An active sentence works better than a passive one. The cat sat on the mat (active) is simpler and clearer than the mat was sat on by the cat (passive).
The reader’s brain works faster than their eye. If you start a sentence the attack… they may already be thinking about tanks, or vitriolic newspaper articles or a mugger in a dark alley.
If the sentence goes on the attack on the castle… the reader may have to discard previous pictures and now they may be thinking about a knight in shining armour. If the compete sentence reads the attack on the castle was carried out by Zorro, they discard all previous images and come up with a completely new one.
Conjuring up all these images is hard work and it can leave the reader confused. It is much clearer to work out the action in a sentence the attack and who took that action Zorro and put the actor first, then the action, and then the scenery the castle.
Actor – action – scenery Zorro attacked the castle
Strict grammarians call the actor the subject of a sentence, the action the verb and the scenery the object.
Subject – verb – object is the definition of an active sentence and those are the best sentences to use.
Sometimes you will think you need a passive sentence but, really, you don’t:
My house was broken into last night (passive).
You don’t know who broke into your house (there is no subject) so you cannot make the sentence active. But you do know who broke into your house, you just think you don’t:
Here are tips gleaned from roughly 5 years spent building up an ezine list. I’ve also incorporated comments and tips from Jenna Glatzer, who successfully built her list up to 75,000 at her excellent site, www.absolutewrite.com
1. Free Stuff. Pick genuinely useful free stuff that you know your audience wants and needs. For instance, my brand new ezine, Expert Status, attracted 600 readers in just a few weeks by offering a report, “25 Top Self Help Literary Agents”. The practical freebie works. Jenna Glatzer offers two free ebooks/reports to subscribers on agents who are receptive to new writers, and on writer’s markets. She notes: “Before I did that, my subscriber numbers were in the hundreds, not thousands.
2. Put a subscribe box on every page of the site. This has worked for both Jenna and me. Mine is parked in the left hand column of the site. Experts advise putting a simple sign up box (with freebie mentioned) in the top left hand corner, as that’s where the eye naturally travels first. A simple sign up box that requests only email address works best.
3. Ad swaps. Exchange plugs for your ezine with another website, to run in eachother’s ezines. Be sure to mention those freebies! Doing this on a regular basis with a rotating selection of web partners will keep your subscription page busy.
4. Cross-registration. I’ve found subscribers by having a plug for my ezine on the thank you page of a comparable (but not directly competitive) website. This offer is made to folks who just signed up for an ezine, and are therefore deemed ‘in the mood for more.’ Offer a swap with your site, and try not to list more than about two other ezines. Also, make a point of including only really good, reliable publications that reach your target market.
5. Give away a bonus for other sites to use, based on your ezine. A popular web marketing technique is the special one or two-day promo that offers big bonus lists when you buy a certain product on those particular days. (I cover this promo technique in more detail in my ebook/binder, Get Known Now; How to Build Your Platform as a Self Help Expert.) So collect some of your best ezine essays, pack ‘em up in a downloadable PDF-based e-book, and offer it as a bonus these sites can use in their special promos. Don’t forget juicy descriptive copy about your ezine, and a subscribe link at the end of your ebook. I’ve gotten hundreds of new readers this way, and much traffic to my site.
6. Announce ezine ‘events’ on PRweb.com and other PR sites. There’s an entire world of web-based press release distribution services out there, some of which are low cost or even free. So use them. But be sure to only plant press releases that are truly newsworthy, and thus likely to get press attention. Even if the media don’t use your words this time, they’ll hopefully file you as an expert for future use.
7. Use discussion boards or groups. These are sites frequented by gangs of people interested in the same thing. Avoid the unmoderated sites, because they’re likely to be spam targets that generate little bonafide traffic. Boards found on member sites are the best. Don’t spam the board with your subscribe message. Instead, offer some genuinely helpful info. Then sign off with a signature line that includes ezine and subscribe info. You can find some of these groups at groups.yahoo.com, topica.com, mail-list.com, and listfool.com for starters.
8. Sponsor other people’s contests. Jenna Glatzer gives away products like her paid newsletter, Absolute Markets Premium Newsletter, to writers’ groups, contests, and conferences that request it, regardless of size. I’ve tried this too, to good effect. Simply run an announcement in your ezine that you’d be happy to sponsor comparable events. Ask them to provide a URL for an event description so you know it’s legit. Then offer up your gifts, and ask for a plug for your ezine and for them to talk up your dazzling freebie, as well. Jenna notes that groups she sponsors “often send out ads for us to their lists ? just as a thank you.”
9. Run quality content. There’s no substitute for heartfelt writing plus solid information about a subject that matters. Jenna writes: ‘The main reason our list stays so big is our ‘letter from the editor’ ? Each week, I chronicle my writing life and my triumphs and failures ? when an article is killed, when I’m having trouble finishing a book ? And I share personal things, too, like when my grandfather died?. People write: ‘ I feel like I know you so well.’ And I think that’s why they stay on the list, even when their mailbox fills up with dozens of other writer’s newsletters.
10. Allow reprints. Allow any newsletter that wants to reprint your articles do so. I like to have an email requesting permission, so I can enter their info into a big database I use to track where I can send more articles in the future. I end each article with the line: You may reprint this article in your own ezine or website. Simply send an email requesting permission to EMAIL ADDRESS. Please be sure to include our full bio box at the end.
11. Create a survey or contest. This would be one of those newsworthy ‘ezine events’ I mentioned above in point # 6. Make it a fun, relevant question that you could really develop a good, newsy story from. I did a survey asking people what they fought with their spouse/partner/boy or girlfriend about. The results made for the kind of reading offline media enjoy running short, 100-word pieces about (fillers.) I made sure to attribute the survey to my ezine, The Joy Letter, with a mention of the site’s basic URL. You can get the technology to run your own survey and collect responses at surveymonkey.com (for a fee) or bravenet.com (for free.)
I think I could actually go on and on here. The possibilities seem to be endless. If you try even half of these techniques on a regular basis, you’ll find your subscriber rates double and even triple. Here’s to building your list ? the foundation that much of your traffic and success rely on.
Suzanne Falter-Barns’ website, The Self Help Salon (www.selfhelpsalon.com) offers tips and tools that help you build your platform and get known as an expert in your field. Sign up for her free ezine, Expert Status, and receive her free report, “25 Top Self Help Literary Agents
Really Simple Syndication and is a way of taking content and distributing it out to various sites. Originally it was primarily aimed at newsfeeds and providing content from news sites to feeder sites.
To use Really Simple Syndication , you must to have an Really Simple Syndication feed from your website. WordPress provides one of the easiest ways to construct an Really Simple Syndication feed as it is a fundamental part of the program. A static HTML site can be translated into an RSS feed, though it isn’t always simple. This frequently involves a manual process and manual submission of files. You can find websites which will do this conversion automatically.
Next you have to find sites to submit your Really Simple Syndication feed to.
You are looking for 2 kinds of site.
The first step is to find Really Simple Syndication directories. A quick Google will bring up plenty of directories you can use. You can purchase software to automate the submission process. Once you have found your directories you want to submit your Really Simple Syndication feeds to them. This can be outsourced as it does take some time. Prepare your keywords, title and description in advance.
Each submission can be made unique by using an alternative description and title. What level of difference this actually makes no one is quite sure, but it does appear to help.
{If you are manually submitting RSS feeds then you have to keep track of which sites you have submitted where|You keep track of where you have submitted your RSS feeds. The reason is you don’t want to submit the same site more than once. Plus, you are may want to submit other sites in the future.
The second type of site is the RSS Aggregator. This combines multiple RSS feeds into a single feed or webpage. This can be submitted to the RSS directories. This is useful to mix up your own RSS feeds with those of news sites. This could provide a higher degree of authority and provide more bulk to the content.
Remember that many of the Web 2.0 sites, e.g. Squidoo, have RSS feeds that you can submit to the directories Submitting these to RSS directories and aggregators will contribute to your search engine rankings. Every time you update your web page, your RSS feed will be updated.Therefore, if you are regularly adding new content,you can find it distributed out to numerous websites very quickly, gaining you backlinks to your site.
RSS feeds are a magnificent way to get further backlinks and to help your sites to rank well. As you use them, watch the extra links build and your rankings (and earnings) pick up.
Backlinks are really important in the world of Search Engine Optimization. If you want your site to do well in google search results you have to have a good page rank. If you want a higher page rank you’re going to need some backlinks.
Backlinks are simply a link from somewhere else to your site.
It’s a really easy concept, in fact, it’s really easy to do. Making a backlink only takes a minute or two. That’s not too bad. However, when you are talking about having thousands of backlinks to your site, you start talking in the thousands of minutes and that IS a long time.
Creating backlinks can be time consuming and seriously tedious and boring, but you have to do it! This lens is going to discuss different ways you can get quality, high page ranked, backlinks, and more importantly, ways you can automate the process and make it go FAST!
Backlinks are a link to your website from another website. The search engines love these. When they see the link on someone else’s site it sends the spiders over to your site and they index your site getting it placed on a search engine organically instead of you going over and entering it. This way is preferred by the search engines.
Where do I put backlinks?
You can put backlinks in any number of locations. You can use them in signatures in forums, you can pay for them, but today we are talking about putting them in blogs.
You find a blog that is about a similar topic as what you will be linking to. You read the blog and then you make an insightful and meaningful comment to the post. When you are finished with your post you also put a link to the site you want the search engines to go look at. (and the other people reading the blog for that matter)
How do I make a backlink?
To make a backlink it takes a couple steps. (they’re real easy don’t worry)
1. Know your url. If you want your link to send people to the front page, or to a specific article or blog post, make sure you have the specific url for that. For example it might be the difference between www.itsawahmlife.com which is the main page of my personal blog or this: http://itsawahmlife.com/pb-j-chicken-stew.html which is a specific post.
2. Now you need a little html magic. You will need to use this html code to make a link:
3. You will need a keyword for your link. Don’t use a keyword that is in the title of your blog/article/website, because the search engines will already see it in your url. Choose something else that is relevant to where you are sending people. For example, using the above post I might use the key word Peanut Butter and Jelly Chicken Stew.
Let’s use the example from my blog and I’ll show you what it looks like, in code and then the way it appears in code.
Backlinks from blogs are great and you need to think about the page rank of the blog before you leave the backlink. You should be backlinking from a blog with a higher page rank. I would choose at least a 4 or 5. It may have to be lower depending on your niche.
Searching out blogs and figuring out what their page rank is could take forever. That’s not even including going and making your comment.
You guessed it. I found you some great software to use to help get this done fast.
Let’s see what Comment Hut is and what it will do for you.
Comment Hut is NOT a blog spamming software. It does not leave your comments and backlinks.
Comment Hut DOES search out blogs by keyword and then tell you what the page rank is of the blog.
You then go and read the post, and post your comment with your backlink.
It is a huge time saver. You no longer have to spend all your time looking for appropriate blogs which can take forever. You also now know what the page rank is for the blog and you can choose to post a comment or not depending on the page rank.
It’s a great piece of software, and it will save you time and you will see more traffic and you will find yourself on the search engines faster and easier. The other plus, my favorite one, it’s free! Well again, there is a “lite” version for free. You can get all the blogs from wordpress listed in the lite version. If you want more choices from other places you can upgrade and get blogs from just about every other blogging source you can think of. The wordpress blogs will do you for a while though.
Go get yourself some blog backlinks with Comment Hut
