1) Search Engine Rankings

You first goal is to get your article to rank in the search engines. After all, it doesn’t matter how good and interesting your article is if no one sees it.

Start by doing a little keyword research. If you bought an Affiliate Niche Pack, just pick one from your keyword list. Use the keyword in the title of your article, as early in it as possible. I also like to work it into the first 100 words of the article when possible. Other than that, just write naturally.

2) Get Reader Interest

Your second major goal is to make the title interesting enough that someone will actually click on it and start reading it.

How can you accomplish both of those? I usually start with the keyword at the beginning of the article, followed by a dash and then a statement, or question to make it sound interesting. Good words to use in that part are secrets, tips, ideas etc.

Here are a couple of examples:

Article Marketing – 7 Tips For Writing Titles That Get Attention

Getting Baby To Sleep Through The Night – A Secret Strategy That Starts Working The First Night

Easy Family Budget – Getting Started In Just Three Simple Steps

Crockpot Beef Stew – 2 Secret Recipes From Grandma’s Recipe Box

Now it’s your turn. Try implementing this strategy with the articles you are writing this week and see if you notice an increase in the amount of people who read them.

1) Google Search

The easiest way is to go out and do a google search. Just use one of your main keywords and dofollow. You can also search for “list of dofollow blogs” to find lists other people have put together already.

2) Notification Lists

There are several free and paid email notification lists that will send you several links each week or month where you can leave a comment that is followed.

A free one of these I came across a few days ago is right here: Vince’s Links

Probably the most popular paid one is “Angela’s Links” (not an affiliate link). For $5 per month you get 30 dofollow links opportunities. These are mostly profile pages you can set up and include a link back to your site. Only a few of them are blogs.

Another popular one is “Paul’s Quality Backlinks” (not an affiliate link). For $8 per month you also get a list of 30 dofollow link opportunities.

3) Lists of Other Dofollow Blogs

Many blogs that “dofollow” also have a list to other blogs that have a similar plugin installed. Take a look at What Can I Make With It for example. It’s one of my own blogs about what to make with various food items. If you look in the sidebar, you will see a link to a Dofollow List. On that list you will find quite a few other blogs on various topics that also have a dofollow plugin installed. Look through them and see what blogs apply to your own market and start commenting on them regularly.

To get the most out of your efforts, make a list of all the dofollow blogs you find that are interesting and targeted enough to be worth the effort. I like to make sure the blog has been updated in the past two weeks and that comments are approved regularly.

Keep a spreadsheet or word document with these posts handy. Then schedule some time each week to go out and comment on a few of these blogs.

Personally, I don’t use any of the paid services. I make a list of 20 to 30 good blogs that dofollow in their comment links and then spend my time commenting on them each week.

When blogs first came out and you were able to leave comments that included a link, people used it as a way to create lots of incoming links to their own webpages to increase rankings. Of course this was quickly abused and Comment Spam was born. If you have a blog of your own, I’m sure you’ve seen your share of this.

To help combat comment spam and make sure all these spammy links did not count, the big search engines implemented a new tag called “nofollow”. As the search engine spiders crawled the web, this little tag would tell them to ignore a link in all search engine calculations. The bottom line is that most blogging platforms adopted this “nofollow” tag and implemented it in the comments section.

Of course there are also blogs (including my Affiliate Treasure Chest Blog) that don’t mind sharing some link juice provided readers leave valuable comments. There are various plugins to allow you to turn the no-follow feature off on your blog.

The big question then becomes should you focus on blogs that have one of these plugins installed or not when you are commenting on blogs. This depends on what your end goal is with your commenting.

If you are following the beginner strategy in one of my affiliate niche packs, your main goal is to send traffic to your affiliate link. In this case, any blog will work. Focus on those that seem to get a lot of traffic and have active commenters.

If you are tyring to improve the ranking of an article on an article directory, one of your social media pages (i.e. a squidoo lense, or a hub page etc.), or if you set up your own site using the advanced marketing strategy and are working on incoming links, you do want to post on dofollow blogs as often as you can.

P.S. Tomorrow I’ll share how to find those do-follow blogs.

People new to article marketing often wonder how long these articles should be. My first consideration is always the requirements by the article directory I’m submitting to. Most of them require a minimum of 250 to 300 words. Use it as the lower end of your word count range. Please remember that this is the requirement for the article body only. Titles and Author Resource Boxes do not count toward the minimum word requirement.

As far as maximum lenght go, I try to stay under 500 words. If my article gets much longer than that, I split it into two parts and now have two articles to submit.

It’s so easy to just kinda work on stuff, take our time and not be terribly productive, especially if there’s no deadline looming.

There is actually a “Law” called Parkinson’s Law that explains this phenomenon. Here it is:

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

It was formulated by Cyril Northcote Parkinson (July 30, 1909 – March 9, 1993). And yes, that’s him in the picture to the right.

We know this law works. When we don’t have much of a goal and more importantly a deadline, any task can take just about forever, but when we are under time pressure, we can get a huge amount of work done in a relatively short amount of time.

Of course the big question is, how can we make this work to our advantage? By keeping track of the time we spend and setting ourselves time limits. Let’s look at how we can do this.

When you’re ready to get some productive worktime in, grab a piece of paper, a pen and a kitchen timer. On the paper, list 3 things you need to get done today. Next to each action item, write down how much time you are allowing for this. Be realistic, but don’t allow for more time than you think you’ll need. You can always add more if needed. I like to use 5 minutes for really quick task. Everything else is broken down into intervals of 15 minutes (i.e. 15 min, 30 min, 45, min, 1 hour etc.)

Set your kitchen time and get to work on item number one. Yes, this is a race. Sit down, focus and do your best to get your work done in the time alloted. Once it’s finished, cross the item of your list.

Get up, grab a glass of water, stretch, then move on the item number two and repeat. Do the same for item number three.

Once you have this system down, feel free to add more tasks, but don’t go over 7 items, or your list may start to feel overwhelming. Just work through the items on your list and then add more as needed.

Give it a try and watch your productivity increase.

P.S. If you don’t want to mess with paper and a kitchen timer, take a look at Action Machine Pro – I have it installed on both my computers and it’s working well for me, making sure I stay on task and get things done faster.