Make Money Online with Brandon Hopkins

Jason McGovern wrote:
Hi Brandon -First off, I love your blog. Second, I was reading your link building in 2007 post, and wanted to request an expanded post on article submission. I would love to get your thoughts and ideas on this when you get a chance!

Thanks for the email Jason! Articles. One thing I always wish I had more time for. However, also something I can’t ever justify outsourcing.

For me, article marketing plays a crucial role in two ways. Whenever I decide to try out something new like Build a Niche Store or ClickBank ideas I always start with articles to test the waters.

When starting a new site in a niche, articles are one of the first parts of my marketing plan. The reason behind this is that you can get a few easy links and some easy traffic. Once those articles are spread to the thousands of crappy article sites, the value of the link degrades, but you’ll still see some traffic every month in my experience.

When I write articles, I try not to target a flooded market, or the main keyword.  I like to write my articles with a focus on a long tail keyword.  Once you can lock in a good position with a long tail keyword, it’s easier to build traffic and a following.  Think of it like a snowball rolling down a hill, all you need is a little push (article) and you collect more snow (rankings) on the way down!

In addition to building links and testing the waters, articles can actually convert to sales. I used to have a Squidoo lens and 99% of my marketing for that lens was with articles. Consistently I sold about one ClickBank ebook per month. The net revenue was not much, but neither was the time commitment.

All in all I still like articles as much today as I did 2 years ago. I do however avoid owning article directories. Too much work without enough reward.

Thanks again for the question!

12 comments

For a long time I have been using this method and I think it’s about time to divulge one of my favorite little secrets.  Keep in mind, this is one facet of a successful marketing plan, not an entire marketing plan.  Use this in conjunction with link building, using trackbacks for traffic, and even linkbait.

The goal of using Google Alerts to build links and increase traffic is to know where the Google bot has been, and follow behind it tracking your keywords.

I assume you have a Google account.  If you use Adsense, AdWords, Gmail or any other Google service, you have a Google account.  So head to the Google Alerts page.

Set up an alert for each of your keywords, but set the “type” to blogs.  Once a day is plenty.  Now, set up keyword alerts for other keywords you use.  If you’re selling widgets, you could use “buy widgets”, “widgets for sale”, etc.

You can use parenthesis for keywords like you do with Google search.

Every day you will get an email from every site that Google has spidered that has your keywords.  Click the links, post a comment and move on.  Works in conjunction with Drive By Linking.

I have about 15 alerts set up for various niche’s that I participate in.  Every morning I will post about 10-30 comments on blogs that I’ve never seen before.  Depending on the size of the niche I usually see about 25 uniques for each niche.  This compounds each day.  For example, day one you get 25 uniques, day two you’ll see 30, day 3 you get 40, etc.

While it may not revolutionize the way you build links, it certainly helps to know where the blog action is!

10 comments

As all good web 2.0 style companies, TNX.net is in beta. However, generally being in beta means that somethings don’t work and the product or service is lacking real features and isn’t useful, yet. TNX is quite the opposite, it’s feature rich and seems to work good all the way around.

Sell Links on Each Page

Unlike many other text link companies, TNX allows you to sell links on each individual page. That means I can sell links on one of my most popular pages, and a regular page that gets moderate traffic. Naturally TNX will sell the links on my page that is more popular for more money. The benefit to this is obvious. If I’m going to be sending a large amount of traffic to an advertiser, I’m compensated more than if I’m sending fewer visitors away. Exactly as you would expect advertising to happen.

DigitalPoint Special Offer

One of the initial reasons I signed up with TNX was because I saw a thread at digital point about free text link ads. Anything that involves “free” and “text links” always gets my attention. Check out this thread, make a post and TNX will give you 5,000 credits in the TNX system.

Payouts and Commissions

As should be expected from any major advertising company, payouts are through Paypal, Check, Wire transfer, and are willing to take suggestions on other payment methods. As long as they pay through Paypal, that’s all I care about. Unlike most other advertising companies, TNX only takes 12.5% of the profit. Most companies that I’ve worked with take 50% (TLA), except Adsense, from my experience they take between 60-70% leaving you without much in terms of profit. TNX wants to keep advertisers happy, and in a competitive market they had to do something different.

Buying Links

An absolute necessity, with Google on the war path killing sites that sell links, is discretion. From TNX’s website, “Our system is Secure and Confidential: No public list of users. All sales are automated.” That is exactly what I want, a company that doesn’t advertise that I buy links and doesn’t list who sells the links.

Buying links through TNX is difficult because it’s different. It’s not necessarily bad, just different. With most advertising companies you buy a link on a specific page or site-wide link on a specific site. With this method of advertising you’re buying specific links one by one. With TNX you specify the criteria of the sites that you want to buy links on and TNX fills the order. For example, I can buy links on sites that are PR5 and better with 5,000 or more links. TNX then goes out and finds those sites that fit my predefined criteria and fills my order.

Link Buying Dangers

Since buying mass links is easy with TNX you’ll want to keep it in check in the beginning. One of the worst things you can do with your website is to buy 10,000 links that show up overnight. Google will see you trying to manipulate the SERPs and is likely to slap your site with lost rankings and drop your PR. If you’re going to start buying links through TNX, start slow and ramp up link buying over 6 months or more. This will hopefully keep Google in the dark about your link buying.

Final Thoughts

Overall, TNX is an easy way to buy links. As you can see from the Alexa graph below, I’m not the only one who thinks TNX.net is a great link buying system!

15 comments