finding the article, or of any SEO benefit, you will get that sometimes. Don’t expect it unless you know the newsletter is published on a website as well. A membership with the Directory of Ezines is a shortcut to finding relevant newsletters to check out.

With any newsletter, the main surge of traffic you may get will be on the day the newsletter is sent, with late readers trickling in over perhaps a few days.

Does the Difference Between the Two Make a Difference?

While the extra traffic you can get over time from having an article published on a website is nice, don’t completely rule out newsletters and ezines. Most important is which one will get you in front of the audience you’re after. Getting in front of the right audience can do far more for your online business than any search engine benefits you may get.

Don’t get me wrong. Ranking highly on the search engines for your keywords is a wonderful thing. Sometimes it’s a huge thing. But it can also be short lived and frustrating. Rankings rise and fall, and there’s only so much you can do about it. Build your traffic in other ways, and a drop in rankings won’t be quite the crisis it would be otherwise.

While it pays to keep both the short term and long term benefits in mind, you shouldn’t always sacrifice one for the other. Besides, if you get a good list of newsletter and website owners who are regularly willing to publish your articles, you’ll have a long term benefit already. You’ll be able to write articles and know that you can pull in traffic more or less when you want it, not just when the search engines like you.

Having an article you wrote published in the newsletter of another site is a great way to bring traffic to your site. The right publication can bring many interested visitors to your website. The only problem is getting your article published in the first place. How do you do that? You have a few options.

No matter which route you take, make sure your articles are not overly promotional. They won’t get published if they are. Write articles which provide quality information and leave the self promotion to your resource box. Don’t overdo it there, either, and if you published the article on your site first, don’t link back to that same article. Link where you want your traffic to go.

1. Hope.

Hoping for publication is when you add your article to an article directory and hope someone picks it for their newsletter or website. It’s best to use the better directories for this, such as EzineArticles, as they have some degree of quality control and your article won’t be surrounded by complete and utter spam. Doesn’t mean all the other articles will be great, but they’ll be better than the ones on sites that approve all articles.

I call this method hope because that’s all you’re doing. You aren’t finding publishers yourself, you’re just putting your article someplace they might look.

It can work. You can have your articles picked up from an article directory and used in someone’s newsletter or on their website. Just don’t count on it for every article. It may also be lost in the crowd.

2. Seek out relevant newsletters and pitch your article.

If you want a better chance of getting your article published by others, you have to seek them out yourself. Start by searching for newsletters in your niche and closely related niches. Searches such as “keyword + newsletter” are a good place to start.

Check to see if the site has any information about accepting articles, article guidelines and so forth. If things look good, subscribe or check to see if back issues are published on the website. You want to see how the newsletter looks. Are articles buried in a sea of ads? What kinds of articles have been published? Has the newsletter recently published an article on too similar a topic?

If things look good, follow instructions and send in your article, including a good resource box pointing back to your website. Your article won’t be accepted every time, but over time you’ll develop a list of newsletters publishers who are generally willing to post your articles.

3. Use the Directory of Ezines

Rather than search for ezines that take articles on your own, you can buy access to a list of ezines through the Directory of Ezines (DOE). This is a paid membership, but as of this writing it’s a one time expense. I can’t promise that will be true forever, so if you’re considering it, check the pricing for yourself.

DOE has a good sized list of ezines, and includes information about what kind of advertising each accepts and whether they accept articles.

While not all ezines/newsletters are listed in the DOE, they have a good number, and the basic information you need about whether or not they accept article submissions is right there. That could be a big time saver. It’s still up to you to match your article to the ezines and to write something worth the publisher’s time to share. Do it right and you’ll be in good shape.

We all make mistakes with our online marketing. It’s a part of the learning process. Some are pretty easy to fix while others are going to take some time and a good bit of education to improve the situation. Here are 10 of the mistakes you could be making with your online marketing and how you can start fixing them.

1. You’re trying to do it all for free.

Yes, a few people have managed to build a successful online business using nothing but free hosting and other free resources. They’re the exception. If you want the best chance at succeeding with your online business, you need to spend a bit of money. Just be careful about it.

My first recommendation is to pay for hosting and your own domain name. The trouble with free sites is that someone else owns the space and can delete all your work at will. That’s not going to help your business very much, and it’s not a risk worth taking. Host Gator is a great place to host your websites, reliable and very affordable.

It’s also smart to spend money on resources that will help you build your business, but this should be done very carefully. Don’t buy just because the sales letter told you how easy it would be to make money with their system. Do some research and find out what others think of it. Try to find non-affiliated reviews, as they’re more likely to point out flaws honestly. Not that all affiliates are dishonest, just that some are, and they’ll say what it takes to make the sale. You might not catch the difference until it’s too late.

2. You don’t know your target audience.

So you decided to start a website on an interest of yours, but you really don’t know how to find people interested in what you have to offer. You know they’re out there, now how do you get them to your site?

The simplest way to do this is to start researching your competition. Figure out who’s selling to your target audience successfully and figure out what they’re doing that you need to do. They don’t have to be exact competition, and may even be somewhat complementary to what you’re doing.

If you’re selling dog training videos, for example, you can look at other websites selling products related to dogs. You should also look at forums about dogs and seeing what kinds of questions people are asking when they’re having trouble training their dogs. Those people are your exact target audience, after all, and you need to know what questions they’re asking if you’re going to attract them.

3. Spelling and grammar mistakes are all over your site.

Maybe you thought at first that spelling and grammar don’t matter online. You look at how your target audience posts on forums and social networking sites, and they don’t seem to care that much about typos.

They do care, actually. Not necessarily for themselves, but they’d rather buy from someone who can maintain a professional appearance online, and that means few to no mistakes in spelling or grammar on your site or in your ads, as well as any other time you’re representing your business online.

4. You don’t know anything about your conversion rates.

You’ve gotten people to your site and that’s all you know about it. No idea where they’re coming from or how often they’re converting into sales.

While you don’t want to obsess over statistics to the exclusion of all else, you do need to know what’s working for you and make sure that you’re making a profit. That’s especially true with paid advertising, as you want to keep the ads that bring in more than they cost going, and to improve them over time. You can’t do that if you don’t know how they convert.

You should be constantly testing your ad copy to make it convert as well as possible. To do that you need to know what your goals are. It’s not always to make a sale right off. You might want people to get on your newsletter list first, so you can sell other things to them later.

Some kinds of testing are easier than others. You can usually have more than one ad running at a time in your pay per click campaigns, and they’ll be rotated, giving you some solid data on which is generating the most clicks. Just make sure that the clicks translate to income, as you don’t want to pay for extra clicks that aren’t going anywhere. Even changing one word in an ad can make a difference.

Testing website copy is more effort, but it can be worth it. Move things around, change what you’re saying, figure out the best colors and overall design.

5. You never work on marketing for your website.

The internet is a really big place. Especially when you start out, you need to work on marketing your website so that your target audience can find you.

Backlink building is a good place to start, and I gave some tips on backlink building yesterday. A well placed backlink isn’t just about search engines; it’s about making your site visible to your target audience.

Paid advertising can go well too, but is by its nature more financially risky. You can buy ads on appropriate websites or do pay per click campaigns through the search engines, but be careful about how you spend your money. Many paid campaigns won’t bring in nearly as much as they cost. Keep tweaking things until you get it right or you decide to try something else. Don’t spend more than you can afford to risk.

6. You don’t understand how online business is different from brick and mortar.

Running an online business is very different from running one anywhere else. Online, your competition is often just a click or two away, and attention spans are usually short. If you don’t do something to catch your visitors’ attention, you’re probably going to lose them.

7. You have a lot of traffic, but you aren’t earning much from it.

You’re doing enough right that you’re getting visitors, but they aren’t converting. It’s really frustrating, so what should you do? Traffic that isn’t converting can have a number of causes.

It may be that you aren’t targeting the right audience, and so your visitors have no interest in what you have to offer. In that case, you need to figure out what part of your marketing is bringing in the wrong sort of visitor and fix it, either by tweaking it or by dropping that part of your marketing.

It could also be that your site isn’t doing what it takes to make people buy. Do you have a call to action? Can visitors find it easily on every page of your site? Is there something about your site that’s driving them away?

A lot of traffic coming to your site is nice for your ego, but unless the visitors are doing what you’d like them to do, what’s really the point?

8. You aren’t building a list.

There’s a saying about how it takes about seven exposures to a product to get people to buy. That is of course an average, but it brings up a very good point. You shouldn’t rely just on getting sales from people who happen to come to your site. You should try to get their email addresses so that you can send them more information and give them more chances to buy from you.

You should not email pure ads to your list with no useful information. That’s a great way to train people to not open your emails, make them want to unsubscribe, or to even hit the spam button. You want your subscribers to look forward to the information you’re sending them. That way they’ll eventually trust you enough to buy from you.

9. You’re sending all kinds of offers to your list, but no one’s buying.

You built a list because you heard that’s where the money is. But that hasn’t been true for you. Matter of fact, it seems like when you send out an offer, either no one opens your email at all or you get a bunch of unsubscribe requests. You don’t feel as though your list is worth the trouble.

You have to be sure to keep things relevant to your list. Keeping with the dog training theme, you should be sending out other offers related to dog care. You should also be sending quality information about training and caring for dogs to keep people interested in opening your emails. Most people don’t like reading constant ads.

We all want a lot of backlinks to our websites. High quality ones can be a source of traffic themselves, as well as give a boost in search engine rankings. Lower quality ones probably won’t send much or any direct traffic, but can still help you with your search engine rankings, if at a lower level.

The challenge is building those backlinks. Most of us don’t want to have to spend a ton of time on it, but you have to do something to do if you want traffic.

1. Everyone’s favorite – sites linking to you on their own initiative

We all love getting links we didn’t ask for or make any specific effort to get. Links that come about just because you provide content that’s just that good are wonderful. They’re usually pretty good quality too.

They’re usually the hardest to get. The internet doesn’t really live by “build it and they will come” no matter how many of us would like it to be otherwise. People have to be noticing your site already in order to choose to link to it.

2. Blog commenting

Commenting on other blogs is one of the easiest ways to get links back to your site. That’s why you get so many spam comments on most blog posts. For those who don’t want to do the actual work of intelligent blog commenting, there’s software that will do it for them.

If you want a good reputation for your site, stick with doing the blog commenting on your own. Nothing wrong with using tools to help you find blogs, but have something to say that’s more than “great post” or similarly basic comments. Add to the discussion. You probably shouldn’t link within the comment to your own site – use the URL field for that.

Don’t overdo it on keywords in the Name field or within your comment either. Many bloggers either delete or hit the spam key on comments that have only a keyword and no real human name. Using your name, a hyphen and then keyword is okay on many blogs but not all of them.

3. Forum participation

Some forums are really useful for driving traffic to your website. Not all of them, however. You want to check for things such as whether you can have a link to your business website in your signature, and if you can occasionally link to your site if it is highly relevant to the discussion. Knowing these rules can keep you from being banned quickly from the forums. If you can’t at least have a signature link, you probably won’t get enough from the forum to spend your time on it.

Just as with blog commenting, keep it intelligent and have something to say. “I agree” and similar responses may get your post count up, but they won’t draw a picture of an authority on the subject or draw people to click on your signature links.

4. Article marketing

Article marketing takes many forms and recently took quite a hit from Google. Many article directories don’t do nearly so well in Google as they used to. Given that many people use only article directories in their article marketing efforts, you do have to consider if it’s time to change your tactics.

There are more places than article directories to do your article marketing, however. You can contact people who run ezines, website owners and bloggers directly to see if they’d take an article from you. Some will take reruns from your site while others will require original content. You have to decide when original is worth it. If the site is a good one with a lot of traffic you can get quite a healthy boost, making original content worth it. Just make sure you can create something relevant to the site your submitting your article to as well as to your own site to have the best chance at acceptance and to make the most of any traffic generated.

You can also use Open Office or other programs to change your documents to PDF format and submit them to sites such as Scribd and Docstoc. Make sure your links remain intact in your PDFs before uploading them.

5. Create a video

Not everyone thinks of link building when they consider making a video about their business, but it’s a possibility. Sites such as YouTube allow you to place a link in the description of your video. Make it relevant to the video content to have it as relevant as possible.

Videos don’t have to feature you as a talking head. You can use screen capture software to demonstrate something on your computer. You can make a video that is essentially a slide show, and either talk over it about the slides or keep it quiet.

Don’t stress about not being comfortable making videos at first. It’s new to most of us. You will get better with practice.

6. Build link wheels

Now this one can be a bit controversial. Some say Google doesn’t like it and will penalize you if they catch you at it. Others say it’s worth the risk and neener, neener, Google won’t catch them anyhow. You decide if it’s worth the risk before building link wheels to promote your site.

The premise isn’t so different from article marketing in some ways. Rather than using article directories or submitting articles to ezines and other website owners, you create little sites that all point to your own properties. You use sites such as Blogger, Squidoo and other sites that allow you to create your own pages that you can edit at will.

They’re called link wheels because each page links to your site and to the next site on the wheel. Some eventually close the wheel; others do not. People like having control and being able to edit their link wheel pages at need, a big benefit when something changes with your business.

7. Social bookmarking and media

You know, social media sites of all sorts have become popular for a reason. If you aren’t taking advantage by now, you need to start doing so. In particular, you need to figure out if there’s a site where you get access to your target audience and build a presence there. Facebook and Twitter are some of the big names, but check for sites more relevant to your niche.

Don’t forget the more basic social bookmarking sites such as Delicious. You don’t get much link juice from any of the social bookmarking or media sites, but the right one will bring traffic simply by giving your target audience another place to discover you.

If you haven’t been doing a lot of link building for your sites, start with just one link building technique and get comfortable with it before adding another. You don’t want to overwhelm yourself or feel the process is too frustrating. Always remember that your most linkable content is your best quality content, so focus on the things that should do the best.

If you pay much attention at all to what Google says or what Internet Marketers talk about, you know that Google just did a big update that effects 11.8% of their queries. Simply put, they’re trying to get rid of sites that offer poor value as they have nothing more than regurgitated content from other sites. They’re tired of the content farms.

The impact has been huge. Ezine Articles has lost huge amounts of traffic, yet they’re one of the best article directories out there. Less known sites have also lost huge amounts of traffic. Many webmasters are concerned about the loss of links to their sites as these changes reduce the value of previously built links.

So naturally all kinds of guides are popping up telling you how to deal with this change. Some free in exchange for an email address, others you have to buy, still others give a free report, then a sales pitch at the end of the report.

What Can You Do?

If this has made your own site drop in rankings, obviously you’re eager to get them back. How this is going to work may depend on how exactly Google did this and if the theory that this is a site rather than page based change is correct. If it’s site based, I suspect it will be more difficult if your site was of the sort specifically targeted. If your site was collateral damage, maybe not so difficult.

I agree with what some have said, which is that this throws a kink into the article marketing routine as used by many people. That doesn’t mean that article marketing is dead, so far as I know. It means you need to think about how you’re doing it to give yourself the right combination of great content for your site, syndicated content and backlinks built.

Time is a huge constraint for most of us. Creating great content takes time, and it’s nice when you can distribute it to article directories after publishing it on your own site. I’ve done a lot of this, but I’m looking at whether I will have the right balance going forward of unique content versus syndicated on my sites. It’s pretty clear that some unique content on a site is a good thing.

Certainly it’s a good time to reconsider things you might be trying such as article spinning, which I’ve long thought was a bad idea. I’ve never liked the idea of faking original content. Autoblogging may also not work so well, but once again, it’s something I haven’t ever recommended, especially as a primary business. I much prefer the slower but more stable results of building my sites more naturally.

It may also be a good time to add in other types of marketing. I keep trying to talk myself into podcasting or making videos – perhaps it’s time. These are actions that you can take which may help you to regain what you may have lost, or may help you build in ways you haven’t manage to build your online business yet.

What Shouldn’t You Do?

Panic. Panicking is absolutely not the right solution.

Don’t rush out to buy one of the new infoproducts just because they say they have a solution to this update. Too many people are rushing products out, but it’s hard to say how all this will sort out. It looks bad for a lot of sites and that’s a major problem for their owners, but you need to have a clearer idea as to what the problem is before you start buying solutions. Know what you’re going to do next and then decide if you need to pay for information on how to best implement your solution.

Did Google Get It Right?

Any time Google makes a really big change like this people are going to debate whether they got it right or not. I have mixed feelings about that myself. I can see how trying to get sites that tend to provide a poor experience out of the rankings might be a good thing overall, but it’s not always easy to target those alone. I don’t doubt there were a number of false positives, sites that should have been left alone but took a big hit anyhow.

The issue is with the good sites that dropped and in some cases the good sites that rose. Blind Five Year Old’s post on the subject has a great example with the old and new searches for “schoolyard bullying,” which now has Wikipedia at the top. Wikipedia is a good site for some things, but as noted in the article, not for a topic like “schoolyard bullying.” The old results were much better.

It would not surprise me at all to see Google tweak things a little over the next few weeks. This is a big change, but that doesn’t mean they can’t adjust it with smaller changes. Take a little time and think about if you need to react and how you should do so. You’ll probably make a better decision if you get more information about the changes first.