Establishing Ownership of Your Content - The Rules are Changing, Are You Ready To Play The Game?

"I was sketching out two marketing plans over the holidays for a couple of new clients and decided it was time to incorporate some of the research data/results I've collected during the latter part of 2011. Generally I'd spend more time testing things on my own sites first, but I'm confident enough with the results of basic testing that I've decided to put the ideas into live production..........." Read this article in full on SiteProNews.com

How to protect the ownership of your content - Whilst I'm trying to put the dots and dashes in the right place on Part II of the article, here are a few tips that I want to pass on about search engine optimization and marketing techniques for your website(s). Call this the common sense approach to marketing, we all know how to do it we just sometimes find ourselves wandering down the wrong track and need a gentle kick to get back on task. I'll do this in the form of a simple FAQ. I'm going to issue these tips every couple weeks or so via my newsletter, so if you want to stay up to date please remember to subscribe before you head off. The subscribe button is to the left of this page. Start by registering for updates using the form to the right - We send occasional updates and news, covering SEO Article Marketing, Social Media and other marketing information. "The Internet - No Place For Dummies" 5th Edition Updates For 2012 All three of our reference guides have been updated to reflect recent changes, primarily concerning Google and its algorithm update, but also to reflect other Internet trends and changes. We continue to update these books on a frequent basis and also to keep our book readers apprised of changes as they occur, via email. Blow away your competitors with our no nonsense marketing guides.  Our Reference Guide Series - Buy them individually or together for a significant discount. Marketing Books Here More on establishing and protecting ownership of your content

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	A Complete Guide To Web Marketing and Creating an Online Business Our first reference guide in "The Internet - No Place For Dummies" series covers the essential steps any business owner needs to take to build a profitable business online. This is a must-read for anyone looking to start or expand their online business. It deals with many of the often overlooked yet critical steps to getting your business built on a solid foundation. The author goes into detail about market research, designing an effective selling website, eCommerce, Search Engine Optimization techniques, selling on eBay, using Social media websites and much more. A must have for any serious Internet Marketer!
	Article Directory Marketing and Article Syndication This reference guide will be a revelation for any web publisher - Absolutely anyone with a website, whether you choose to market using article directories or not, should read this book. The author covers the issue of duplicate content and starts out by showing you how to protect your content from thieves - article content scrapers and automated content scrapers. Then we roll-up our sleeves and get into article marketing. You'll come to understand the differences between submitting articles to article directories and submitting articles for 'syndication'. One strategy can earn you 5 figures for every article you write, were the other and the most commonly used approach will earn you pennies. Get ready to have your world turned upside down with this incredible exposé on the most widely used method of marketing a website.
	WordPress and Social Media Powered Content Distribution This is another popular hands-on reference guide. No protracted theory, we get straight into the task of automating your content distribution via WordPress and the world of social media. We provide you with links to the actual plugins to use for automated distribution along with detailed configuration notes for each plugin. When you've finished with this guide you will be able to - Submit a blog post at your website (either through Wordpress or a Smartphone) Have that post update static pages on your website with new content Have the post distributed automatically to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and dozens of other powerful social media websites Have the post update social bookmarking websites automatically, along with updating RSS syndication websites with all of your new content. Empower your SEO campaign with practically zero effort from you Plus much more!

Q - I'm a newbie, I've got a handle on the basics, now I want to do some advanced on-page SEO, where do I start.

A - The best place to start is not to start at all. Build your website entirely with your visitor in mind. Don't get drawn into the futile idea that you're trying to please a piece of software (Google) and that somehow that's more important than pleasing the person with the credit card. Oddly enough, Google tells us all to adopt this approach but we tend not to listen to them as we should. The worst thing you can do in this day and age is to over-optimize your website to the point where it starts to look completely unnatural. If you remove the idea of SEO from your head, it's hard to do much harm. If you go into it with a half-baked notion of how to optimize your site for Google, then you can easily shoot yourself in the foot. If you want to learn more advanced techniques that's fine, but don't practice on your money site!

Q - What's a money site?

A - A money site is the website you use to make money :) The need to differentiate from a money site and any other type of site is born from the internet marketing community who regularly build whole empires of different websites all pointing to a central money site which is used to convert the sale.

Q - How important is content?

A - I've heard people post Panda saying that Google has gone full circle and is now all about content again. That's odd, because I've been doing this for 14 years and it's always been about producing good quality content, with the emphasis on quality. Sure, you need to do a few more things off-page nowadays, but it's still about creating unique and interesting content to engage your visitor, build their confidence to the point where you can take a gentle and caressing hold of their hand and walk them down the sales funnel.

Q - How do I use Article Directories to market / promote my website?

A - The short answer is that you don't. Before I start to debunk some popular ideas about Article Directories (AD's), let me start by pointing out that they've been heavily devalued by Google. They've changed dramatically, they're not what they were to the web 12 months ago. In the case of the bigger AD's like ezinearticles dot com - they lost as much as 90% of their traffic overnight when Google rolled-out it's Panda algorithm update. So what I'm offering below is a post-Panda summary of what AD's are and what they can do for you -

• Article directories will send very little direct traffic to your website.
• Article directories will send very little link-juice to your website*

* Hmmm...Link juice. That's something Internet Marketers drink before they start work each day, right? Way back in time Google thrilled us all with the introduction of something called Page Rank. PR was devised as a means of establishing the rank of individual pages based on the number of back-links pointing to the page, the PR of the external page hosting the back-link, and the number of outbound links on that page. Every link to your site passed a certain amount of 'link-juice' based on the above parameters, and the cumulative juice passed to your page resulted in a PR for the page. PR ranged from 0 to 10. Only mega sites like the US Government and sites like YouTube and Facebook had (note that I said 'had') PR10 ratings, the rest of us mortals scraped for a PR 3 or 4. The point is, a higher PR generally resulted in a higher SERP (Search Engine Ranking Position), so it became a full-time job finding websites from which to leech link juice by placing a strategic back-link pointing to your own website.

Anyway, back to article directories and picking up on the two points above. If that's the case, what good are they? To understand that question you need to consider that there are basically two approaches to article marketing. The first is where people write a quick article and post it to 100 or so directories using some automated submission tools. They'd do that primarily for the benefit of direct traffic and the back-link. But as I've said, they are no longer worth the time and effort unless you have a brand new site and you're just looking to get it on the map. So the other type of article marketing is something called 'syndication'. The concept is simple: write a great article that's a compelling read, and get people to syndicate it by using it on their own website, blog or within an eZine (magazine generally delivered by email to a list of subscribers). The point about syndication is that it requires a different standard of writing and generally the author needs to structure the article with syndication in mind. Well that's a quick summary of Article Marketing, if you have questions or need advice, just ask.

Q - Thanks for your article on establishing ownership of my content with Google, how exactly do I do that?

A - It's not too difficult but it requires a change of approach to how you generate your content. The good thing is that if done properly, the new approach will lead to a better user experience, improved user-interaction, reduced bounce-rate, higher time spent on page, and better conversions. Think about those things....isn't that exactly what Google wants us to do? And aren't the sites who offer those things the ones you see most commonly in the SERP's? So when I get some other things off my desk I'll get around to sharing some of the things I'm going to be doing in 2012 to transform my client sites into sites with a high 'Google Credit Score'. Register at the top of this page to receive an advanced copy of Part II, along with all future articles in this series.

Also, I have a book, for those interested in starting a new business or giving an existing business a shot in the arm. It's around here somewhere and it's pretty inexpensive, so go find it!

Cheers