HOW CAN I EARN MORE MONEY?

 No doubt you have heard about Article Marketing. By submitting articles to the many article directories that can be found on the Internet, you can bring extra traffic to your web site both from the people who read your article and from back links.

How does this work? Very simply, when you submit an article that relates to something you are selling - whether something you are marketing yourself, or a product that you are promoting as an affiliate - you let your readers know that you are an expert in this subject. At the end of your article you have a bio or “resource” box, in which you include your name, a little about yourself, and a link back to your site. When people read your article and want to know more, they will click through to your site. Meanwhile, every article contains a link that can be found by the search engine spiders, thus improving your search engine ranking.

Information-based marketing is one of the oldest and most effective techniques in getting targeted prospects to sites and converting them into buyers. As a general rule, people do not like to be “sold”, but they do like to be “told”.

There are many tools available for people to use to make the process of distributing their articles more easy, and are invaluable in getting the contents more exposure, but this is only half of the story.

If you want your article to be effective, you need to implement these three keys before submitting it to the directories.

1. Know Why You Wrote It.

By promoting your articles you will gain several benefits: you will brand yourself as an expert, you will get links back to your web site, and you will get real, live visitors as people click on your links.

However, none of these can be your reason for writing. There must only ever be one reason for writing: you have information or knowledge that you want to share with your target audience. Without this, you will not get branding, links or visitors, because many of the article directories will not accept your article. Even if they do, people will simply not take the time to read what you have written.

If you want people to read your article, and then click through to your site, you have to give them something worth reading.

2. Publish Content that Will Help Your Readers.

 

This follows on from #1. You may be thinking that all you want to do is get as many links back to your site as possible to help your search engine ranking, but it does not work that way.

Although some article banks and directories accept content automatically, many do not. The best ones definitely don’t. The guidelines of these sites make it clear that they want original content, and that it must be well written and offer real value to their readers. After all, the article directories are not really interested in giving you free links. What they really want is good content so that people will keep visiting their site. Give them that, and they will reward you with links and visitors. Don’t, and your article may quickly find its way to the cyber rubbish bin.

It goes beyond simply being accepted by the directories, too. That’s just the first step. The main point of having articles in directories is to provide content for people who publish blogs, ezines and web sites. The more publishers who pick up your article, the more links and visitors you will get. However, publishers want good quality writing for their publications - and the few who are pepared to publish rubbish will not generate any traffic for you anyway, because no-one will be reading their publications.

The bottom line is that you need to produce useful information, and it needs to be well written (with correct grammar and spelling) and entertaining. Read what you have written through the eyes of someone looking for information on that particular topic. Ask yourself, “Would I find this helpful?” If the answer is “no”, then the chances are no-one else would, either - and it is unlikely to find either many publishers or many readers.

3. Make Sure That Your Article is Clearly Targeted.

On a piece of paper, write the words: “One article, one topic!” Tape it in front of your computer where you will not be able to avoid seeing it every time you sit down to write.

If you are writing about how to build a fence, your readers don’t want to know about your dog, your grandfather’s latest operation, or your daughter’s latest school report. They want to know about building a fence. Keep on target and keep their attention.

This will also help you when it comes to publishers picking up your article. They want content that is in line with the theme of their publication, not something drifting off into a dozen other unrelated areas.

Stay on target with your bio box, too. There is no point in writing an article on dog training, if the product you are trying to promote is about raising healthy tomatoes! (Unless, perhaps, you are writing about ways to keep the dog out of the tomato patch, and even then it is borderline.)

4. Use Keywords Effectively.

 

Your readers want information. Your publishers want information for their readers. Hopefully, you now have an article that will satisfy both. Now, it’s your turn. What do you want?

Well, first of all you want people to read your articles and recognize you as an expert in your niche. If you have written your article well, it will help achieve that.

Secondly, you want people to click through from your article to your web site. Again, a well-written article should achieve that result.

But you also want something else: those wonderful back links to your site that will boost your search engine placing. A little simple SEO (search engine optimization) will both improve traffic from your links and help more people to find your articles in the first place.

Before you start, determine what keywords you are going to target with a particular article. Hint: choose only one or two. Too many will dilute the effect.

Make sure your keywords are in the title of your article. It may be tempting to give your article some fancy, obscure title, but it will not get you traffic. Nor will it make your article easy to find.

Mention keywords at strategic places throughout your article, but don’t overdo them. Some people use anchor texts within the article itself, but most major directories will not allow it. Better to save the anchor text for your bio or resource box.

5. Write Often.

An old proverb says that “One swallow does not a summer make.” Likewise, one article does not an expert make. Nor is one article going to produce a great deal of traffic or links to your site.

Take time to sit down and brainstorm your niche from every possible angle. Make a list of articles that you could write - just headings and very basic ideas to start.

Then set yourself a schedule that you can reasonably expect to keep. Don’t set a goal of writing 50 articles a day, you’re not very likely to do that (and even if you could manage it once or twice, they would probably not be very good articles.) Aim for one a day, or even one a week. As with exercise, it’s better to do a little consistently than a lot once.

Then, do it. If you write one article a week relating to your niche, at the end of a year you will have 52 articles in circulation. Once they’re out there, they will keep working for you.

Done properly, article marketing can be a highly effective means of promoting both yourself and your products. So what are you waiting for? … start writing!

 

HOW TO RECOGNIZE A PYRAMID SCHEME -

And Why to Run if You Do!

 

Some time ago a friend called me, terribly excited about a new scheme she had become involve in. Actually, she was so excited about it, and so keen that I should also get involved, that she had signed me up and paid the entrance fee on my behalf! (Something which made it so much harder when I had to tell her, “This scheme is a scam. I don’t want to be involved, and I urge you to get out of it as quickly as possible.”)

 

It sounded great. For a measly $200 you got entered on the lowest level. You only had to recruit two people under you (though you were welcome to recruit more if you wanted), and when you had cycled through a certain number of levels, you walked away with $6000. Then, you went back to the bottom and (without any extra input of cash) started cycling again.

 

Unfortunately my friend was very upset with me when I told her it was a pyramid scheme. She pointed out that the web site stated that it complied with all the government requirements. She pointed out that there were lots of testimonials of people who had made the way to the top level, collected their $6000, and done all sorts of wonderful, altruistic things with it. She pointed out that they were “selling” something (on joining, you received a voucher entitling you to discount holidays.) And she simply couldn’t - or didn’t want to - follow the math when I tried to show her how it would inevitably collapse.

 

My friend was naive (some unkind souls would say, gullible) but more than that she was desperate. And naive, desperate people fall for these schemes in their droves - if they didn’t, the schemes would not exist.

 

So how do you recognize a pyramid scheme? Firstly, it helps to have a basic understanding of how things work. Short of winning the lottery or Great-Uncle-Fred-Whom-You-Never-Knew-Existed dying and leaving you his millions (neither of which rates very highly on the probability list), there are basically three ways you can earn money:

 

1. You can work for it.

2. You can get someone else to work for you, and benefit from their labor. Some examples would be if you run an agency of some kind, or if you have an internet business and have affiliate marketers.

3. You can get your money to work for you, and bring in more money.

 

The first is the obvious, tried and true method: you give your time and labor in exchange for money. It works, and despite the jibes about “job” meaning “just over broke”, it has put bread and butter on the tables of many generations before us. Unfortunately, many people have developed the mentality that when they move away from the “job”, they will also move away from work. Nothing could be less true. Unfortunately, the free lunch is sold out. No matter what other means you use to earn money, it will still involve work.

 

Getting someone else (or lots of someone elses) to work for you does not mean you don’t work. What it does mean is that you are able to multiply the volume of work. Even though this inevitably means that you earn less per unit of work, there are vastly more units performed, therefore more money in your pocket. I once worked for a babysitting agency. Had the proprietor done the babysitting herself, she could have earned maybe $10 per hour. However, with a hundred sitters on the books, each earning $10 per hour, from which she received $1 per hour, she was vastly better off.

 

This works, however, only if the people under you actually work. If all they ever do is recruit more people, who also only recruit others, and so on down the line, no income is being generated. That means no dollars in your pocket or in anyone else’s. You will end up broke, but with a big organization.

 

That leaves getting your money to work. Dollars are not rabbits: they will not multiply if you leave them alone in a dark corner. The only way they can make more dollars is by working.

 

You can put your dollars to work in several ways:

1. You can use them to buy something which you are later able to sell at a profit.

2. You can use them to buy the raw materials to manufacture something you are later able to sell at a profit.

3. You can use them to pay someone else to do work from which you will profit.

4. You can use them to buy something that someone else will pay you to use.

5. You can lend the dollars to someone who will pay you interest while they have the use of them, and eventually return the original amount to you.

 

So how does all that relate to pyramid schemes? Very simply, in a pyramid scheme, people do not work other than to recruit new members to the scheme, and money does not work. The only money generated into the scheme is what is paid as an entrance fee by each member. Since that entrance fee does not generate any other money along the way, the only thing that each person can take out without destabilizing the whole structure is what they put in.

 

Let’s look at a very simple pyramid. Let’s say each person has to put one egg into the basket, and to recruit two new people for his next level. When his fourth level is complete, he can withdraw eight eggs and make an omelette. Here’s how it would work:

 

Level 1. You. 1 egg in the basket. Average 1 egg per person in the scheme.

Level 2. You plus 2. 3 eggs in the basket. Average 1 egg per person.

Level 3: You + 2 + 4. 7 eggs in the basket. Average 1 egg per person.

Level 4: You + 2 + 4 + 8. 15 eggs in the basket.

 

At this point your four levels are complete. You take your eight eggs and trot off to enjoy breakfast. However, now there begins to be a problem. By taking your 8 eggs, you leave only 7. Divided by the 14 people left in the scheme after you go, this means the basket now contains only an average of half an egg per person, instead of one.

 

As each successive level comes to the top, grabs their eggs and heads for the frypan, the average number of eggs for each person remaining in the system decreases. In this particular matrix, it takes only 12 generations before the average is 0 eggs per person! And that is assuming that it all works perfectly, with every person recruiting the required two others. If even a small percentage fail to recruit, or if people recycle to the beginning without any further input of cash, the whole thing falls in a heap even more quickly. Remember also that the “reward to investment” ratio in this simple example is much less than that offered by most pyramid schemes, thus they would collapse even more easily.

 

It doesn’t matter what kind of matrix, or what format you use. Sooner or later, the results will be the same. This happens for one simple reason: the only money coming in is the entrance fee for each participant. That money is not working. It has not generated any other money along the way. There are only two possible outcomes: either each person walks away with the money he put in (which kinda defeats the purpose of having a scheme in the first place); or a few people walk away with the money that lots of other people put in, and a lot of people walk away with nothing.

 

So, how do you recognize a pyramid scheme? Basically, ask two questions: (1) What income is being generated into the scheme? If the answer is, “Only the member’s entry fees” then don’t walk, RUN away. (2) What do the members do to make the scheme work? If the answer is “Only recruit more members”, run.

 

Often, in an attempt to overcome government regulations, schemes will claim that members are “buying” something when they join - often a bunch of e-books that have been around since the dinosaurs and can be downloaded for free with a bit of searching on the Net. In this case ask, “Is this an ongoing income generation, or is it a one-off that is really an entrance fee in disguise?”

 

Don’t believe the blurb on a web site or in a letter. Just because someone says that they “meet all government requirements” doesn’t mean that they do. Likewise, testimonials can easily be faked. And if a scheme finds it necessary to proclaim loudly and often that “This is not a pyramid scheme,” then there is a pretty good chance that it is! Above all, the old rule of thumb still applies: if it sounds too good to be true, you can bet it is!

 

Why do you care? Apart from the fact that you stand an excellent chance of losing your hard-earned, and that if you don’t other people will (which may or may not bother you, depending on your ethical standards), in many countries pyramid schemes are illegal. Here in Australia, it is not just illegal to promote a pyramid scheme, it is illegal even to belong to one. That means that if (when) the one you are part of crashes, you stand a good chance of prosecution and fines. It also leaves you open for civil action from those who have joined below you and lost everything, particularly if false representation was involved.

 

All of us want to earn more money. Most of us would like to do it the easy way, rather than the hard way. But, in the long run, pyramid schemes are just not worth the hassle.

 

Copyright Lynn Fowler, owner of howcaniearnmoremoney.com. Whether you are a stay-at-home Mom simply looking for a bit of extra pocket money, a fed-up worker who wants to quit your day job and tell the boss “bye-bye”, or a serious entrepreneur seeking out the best ways to establish a profitable business, we will seek out opportunities for you to earn more money.

 

You may reprint this article, provided that (1) You publish it in full, including the resource box. (2) You do not alter it in any way. (3) You do not claim authorship of it.

Thank you for visiting How Can I Earn More Money. The title of this site is a question that I, like many of you, have often found myself asking. Particularly at the present time, when the world seems so full of doom and gloom relating to finance, we may well find ourselves asking whether it is really possible to break free of the prevailing trends and rise out of financial bondage.

Let me say right from the outset that I am not a “guru” or financial wizard. I cannot show you a bunch of 6-figure cheques that I have earned in the last 6 months. I cannot flash pictures of my million-dollar home, my yacht or my sleek sports car - as yet I don’t have any of those things, and I’m not at all sure that I want them anyway.

What I do want is to be free from debt and financially independant and comfortable - my goal is summed up as: “To have more than enough to give generously, serve effectively and live comfortably.”

Because I am not an expert, most of what I post on this blog will not be from me but articles that I have sourced from people who are experts. I welcome you to join me on this adventure. Let’s travel together and see whether we can’t find our way to the land of abundance.