Here’s a short little tutorial on doing just that.

Step One -  Get Your Report Ready

Start by getting your report ready. I recommend using a pdf report. You can write it in Microsoft Word or Open Office and then use a program like PrimoPDF (it’s free) to turn the word document into a pdf.  Save your pdf somewhere you can find it later.

Step Two – Create A Download Page or Post

Next we’ll need a website where readers can download the report. You can create either a post or page. If you want to share the pdf with just anyone, a regular blog post works fine. If you want the download page hidden because you are offering the report to people that sign up for your list, create a page in wordpress and then follow these instructions on hiding pages in wordpress.

Step Three – Upload The Report and Include It In Your Post

Now it’s time to upload the pdf and display it in the blog post or page. I’m going to add a free pdf report to this post and document the process with screenshots along the way.

Start by looking at the Upload/Insert option in your WordPress post interface. You may be familiar with these buttons for including images in your blog posts. This works almost exactly the same way as you’ll see. The only difference is that instead of the square image button, we’ll click on the sun or star shaped button instead. If you hover over the button, it will say “Add Media”. I also highlighted it for you in the image below.

Click on the button and here’s what you’ll see next …

Click on the “Browse” button. A new window will open. Browse to where you saved the pdf in the first place. Click on the file, then the open button. You will return to the screen above, but a file name will be in the field to the left of the browse button. Click on the upload button.

You will be taken to a screen where you can provide a little more information about the file. The default title is the file name. I like to use a more descriptive name. Under “Link URL” click on the “File URL” button to make sure you are linking directly to the pdf file.

Last but not least, click the “Insert Into Post” button. Here’s what my post looked like after I clicked on “Insert Into Post”). I did add the (PDF) text to the page right after the link before taking the screenshot.

And here it is in this post:

PLR Frequently Asked Questions (PDF)

Step Four – Publish Your Page or Post

Your last step is to simply publish your wordpress page or post.

P.S. Ready to learn more about WordPress? Here’s a fully illustrated 60+ page guide that will show you how to install, customize and use WordPress to manage your content sites.  Grab your copy of WordPress Blog Setup Made Easy today for $20.

I thought I’d share my reply with you here as well. Here it is.

I like to start with a little bit of keyword research before I buy a domain name. I try to figure out what one of the main keywords is for the topic the site will be about. Then I play with those keywords and other words around it until I find something I’m happy with that’s still available.

I stick to only .com domain names. I have bought .info and .net in the past, but not for important sites where I eventually want people to remember the domain name. No one ever remembers to add a .info or .net  and will go to the .com version of the site instead.

I stay away from names with dashes or numbers in them for the same reason.

Now, let’s look at some bad examples:

SewingandEmbroidery.info

My first mistake was to go with a .info extension. If I remember correctly, the only reason I did it was because the .info was cheaper at the time. The second reason I don’t like it is because it is a little hard to spell and misspellings are pretty common. I made that mistake with a few of my domain names.

Lemony-Snicket-Stuff.com

When this domain was registered there was some talk in the SEO community that it might help to have dashes between keywords. It doesn’t and just makes it almost impossible for people to type the domain name and get it right.

I haven’t put nearly the time and effort into either one of these sites that I should have and part of the reason is because I ended up not being very happy about the domain name.

Hope this helps and take a minute to read the rest of the recommendations on Nicole’s blog.

P.S. Once you have your domain name registered, it’s time to get your website up and running. I recommending installing the free WordPress software. Here’s a guide on how to install it, set it up and write your first few blog posts or articles.

Start by thinking about what your target audience really wants. You can also do some research by asking your current readers and visitors or using sites like Yahoo answer or forums in your market to get a feel for what your audience wants.

Spend some time creating exceptional content and post it to your site. Do some keyword research and optimize the page for those keywords so you can build some free search engine. Start promoting the content by blogging about it, mentioning it on twitter and other social media outlets. Tell our lists about it and always invite people to share the link to the content.

Monetize your link magnet by adding a link somewhere toward the end of the content for one of your products. It’s important not to be pushy here or people will be less likely to link to it.

P.S. Ready to learn more about building links? Sign up for my 13 week link building course at EasyLinkLove.com

There are a couple of good reasons why you may want to do this, especially if you are using WordPress to manage a content website. Here are some examples of pages you may want to hide from the regular page navigation bar.

• Newsletter Signup Thank You Pages
• Product Download Pages
• Affiliate Signup Or Tools Pages
• Free Downloads Or Bonuses You Want To Send To Your Lists

No matter what you’re reason for doing this, here are two different ways to hide those pages from your site navigation.

Manually Editing Your WordPress Template To Hide Pages

I usually manually edit my wordpress template to hide pages. It’s pretty straightforward and after you’ve done it once or twice, it becomes second nature.

I start by creating a main “hidden page”. This page won’t be seen, so name it whatever you’d like. If you are hiding download pages, you may want to name it download or hidden or something along those lines. You can keep the page blank. Publish it, then go to your list of pages (by clicking on “pages”  or “edit pages” in the left-hand sidebar in your admin area. Hover over each page and you will see the ID for it in the status bar in the bottom of your browser. It will be part of the ULR and include something like “post=1234″.

Once you have that page ID, head on over to the theme editor (under Appearance  in your admin area). Depending on where the pages appear in your navigation, you’ll have to look for the code to edit in either the header or the side bar files. Look for the following line of code:

<?php wp_list_pages();?>

Sometimes it will include a little extra code and look more like this:

<?php wp_list_pages (‘title_li=&depth=4&sort_column=menu_order); ?>

Now we’ll just need to include a little code to hide our page from this navigation menu. In our example, the page id was 1234. We’d modify the basic code as follows:

<?php wp_list_pages(“exclude=1234″);?>

The second code example would look like this:

<?php wp_list_pages (‘title_li=&depth=4&sort_column=menu_order&exclude=1234′); ?>

If you have more than one page to exclude, you simply add it separating the page ids with commas. Here’s an example:

<?php wp_list_pages(“exclude=1234,1235″);?>

The reason I’m creating a main hidden page is so I don’t have to go in and manually edit my template each time I create a new hidden pages. From here on out I simply make the main hidden page the parent of this new page (it’s one of the options when you create a new page) and the new page will automatically also be hidden.

Using A Plugin To Hide Pages In WordPress

If hand-coding the php code in your templates isn’t quite your thing, there’s a wordpress plugin that will do the job for you. It’s called “Exclude Pages” and you can download it from the WordPress.org site here. Once you have the plugin uploaded and activated, you will see a little option and checkbox that will allow you to specify whether or not a particular page on your blog should be included in the site navigation or not.

P.S. Ready to learn more about WordPress? Here’s a fully illustrated 60+ page guide that will show you how to install, customize and use WordPress to manage your content sites.  Grab your copy of WordPress Blog Setup Made Easy today for $20.

Note - this applies only on self-hosted sites that use the free software from WordPress.org. It does not apply to WordPress.come blogs.

What Are Permalinks?

Permalinks – which is actually short for permanent links are the links that point to your individual blog posts and pages. By default, these links looks something like affiliatenichepacks.com/?p=213.

We can however easily change the structure of these permalinks via the WordPress admin interface to look a little nicer likehttp://www.affiliatenichepacks.com/474/how-to-change-permalinks/

Why Should We Change Them?

There are two reasons why you should change your permalinks. The first one is that they simply look better and make your site look more trustworthy. It’s a bit of a vanity thing.

The second reason is keyword and SEO related. Having your main keyword as part of your url will help you rank better. It’s a minor factor, but every little bit helps.

How Do We Change Them?

Last but not least, let me show you how easy it is to change your permalinks.

Log into your wordpess admin area. In the sidebar on the left you will see an option for “Settings“. Once you click on it, the following menu options will appear.

You will see a link or option called “Permalinks“. Click on it and you will be taken to a section of your blog that will allow you to change your permalink settings.

You will see a default option that’s selected right now as well as several other common options. All of these options are usually popular with bloggers, but not often a good choice for a content site.

I prefer to have the title of my post be part of the link. I either use it by itself like I am doing on this blog here (not that the file name is simply “/how-to-change-permalinks/” or with an html extension (in which case my url would become /how-to-change-permalinks.html ).

Either option is fine and I use them interchangeably.

Here’s what the permalink settings area looks like when you first log in:

Instead of the default, click on the radio button next to “custom” and use one of the two following settings.

/%postname%

/%postname%.html

Here’s what that’ll look like.

Last but not least, click on “Save changes and you’re all done.

P.S. Ready to learn more about WordPress? Here’s a fully illustrated 60+ page guide that will show you how to install, customize and use WordPress to manage your content sites.  Grab your copy of WordPress Blog Setup Made Easy today for $20.

It is a piece of free software that you can download at www.WordPress.org

You then install the software on your web-server and use it to build and update your website. This may sound complicated, but it really isn’t.

Before we talk about why I like wordpress to run websites, let’s get a little better understanding of what it is.

Here’s how Wikipedia defines WordPress:

WordPress is an open source Content Management System (CMS), often used as a blog publishing application, powered by PHP and MySQL. It has many features including a plug-in architecture and a template system. Used by over 12% of the 1,000,000 biggest websites, WordPress is the most popular CMS in use today

Pretty impressive, right?

By now you may be wondering what makes WordPress so great. Here are a few of the reasons why I like it:

• WordPress blogs are easy to update or hire someone to make changes because there are so many users.
• No learning to code. Post your blog posts using a visual editor. (If you can send an email, you can post to your WordPress blog.)
• You need to focus on driving your business on automatic – not being your own webmaster.
• Using WordPress makes SEO (Search Engine Optimization) easy and there are quite a few free tools that help you get your pages indexed fast, build links and do on-page SEO.

To summarize, WordPress is a great way to run a website – in fact adding new pages to it is as easy as writing an email and installing and customizing a WordPress site is a pretty easy process.

Let me show you how to do just that in the WordPress Blog Setup Made Easy Guide.

In this 60+ page guide I’ll walk you through:

1. Buying Your Domain Name
2. Setting Up Hosting
3. Installing WordPress
4. Customizing Your WordPress Site
5. Installing A Template
6. Making Your First Post
7. Using and Installing Plugins

P.S. At $20 the guide is very affordable and a fraction of the cost of  getting a web designer to set up just one blog for you.

You’ll be pleasantly surprised how easy it is to follow along and setup your own WordPress blog and customize it. You could be done in as little as an hour.

Grab your copy at http://www.affiliatenichepacks.com/wordpress/

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.