You found a great long tail keyword.  The competition volume is low.  The search numbers are through the roof.  The words give off every indication that it is a “buying” phrase.  Unfortunately, there’s a big problem.

The phrase is not grammatically correct or it can’t really be used in a sentence because of the way it’s structured.  You are stuck.  This long tail is a moneymaker, but there’s just no good way to use it without seeming like a semi-literate hack.  What do you do?  You don’t want to risk your credibility or to create a poorly performing piece of junk, but you don’t want to let that keyword slip away, either.

Luckily, there are a few things you can do to use the phrase even if it doesn’t seem to make a great deal of sense at face value.  Here are two proven suggestions for turning the awkward phrase into a real moneymaker.

Tip One Split Sentences

Look at your keyword phrase in a different light.  Instead of considering the phrase as part of a single sentence, analyze whether it can be used to end one sentence and to start another.  Here’s an example.  Let’s say you are working with “doctor Chicago laser”.  That’s going to be hard to stick into the middle of a sentence without seeming a bit forced, right?  

Instead, you can go with “…finding a doctor.  Chicago laser surgery clinics boast some of the finest…”  You can end the first sentence with part of the phrase and begin the next with its remainder.  The search engines will find “doctor Chicago laser” in there, getting you up in SERPs for the phrase.  It works because the engines don’t read punctuation.  That leads us to our second tip.

Tip Two:  Punctuation

You can use punctuation to turn a tough keyword phrase into something more manageable.  This technique works really well in titles, but can also find its way into the body of your articles.  Here’s an example.  Let’s say you have “baseball card buy” in front of you.  That’s a little tricky, but a title like “Finding an Investment Baseball Card:  Buy the Right Rookie Every Time” might work out pretty well.

This method is all about inserting punctuation into the keyword phrase.  Those simple alterations can produce substantial shifts in meaning, allowing you to use seemingly nonsensical phrases in a smooth and readable way.

Keyword discovery and optimization are the lifeblood of any bum or article marketer.  Too often, marketers fail to utilize tough keyword phrases out of frustration or produce substandard articles that fail to produce the results one can experience with top-notch writing.  Don’t let that happen to you.  With a little work, you can transform an awkward keyword phrase into a smooth-as-silk profit generator.

You did the keyword research.  You wrote the article.  Your resource box is so good that you sense a click-through rate world’s record in your near future.  You might be a bum marketer, but you’re producing high-potential material.  Guess what?  It might not be enough.

Some other goofball who accidentally stumbled onto your great long tail keyword may end up beating you by three pages in the search engine results.  A less-than-relevant page from some random site that doesn’t even use your keyword could end up getting more traffic than your perfectly assembled article.

What’s the scoop?  How can you bump your articles up in the SERPs for maximum exposure (and maximum profits)?  Sometimes, the only difference between Google’s second page and an awesome position is a handful of links.  If you can get a few back links directly to your article, you might be able to climb the ladder.

So, how are you supposed to get back links to your bum articles?  Let’s run through a few different options. 

First, social bookmarking is a great shortcut.  You can set up an account at a series of social bookmarking sites and drop a link to each of your articles.  If that seems a little time consuming (and it can be), you can get a free account at OnlyWire or another services that allows you add bookmarks across a series of sites with a few mouse clicks.

Second, blogging can be a great way to get the job done.  Set up a handful of blogs at some of the more popular free sites.  Link to your articles from your Blogspot and Wordpress logs and you can give your bum pieces a boost.

Third, you can actually write articles about articles.  This little known trick is great.  Some directories will let you pepper your articles with additional links.  You can use that opportunity to link back to your own articles.  One nifty trick is to write an article about the fact that you’ve just published three articles.  Link (with anchor text, of course) to each of those three articles within your new offering.  If you mass distribute this one, it’s going to add a healthy supply of links back to your original bum article.

Fourth, use your other properties.  Link to an article from one of your sites.  If you work with Squidoo lenses or Hubpages, you can quickly generate some nice links back to your articles, helping them to climb up in the SERPs.

There are many ways to generate some extra links back to your articles.  Use some of these simple ideas and compliment them with a little bit of your own creativity.  You can finally start getting great results from your bum marketing efforts once you start bumping those articles!

If you’ve been around working from home online for even a short amount of time you’ve probably heard of article marketing. In simple terms, article marketing is where you promote products – either your own or as an affiliate – by submitting articles to directories which include a link to the product in the author bio. This link is your affiliate link, so every time a visitor you send buys the product you get paid a commission.

It’s a simple technique, but many marketers spend huge amounts of time doing it without ever making a lot of money. Does this mean it doesn’t work? Far from it. If you know how, article marketing can be extremely profitable.

The problem arises when marketers don’t actively track their efforts. To start with, picking the right product is vital. If you pick a product to promote that doesn’t have a good sales page or is in an obscure niche you will get less success. It sounds obvious, but many article marketers blindly churn out article after article promoting a product that’s almost impossible to sell. This is something you can and should test yourself. When starting to promote a product only write a certain amount of articles, for example 25, and if you haven’t made an acceptable amount of money after those then forget it and move onto a different product.

Once you’ve picked a popular product (you can find many at the Clickbank marketplace) the next stage is optimizing the actual article. There are several key steps to writing a successful article, and each one can make the difference between earning a small amount of money and a huge amount of affiliate sales. If you want to do article marketing properly, you need to test how to make an article get the most views, have a high CTR and ultimately give you the most conversions.

The most important components of an article are:

• The headline. This is arguably the most important of all. You need to make sure it grabs the reader’s attention and makes them want to start reading.

• The first sentence. Like the headline, this needs to intrigue the reader to make them continue.

• The author’s bio. Once you’ve got your reader to the end of the article you need them to click through to the products page.

There are many theories about how to achieve the best CTR, but again if you want to do article marketing the right way you need to examine your own results. For example, don’t always use the same bio box with each article. Instead, try a few different versions and see which gets the best CTR. Once you have found the one that gives you the highest CTR, slightly change it to make variations and test again. By following this process you will zoom in on the most efficient types of bio boxes and know which ones are going to get you the best results, rather than just using the same one repeatedly.

Just by using simple tracking and testing techniques you will have a big advantage over many other article marketers. Ultimately, you want to get the most profit for the least amount of investment in any business and article marketing is no different.