Hello All,

Welcome to Week 26 of John Thornhill’s Internet Marketing Training Masterclass Coaching Program.

This week was all about beginning to drive traffic to our products website sales page, beginning with writing and submitting articles.

There are many different ways to drive traffic to our websites. I am still new to learning this whole process. I haven’t even gone through Dave’s course “Total Web Traffic” yet! So much to do and learn and so little time around my nearly 3 year old!

According to John writing articles is one of the most effective ways to drive free targeted traffic to our websites. Writing articles should not be that difficult for us as we already know about our product and our chosen niche.

The articles only need to be around 400-600 words long and as informative as we can make them. The other advantage with writing articles is that we can place a link to our websites in the bottom of the article in the resources box, hence driving the free targeted niche traffic to our sites.

It is recommended that we try to write and submit at least 2 articles per week. This is the method that John has used to drive traffic to his sites.

Writing articles is not something I have done yet! Yes I have been slack!

Actually, truthfully, I have procrastinated and avoided this task like the plague and I am not really sure why. I don’t think ‘Writing’ as such has been a strong point of mine, although I do believe I have been improving with the growth of my blog.

I was one of those students who didn’t do very well in high school ‘English’. I have always loved reading, research and note taking, however when ever I wrote book reports and essays I could never get above the ‘C’ mark in grading. I actually failed my mid year exams and only just passed my end of year exam with a ‘D’ in my high school graduate year!

No offense to the teachers I had, but they were never quite helpful to explain where I went wrong. I was always asking for help and always studied hard and stayed back after class, however for some reason I guess I just didn’t write the way the teachers wanted me to!! Hence the insecurity now more than 20 years on.

I do not think that Teachers realise the long term negative effect they can have on people, but that is another discussion in itself!

The bottom line is I write the way I think, I write the way I feel and not the way the text books tell you too! My grammar is not the best and yes I love spell check, although I have always been good at spelling. (As long as I don’t write or type too fast!! )

However regarding spelling, I do have some confusion here. I am Australian and my spelling is according to the ‘English’ language. For example English = ‘Colour’, American = ‘Color’. Due to the internet world I have noticed most websites lean more towards the American way of spelling, so now my spelling is a combination of both and can be quite confusing for me.

Do I stay true and write the English/Australian way I have been taught and grown up with, or do I write the American way? Hmmm. Food for thought I would be interested on your thoughts on this one.

OK. I think I have rambled on enough I had better introduce this weeks training.

So lets begin with this weeks tasks…….

Internet Marketing Masterclass Week 26: Writing And Submitting Articles

Like I mentioned earlier, this week was all about starting to drive traffic to our website by way of writing and submitting articles. This week we were sent our welcome letter for the week, our checklist and we had only 1 video to download. We were also sent a list of article directories to submit our articles too.

Video 1: Mentorship Monthly – Writing Ezine Articles

Writing and submitting articles is considered to be one of the best ways to attract free traffic to our websites. ‘Ezine Articles’ is considered to be the biggest and most authoritative article directories on the internet with the highest ‘Google’ ranking.

According to John writing a good article can often take about an hour or more to do, plus we then have to submit it to numerous article directories to get maximum exposure (at least 20). This can often take up to a full day.

If we don’t have the time to write our own articles, then we can find a ghostwriter on a site such as ‘Elance’ and employ them to write our articles for us for a fairly cheap price.

Next John shows us the basics of submitting an article using a service called ‘Submit Your Article’. This service will submit your article for you to all of the article directories, which can save you time if you don’t want to submit them yourself.

(At this stage I have not signed up for a service like this. I think I want to do the initial submission myself so I learn the process and then consider a service like this at a later stage if I feel I really need it. )

According to John, creating an article is a simple 3 step process and you can break it down to the following sections.

1. What am I going to talk about (The Intro)
2. Talk about the topic (The Body)
3. And what I just talked about (The conclusion)

Another way to approach article writing if we are stuck for ideas is to write “The 10 Ways Method.” For example ’10 ways to loose weight’, ’10 ways to eat healthy’, ’10 ways to stop smoking’, ’10 ways to exercise quickly’ etc etc etc. Writing this way can keep the ideas flowing.

It is important to write in such a way that will leave the reader wanting more and wanting to find out more.

The next part of writing the article is to use the ‘Resources Biography’ box at the end of the article. This is where we promote ourselves and encourage our readers to want to find out more by visiting our website from the link we provide.

The one things we must not do is use ‘private label articles’ unless we completely edit it so it is unrecognisable. It is very important to use original works. Most of the directories will not approve our articles if they consider it to be duplicate content.

It is also advisable to slightly change our articles as we submit them to more and more directories.

Another way of researching ways to write articles for our niche is to find article experts that are already writing in our chosen niche, read their articles and see how they are writing and promoting their sites.

Summary

Like I said earlier in this post, article writing has been something I have avoided, however I have decided not to avoid it anymore!

Recently I was asked to review a product from one of my fellow masterclass students called Craig Stringham. His product is called “Niche Assassin”. He has a free guide that he gives away, however the membership is about $27 I think and he then gives you all the videos to the series.

There are over 4 hours worth of them all on how to write articles effectively step by step. The videos were excellent and did help me see past my insecurities on writing articles. If you are unsure about writing articles these videos are a great way to learn!

This week I am going to get through my fears, sign up to ‘Ezine Articles’ and write and submit my first article. Wish me luck!

Week 26 Checklist:

Our checklist tasks for Week 26 were:

1. Join Ezine Articles
2. Write and submit our first article (Wait for the article to be approved and listed, this can often take 5-7 days as all articles are manually approved)
3. Rewrite the same article and submit it to the next article directory
4. Repeat the process and submit to as many article directories as we can from the article list we were given
5. Visit the forum and continue communicating with fellow students
6. Continue posting to our blogs
7. Continue visiting fellow student and marketers blogs and make comments where appropriate

OK so that is Week 26 wrapped up.

Enjoy Your Learning!

P.S If you want to read more posts on my master class training, you will find them all listed on my masterclass training page. Click on the following link to get to that page: My Masterclass Training
P.P.S John Thornhill’s Internet Marketing Masterclass Coaching may be closed at the moment. He has just started the new 2010 program and he only ever takes a limited amount of students at a time so as to dedicate himself to our learning, basically it is a first in first served situation.

Update 10/4/2010: John has just released a one month $4.95 trial to Masterclass meaning you can sign up for $4.95 and trial the training. As far as I know he is limiting these places. If you see a sold out sign, then do sign up to be notified when there are new places available again.

This training program was the best decision I ever made. I would not be doing what I am today if it wasn’t for John. I can not recommend this program enough!

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