Best Ways to Enhance Your Article Ranking

Article marketing is readily one of the most popular ways digital marketers attract traffic to their websites. If your articles are ranked high by search engines, particularly Google, they tend to attract more organic traffic. The more traffic your articles attract to your website, the more leads you generate and consequently the more sales you make. The articles you write either directly on your website/blog as well as on other websites as a guest blogger must not only be of high quality and informative, they must be impactful enough to grow your readership. That simply means traffic. Getting these articles ranked high in the SERPs of search engines depends on several factors. The following are some tested techniques you need to make that high ranking happen.

    
Diligently Research Keywords

Keyword research is a key component in search engine optimization, SEO. Since your articles must be related to a niche and an industry, you need to diligently research keywords to determine which are most relevant to your niche. These keywords provide great and highly valuable insights into what people are looking for on the web. When you incorporate these keywords in your articles, they help search engines to find and rank your articles. These keywords, search terms or search phrases help your articles to rank high in the SERPs of Google. You can take advantage of the many keywords research tools online to determine the right keywords for your articles. When Google finds more relevant keywords in your articles than other articles, it is more likely to rank your articles higher than the others.

Be Consistent

Consistency is a key ranking component in Google ranking. To improve the ranking of your articles therefore, you must be consistent. When you are consistent in writing and without let, Google notices. This consistency together with some relevance of your articles will build up over time to prompt Google to rank your articles. Therefore, aside helping you to stay motivated in your articles writing, the buildup can stand you out in the ‘eyes’ of Google. That helps your ranking a great deal. A good ranking means good organic traffic.

Write Impactful Content

For your articles to rank high on the SERPs of search engines, you need to research and use the right keywords that are relevant to your niche and are heavily searched. Your content must not only be highly relevant for these keywords, it must also make sense for the context of your articles. Be careful not to overuse your selected keywords on any particular article. Doing so is keywords stuffing which search engines can penalize your content for. It is ok though to use your keywords enough times throughout the content. But if you overuse them, it will make your content seem like spam in the eyes of search engines. Search engines tend to ignore and even penalize any content that appears to them like spam.

Get Backlinks

You can reach out to other high value content or blogs in your niche to see if they accept guest posts. When you find any that accepts guest articles, you can create a compelling title for your articles on their sites. The aim is to get backlinks to your own website. In your guest articles, it is good to include keywords that your target audience might use to search for information on the topic of your articles. Doing so can help enhance engagement for the content. If your title is thus engaging enough, and you include the links back to other articles on your website in the Author’s Resource Box, you get valuable backlinks in the process.

 

Ensure Your Content is Original

Always make sure your articles are original and not copied from anywhere else. Search engines see copied articles as spam in the extreme but if they manage to rank them at all, they never rank them highly. For this reason, one great way to improve your article ranking on Google is by providing original content only. To write original articles, make sure you take quality time to research and write about topics in your niche that are relevant for your audience. Pass each article through smart software like Copyscape to determine its originality before publishing the article. This is about the most reliable way to make sure that you do not deliberately or inadvertently plagiarize any material from any other sources. This is very important because Google’s algorithms can penalize your page rank if they detect plagiarized material in your article. Making sure your articles are original this way may take time and efforts but really worth the while. If your content is judged by Google to be original, it will lead to an increase in views and clicks over time. That ultimately will lead to an increase in traffic and rankings on the SERPs of search engines.

Read the Articles You Link To

The essence of reading articles before linking to them is to find out if such articles can add value to yours or they will detract from it. Reading and understanding the articles you link to is therefore a great way to be sure you are not linking to a poor quality, junk or plagiarized material. Be sure to include relevant keywords in both the title and in the first sentence or two of your article. This is hugely important because these first few words are often used by search engines when determining how to rank content. Once the keywords on the article directly reflect what people are searching for on Google, it helps to enhance the ranking of the content.

Use SEO Tools to Help your Ranking

You can effectively use SEO tools like Moz’s Open Site Explorer to enhance the ranking of your articles. These tools are smart tools which allow for a more in-depth analysis of the competition and how well you are doing against them. They provide you many other valuable insights to help you rank better on the SERPs of Google. Your competition is made up of people who are in the same niche you are and are competing for attention with similar keywords. Moz’s tools help you to know what they are doing and how you can better do what they are doing to get a better ranking on Google.

Include a Title and Meta Description

Creating optimized titles helps your articles to rank better in the SERPs of search engines. If properly done, it will help your articles to stand out from the rest in the eyes of search engines. Title and Meta tags act like some kind of guides to direct search engines to what is in your content. If your title has a meta description, it acts as some kind of snippet that shows up below your title on the search engine result pages (SERPs). You must however be sure that your meta description is between 100-150 characters in length. This provides a visible and easy-to-notice summary of what your article is about. It is usually long enough to induce more curiosity without necessarily delving into deeper details about the article.

Wrapping Up

Taking steps to help your articles rank high on the SERPs of search engines is a very smart thing to do if you are into articles marketing. First is to write quality articles and with the relevant keywords in the content. Next is to get search engines to notice them and possibly rank them. The foregoing tips and techniques are very handy in that quest. Why not give them a try?

8 Effective Techniques to Monetize your Podcast

Even though podcasting is a relatively new form of media, podcasters have found ways to monetize it too just like blogs. Presently, many podcasters are generating revenue and earning good money from podcasting in a variety of ways. Monetization is important for your podcast because it can help you to generate some revenue that can be deployed to improve the quality and production of your podcast show. Aside helping the podcaster to earn income and create some financial incentive to continue producing the podcast show, monetization can also help to support the costs of hosting and distributing a podcast.

 

Below are some of the most popular techniques for monetizing a podcast, together with the right tips to get it done.

1. Selling Ads Space

Readily the most popular way to monetize a podcast is to sell advertising space. This is easy and straightforward for anyone already used to marketing online. You can sell ads space on your podcast in a variety of ways. Some of such ways include creating and airing paid branded content, through content sponsorships or by airing direct paid commercials. Podcasters can make good money through any of these ways.

2. Sponsorship Deals

This is yet another very good way to monetize a podcast. By this method, the podcaster earns money through sponsorship deals. Many sponsors do not mind paying good money as charges to have their products/services mentioned on a podcast show. For sponsors who can afford to pay, it is possible to have an entire podcast episode dedicated to their products/services.

3. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is also a great way to monetize a podcast. Podcasters can partner with businesses, promote and market their products/services then earn commissions from the sales they help generate. For effectiveness, it is best to promote products/services related to a podcast’s chosen topic. When podcast listeners click on the affiliate links on the podcast’s show notes to make purchases, the podcaster earns sales commissions. Additionally, podcasters can partner with other podcasters to cross-promote each other’s shows. All parties earn commissions from this collaboration and partnership effort.

4. Premium Subscriptions

On their podcasts, podcasters can offer premium paid content as another viable way to monetize their podcasts. This premium paid content could be in the form of exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, or other content that listeners can only access by paying some subscription fee. Premium subscription not only helps to directly engage some dedicated podcast listeners, it is one great way to generate some revenue for the podcaster.

5. Sharing Your Content on YouTube

For monetization purposes, you can create a YouTube channel specifically for your podcast. Once created, you can keep uploading your podcast episodes to it. Make sure to include your affiliate links or links to your website in the description. For effectiveness, you can use video annotations or cards to link to specific episodes or segments of your podcast. Be sure to add a “Subscribe” button to your channel and encourage viewers to subscribe if they want to stay up-to-date with your latest content. You earn money by running ads during podcast episodes out of your YouTube channel.

6. Selling Customized Merchandise

You can customize and sell your podcast show merchandise. This is one other viable way to monetize your podcast. Such items as easy-to-handle and common products like Face caps, T-shirts, hats, hand towels, key holders, bottle openers and suchlike products can be customized with a podcast’s logo, catch phrase or slogan. You can brand and sell sunscreens, table mats, bumper stickers, coffee mugs, and any other items with a podcast’s branding. By selling these branded items, you can make money from your listeners while at the same time widely promoting your podcast.

7. Sponsoring Other Podcasts

You can reach out to other podcasters and negotiate collaboration and sponsorship deals. If such deals fall through, you can benefit from the podcasting network. Other podcasters in the network will promote your show to their listening audience while you promote theirs to your own listeners. This way, all parties will get to reach many more new listeners than they would have ordinarily reached with their own audience alone. You can grow your audience from this arrangement, reach more new listeners and make more money from your podcast.

8. Collaborating With Other Podcasters

Through synergy, you can monetize a podcast by collaborating with fellow podcasters. The commonest way to do this is by getting involved in creating a joint podcast or cross-promoting each other’s podcasts. If you collaborate with other podcasters this way, you can manage to reach a larger audience and garner more new listeners to your own podcast. The more listeners you have, the better the chances of your podcast making more money.

Wrapping Up

There are several techniques you can use to monetize your podcast. The foregoing techniques are about the most common among podcasters. What matters most however is to correctly figure out which monetization techniques are best suitable for your brand of podcast. If you deploy these techniques well enough, with some creativity and hard work, it is possible to make good money from your podcasting.