Exclusive Interview With Jeremy Gislason
Of SureFireWealth.com

Part 5 of 6

LA - Okay and something I made a note of which maybe is worth going into in more detail is how can people send more traffic to their website with article marketing? What would be your suggestion for that?

JG - Other ways, besides article marketing?

LA - No, how, step-by-step, would they use article marketing to get traffic going to a new site?

JG - How to use article marketing? Pretty simple really. Well for me it's pretty simple, as I don't do anything right now actually! We have an article marketing team; a few people write the articles, other people submit the articles to all the best article directories and all the best places and they send us a report once a month showing all the stats.

But if you are just starting out, I did this myself four or five years ago, all you need to do is type in Google something like 'article directory' or 'submit your article', something like that, and you'll find tons and tons of places to submit your article.

Now, when writing your article there are things nowadays that Google doesn't like - duplicate content, where let's say you write a real good article but you have that same article on a thousand different sites, sometimes Google doesn't like that so you won't get a really high page ranking.

But, what you can do, let's say you have a product about remodeling your house - you have a 'how to product', you teach people how to do things themselves so that they can fix their house themselves, for example. They can fix some plumbing, fix a window, lay carpet, or do something themselves, okay?

So you go and find other sites that are related to that niche market you are in, and if they have articles on their sites or maybe they have a blog, and maybe they accept guest authors, what you can do is contact them and say "Hey I've got this new report... it is kind of related to this market, and we are not competitive, I think we compliment each other. I've also got this great article written, I was wondering if you would publish it on your blog?... Or I was wondering if you would publish it on your article directory?... Or I was wondering whether you would put it in your newsletter?"

All you have to do is that, a lot of times they would say yes - if you make it unique. You tell them they will be the only one who can publish this article. So now they have unique content for their site, which they should be happy about because Google loves fresh content, so anytime they put new articles on their blog, or their article sites, or whatever they have, Google is there.

So, make a deal with them, if they like your articles you might even be able to become a featured guest writer where every month they will let you submit an article to their site or their blog or to their newsletter subscribers.

What you do is with every article you submit, you have an 'about the author' section, a little resource box, at the end of the article, where you say something like 'John Smith has 20 years experience in the home remodeling industry, for more tips and tricks about home remodeling go grab this free report', and have a link to the free report, or 'to get more tips go visit his blog right here'.

And now, everywhere that article is published people will read it, of course not everyone will click on the link, but a certain percentage of people who read that article, especially if they like what you wrote, are going to click that link and go visit your site. That's a great way to do it.

Now there are automated methods, there is software out there that you can buy which will automatically submit it to these directories, but we have actually found in our experience over the years, manual submissions are the way to go.

Yes, they take more time, but you can do them right, you make sure they get in, and you make sure they are not considered spam. We have tested this ourselves. I'm not saying not to use them but whatever works for you. I am just saying what worked for us. We tried automatic submitters, we tried manual and found manual works better so that's what we use. Also, we don't submit to every single article directory in the planet. We only have I think it's under a hundred of the top places that we submit to.

Things to look for include Page Rank; you only want to submit your article to sites that have a high page rank. And page rank with Google means you are more of an authority site. The highest page rank is 10, which is Google of course.

But if you have a page rank of about four or five you are doing pretty good, a six or seven is great. If you can find a page or blog in your niche that has a page rank of seven or even six and they publish your article that's fantastic, because they have probably got a lot of traffic coming to that site every month. So that's a great way to do it.

So article marketing can be a great way to get tons of free traffic. The key is to do a lot of articles, don't just do one article a month. Do an article every day if you can, different articles is what I'm saying. Have lots and lots of articles written and put them all over the place. Maybe you have one article submitted to ten different places and then you have another article submitted to ten different places and try and keep the duplicate content down.

Also, if you have your own blog, you want to be posting lots of good content on your own blog. Somebody goes to your blog and the last post was July 2006 they are probably not going to think much of your blog, so you want to keep it updated. If they see that it was February 19th 2009, which is today, and the last post was yesterday... you know what I mean, keep your blog updated.

Article marketing is very simple to do. Just do some Google searches, find places to submit it, find related sites to your business. If you can monetize that great, but getting traffic is an important thing to do. If you want to try submitting Software go ahead. But those are the basic ways to do it.

LA - I don't want to get too technical here, because this subject of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can get very in-depth, but I was wondering for someone maybe not familiar with the subject, should they consider it for part of their business and how can it benefit them?

JG - Yeah, this is a question that me and my business partner Simon, we argue back and forth about all the time!

I am pro-search engine optimization, but I also believe in using every method you can, not just one. Whereas he is more of a 'It doesn't work. Prove it.' kind of thing. He believes in only direct marketing.

Anyway, I believe in a well-rounded approach to getting traffic and getting sales. So if it's going to help I'll do it. So article marketing helps so we do it. Blogs help so we do them. Free reports help, so we do them. Affiliates, they help so we do it.

Whatever works... Search engine optimization for anyone who doesn't know anything about what this is, and I have caught myself doing this, I'll say like 'You need to get better SEO for your site' and the guys are looking at me like 'What the heck?!' and I remember my insurance agent was over here about a month or two ago and he's asking what I do and stuff and I was trying to explain it to him and he kinda understood it and I'd have to explain it about 10 times, and he said 'Yeah my company they have a website too and we are trying to think how we can get it better' and I was trying to tell him 'Do you have an SEO optimizer?' and he looked at me and he said 'What's that?' and I said, 'Okay, if somebody types in your insurance company's name in Google are you the number one result?', and he said, 'no idea'.

So what search engine optimization is - is that you basically optimize your site pages so that Google can see those pages and rank them higher in the search engine. Now, they are not going to automatically rank you high because if there are a million other sites using those same keywords. A page rank eight site is going to outrank a page rank three site.

And how you build page rank is, you get links coming back to your site, which article marketing helps with. But if you can have direct links going back to your site using your keywords, Google sees that.

Let's say you have, going back to the home remodeling industry, let's say there's HomeImprovement.com or something has a link back to your site saying "how to carpet your house" and then your site is about carpeting or remodeling your house, well Google sees that and says 'oh, you are an authoritative site and we're going to remember that'. And when you get enough sites like that linking back to you, you know related sites with related key words linking back to you, your page rank is going to increase. The higher you increase your page rank, the higher you are going to rank in Google for keywords (words people search for).

Now you want to also optimize your pages such as -- these are called Meta Tags. So your Title Tag - which is basically a little blue line that you see every time you search in Google, all those results that come up... the little blue titles, those are your title tags.

You want to keep them under 60 characters and you want to use very, very relevant Keywords to your site and then your Meta Description Tag, you should try to keep that under 140 characters and that is the little description that you see in the Google search results of all the sites.

And you want to have that on your page and you also want to have keywords. Now Google used to emphasize those a lot years ago but not so much anymore, but you still want to have them. Put some keywords and you don't want to use the same key words more than six times otherwise it is considered 'Keyword stuffing', spamming - things like that.

So you put your keywords in place and the key is your Title Tag, your Meta Description Tag and your Meta Keywords need to be related to your content on your site - they can't be fake. So you can't try to trick Google. You can't have a site about 'how to make money' and then all your Keywords talk about 'building a house'. It's got to be related.

But the better job you can do on that, and the more pages you have on your site... Now remember, let's take a blog for example, Google loves blogs because it is all content and they especially love Blogger.com but they love WordPress too. And every time you post a new article on your blog you want to make sure you have the plug-in tool called the All in One SEO Pack, I think for your blog, and what that does is you can type in your Title Tag, your Description Tag, and your Keyword Tags and that's how it's going to look in Google.

So the more articles you post on your blog, each article is one page. So eventually you are going to have hundreds, or even thousands of pages, on your blog and Google will see it. And if you can have other sites linking to those pages that's going to really help you a lot.

I could talk about this all day, there's Inner Page Ranking, there's Outer Page Ranking; there are so many things. But, in a nutshell, just do the simple things at least; it's not going to hurt you. Use your Meta Tags, set up your pages... There are free tools you can use to check your tags, do Google searches for Meta Tag checkers or something, there is software out there that you can test your pages with to see if they are working okay, and it's going to help you out.

Because what all that means is that you are getting free traffic from Google. So if you have a good keyword that is getting hundreds and thousands of searches every month, and you are consistently ranked in the top ten, or better, the number one result every time, you are going to get a lot of traffic to your site for doing nothing other than having good SEO or good authority, things like that.

For example our site MemberSpeed.com is currently page rank five, and we are number one in a lot of Keywords that we want people to be searching for to find that software. There are more keywords that we are trying to improve on, there are some key words that if you type in Google like 'membership site software' I think MemberSpeed is, like number one or number five or something. Just as an example, that's getting us free traffic.

You do want to focus on it, it takes some learning, I studied about it a lot before I understood it. There are courses out there that teach SEO like StomperNet and other things. I do advise making it part of your traffic plan, but I don't advise just sticking to one method, which is the mistake some people make. They might say "I am only going to do article marketing, that's it", or "I'm only going to do affiliate marketing, that's it"... or "I'm only going to do SEO, nothing else". If you do that, and the traffic dries up from that source, you are screwed.

Let's say your entire method of generating traffic is through SEO, and you have been the number one for all your Keywords for a year, you're getting thousands of people from Google everyday and making tons of sales. Now suddenly, Google changes their algorithms and you are suddenly kicked off, or maybe they penalize you and you are in the sandbox. Now suddenly you are on page 100 for your keywords, nobody ever finds you, your traffic goes from a thousand visitors a day to zero... overnight.

And it has happened to people. What happens... boom, your income dries up. But if you have a well-rounded approach, if you are getting traffic from article marketing, social marketing sites like Twitter, FaceBook, YouTube, LinkedIn, all these kind of sites, if you are getting traffic from affiliates, joint venture partners, integrated marketing and SEO, it doesn't matter if traffic dries up from one of those sources, because you have traffic coming from all your other sources as well. So you really want to take a rounded approach.

 

Jeremy Gislason Interview: Transcript Part 1

Jeremy Gislason Interview: Transcript Part 2

Jeremy Gislason Interview: Transcript Part 3

Jeremy Gislason Interview: Transcript Part 4

Jeremy Gislason Interview: Transcript Part 5

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