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If you followed last week’s post, you should know all about RSS feeds and how to both create and promote them. If you find RSS promotion works particularly well, here’s a quick trick on how to create more RSS feeds to promote and create more links from.

How To Blend Two Or More RSS Feeds

If you have submitted all of your article author, web 2.0 and website RSS feeds to a number of RSS directories, an easy way to create a new RSS feed to promote is by blending two or more RSS feeds together, creating a new one.

1. Login into your Feedage account.
2. Click on ‘RSS Blender’ on the left hand menu.
3. Enter your RSS feeds to blend.
4. Submit your new feed to the Feedage and other RSS directories.

When creating blended feeds, take a little time to think about what and why you are creating a new feed. You can blend content from other websites with your own to make a new feed based on a more specific topic/regional area. Think about why the new feed is ‘useful’, both to you and others – jotting down a few words about what makes your new blended feed unique will help in promoting it. There’s little point creating a blended feed of all of your existing site, author and other feeds when they have already been individually promoted. Create something new, with a slightly different slant that utilises your feed(s) as part of its information stream. This way you open your feed, and hence backlinks, out to new categories, niche directories and traffic sources.

It takes time to write content. Time, I believe, is the most valuable asset we have. Hence, I am always looking for ways to make one well written piece of content work harder and harder in it’s ability to generate good backlinks. Today I’m going to take you through my favourite ways to utilise a good article again and again.

First off, let’s look at where a well written 4 – 500 word article should definitely be published:

1. On your website: It’s your content, so you should certainly publish it. Always publish your articles on your own website first, bookmark them to ensure the search engines are aware that your website should have first published credits.
2. On the top article directories: At the very least, you should publish your article at the top five article directories. These directories are crawled often by search engines and offer well trusted links back to your website. Last month’s post on ‘how to index your new website quickly‘ listed the top five article directories.

Now, if you did nothing other than the above with your articles on a regular basis, you would certainly still see the benefits. The above, however, is really only the start of what you ‘could’ do. To utilise articles to maximum efficiency you have to get a little creative. Here’s my current favourite ways of squeezing links out of your articles:

1. Turn An Article Into A Press Release
   Did you know that there exists online a whole network of Press Release websites dying to distribute your stories across the web? Many of the bigger ones, like prweb.com, charge for using their service. However, there are also a large number of services which offer a good distribution service free of charge, the best known of these is probably prlog.org. You will have to do a little editing to turn that article into a press release, but once you have, you’ll find a number of new places to publish that content AND receive high quality backlinks in return. To get you started, here’s a useful guide to turning an article into a press release and here’s a good list of free press release websites – there are many more, so do search out your own additions to add to these.
2. Turn An Article Into a PodCast
   I discovered an interesting new service this month called Odiogo that will turn any rss feed into a podcast. I’ve actually added this very blog to their service and as a result, you can now ‘listen’ to all posts in audio (just click on the ‘listen now’ link above), mp3′s are also downloadable should you wish to place them onto your ipod or player. Now, not only is this a fine and cool way to turn written content into multi media, it also offers you the ability to upload your Odiogo files to a range of podcast websites out there. Google particularly adores multi media content, and hence links back to your website from such podcasting places are high authority and, more importantly, ones that your competitors probably don’t have.  Here’s a comprehensive list of podcasting directories.
3. Turn An Article Into Video
   Having turned your article into audio, it perhaps comes as no surprise that I’m going to recommend you turn it into video too. If you downloaded the top100links, you’ll know that YouTube is the number one rated link you can have . Turning that article into a video easily means you can create that, and many more, fine site link back to your website.  There are a number of online software services emerging that turn an article into video almost instantly, the best known of these is Article Video Robot, this one will actually also submit your video to the top video distribution websites – including the mighty YouTube.

So, hopefully by now your getting the idea. The internet is a vast world of multi-media content. The more ways and formats that people can come across your content the better, both in terms of attracting traffic and in terms of growing your link base across a wide variety of IP addresses. With a dose of imagination, you’ll uncover a host of further methods for making your written content stretch and morph further across the web. Of course, I’d be most interested in any ideas you have, so please do post them here!

If you have read through some of our earlier posts, you may recall that, back  in January, we discussed the importance of looking for IP diversity within your link building. Today, were going to look at how the same rule should be applied when placing links on your articles and other web 2.0 properties.

Last week we took a good look at creating an SEO friendly article. If you followed this post, you will have added three links in total to your article, two pointing at your new website and another pointing to another web 2.0 property (ie blog, another article etc). For a new website, these two links back to pages on your new site will help push search engines towards indexing your whole site quickly.

However, once indexed and ranking, you can start looking to change this approach slightly. Just as discussed back in January, when you have two or more links to your main domain from any webpage, only the first one gets full credit. This is true even if your second, or third, link points to a page deep within your website.  As your website grows, and in particular as your collection of web 2.o properties grow,  linking out from your articles to three different domains will utilise these links far more effectively.

What’s the next best thing to a link back to your website? Answer: A link back to a page that in turn links back to your main website. Hence, when placing links, the trick is to link out once to a page on your main url, and then to domains that link back to main your url.

Link Placement Action Plan

1. Keep a list of all your web 2.0 properties, ie published article, blogpost, video, podcast and other media urls.
2. Track rankings of these urls and keep a note of the highest ranking web 2.0 pages.
3. Look over your best web 2.0 pages and place a tick beside all that allow you full editorial control.

Your highest ranking web 2.0 pages that also allow you to edit your content are the very pages you should link to, after your main url, when placing links on articles and indeed all web 2.0 properties. For a list of places to create web 2.0 properties click here.

By linking out your main domain and other pages that link to your main domain, you’re getting the most out of each of your links. Not only are you boosting the authority of your own main website, but also that of your links too. In the long run, this approach will only make all of your links all the more powerful.

Article marketing is my favourite form of SEO/Web Marketing.

With a little care and attention, articles can become fabulously powerful online marketing assets. I could take you all the way through at least one bottle of single malt if I were to relay all of the reasons I believe this…for now, let’s stick with a brief intro!

Article Marketing is perhaps the easiest form of content distribution out there. Creating links with your own content is a very positive method of building links. By sharing information, you contribute to the very essence of the internet. Not only do you increase your own topic authority BUT you also get to do this in your own words.

One article can create many good links. If you take a little time to write quality content, it will be rewarded with lots of publications in lots of good places, which in turn send lots of high value one way links back to your website. There are also a number of ways that a good article can in turn be quickly transformed (something we’ll go into in a later post) into a video, podcast or audio file – again, offering more ways to distribute your content and create good links.

Good articles published on the top article directories bring well targeted traffic. It is not uncommon for an article published on the top directories, (especially Ezine Articles, Go Articles and Articlebase), to rank page 1 for low competition keywords.

So, with one well written article in hand, here’s the parts of an article directory submission I recommend taking special care over:

1. Make sure you have a main keyword target for your article. Ideally, this should be one of your website keyword targets.
2. If possible, place your keyword target directly into the article title. Try to write this in a way that still reads well for browsers. I often use a ‘Top Tips For…’ title style, as this title format makes it both easier to write an article and to place a keyword into my title, eg ‘Top Tips For Buying Cheap Shoes Online’.
3. Don’t worry too much about placing your keyword target all over the copy. Again, think about your ‘human’ article readers first and foremost. If possible, place your keyword target in the first and last sentence of your article.
4. Many article directories, including EzineArticles, Go Articles and ArticlesBase, let you get away with a link placed towards the end of your article. Link your keyword target placed within the last sentence of your article to the url of the most relevant page on your website.
5. Every Article Directory allows you to write a ‘Resource Box’, telling readers about you, the author, and where you are from. First off, aim to write an engaging resource box, one that seeks to entice browsers to click through to your main website. I usually have a ‘click here to…..’ sentence within my resource boxes. Place a secondary keyword, one related to your main keyword target (eg for ‘cheap shoes’ a related keyword might be ‘budget shoes’) within the resource box. Link this 2nd keyword to your homepage url.
6. Place another secondary keyword within the resource box. Link this third keyword to a web 2.0 url outside of your website. Examples of web 2.0 urls could be your blog, your twitter/facebook page or even another article on another directory.

On occasion, you might find that a directory asks you to remove your keyword link placed within the article body itself. In this instance, simply link from within the Resource  Box with your main keyword target to the most relevant page within your website , leaving out the secondary link to your website homepage but keeping your link to your web 2.0 page.

Hopefully, the above six points will ensure you get the most ‘link juice’ out of your individual article submissions. Next week, we’ll take a look at how published articles can be pushed higher up the rankings… taking your website url with them.