Search Engine Optimization: A Growing Trend in the Middle East and Northern Africa?

In the Western world, SEO is one of the most popular buzz words for internet marketers. If your goal is to establish an online presence, you have to use SEO as one of your main marketing strategies. But where does that leave the rest of the world? We all know SEO is growing in Asian countries, but until recently the Middle East and Northern Africa, or MENA collectively, has stayed well under the radar.

One of the inherent issues with implementing SEO in foreign countries is the language barrier. Typical Alphanumeric based languages are a simpler hurdle – the words are different, but the letters are the same. In Middle Eastern PPC management, the biggest problem is getting passed that change in language dynamics. There are over 221 million Arabic speakers in the world, but Arabic still constitutes less than 1% of all online content.

Google is working hard to remedy this with Arabic-centric domains such as google.ae, but the change is slow and it’s difficult to find a Middle Eastern search engine marketing firm. With up to 80% of online searches coming out of Saudi Arabia and Egypt being performed in Arabic, it’s about time we saw some improvements in the MENA SEO front.

Luckily, it seems like the Arabic trends are definitely on the rise. In a part of the world with one of the historically lowest percentage of internet users, we’re starting to see numbers like 100 million Youtube videos watched (out of a global 2.5 billion) and 60% of internet users in Saudi Arabia using the Arabic extension of Facebook, now’s the time to get a jump on SEO in the Middle East. With the right Middle Eastern search engine optimization firm, the sky is the limit.

Using Inbound Marketing to Tailor Your Website to the Modern Buyer

It’s widely known these days that having a website is crucial to the success of your online marketing strategies. It doesn’t matter what type of business or commercial enterprise we’re talking about; your online presence largely determines the outcome of your efforts to reach new buyers.

Surprisingly, a lot of businesses still haven’t made that leap to get in on the digital action. 1&1 Internet recently conducted a survey of SME businesses and found that an incredible 40% of small businesses don’t even have a website. Some of these have at least established some sort of social media presence, but simply having a Facebook page isn’t enough to create a fully realized strategy for online marketing. As we get further along in 2012, it’s becoming more essential than ever to set up a virtual front for your business that allows real, engagable customer interaction.

Okay, so a website is important, but what then? Just building a static site isn’t going to get you nearly as far these days as it may have back in 2003. The difference is that inbound marketing is playing a larger role in how sales are made, and a truly successful website needs to take advantage of that on all fronts.

What I mean is that websites today are much more interactive than they were in the past. Where we are right now, your website’s success depends on the network of connections surrounding it. Through strong social media interaction, efficient use of search engine marketing, blogging, and informative content you can more easily showcase your website to a more widespread audience, thereby increasing your sales and boosting your conversion rates. Do it right, and it’s more effective than most article marketing techniques.

Why has this arena changed so much? Most of it is due to a shift in the behavior of buyers on the web. Consumers need the freedom to make their own choices – they want to choose when, where, and how they buy something, and the last thing they want is a salesperson pushing them towards the checkout. This fundamental change can be summed up by saying that modern buyers don’t want to be sold to – they want to be given information. It’s a self-service psychology.

Interactive content like this – podcasts, social media, blog posts – are now bringing in the majority of online sales, proving that inbound marketing techniques are becoming more effective while outbound strategies – telemarketing, direct mailers, email marketing – are dropping in terms of conversion and ROI.

The bottom line is this: a virtual business optimized for inbound marketing allows the sales to come to you – not the other way around. It’s easier, cheaper, and all around more cost effective.

Why You Need to Stop Paying For Your Backlinks

When you own a business or a website, you can be tempted to use one of those services that offers “Cheap PR8 Backlinks!” or “Get on Page 1 of Google!” It’s an easy decision if you don’t know much about how these services work – What’s that? Get on page 1 of Google? Why sure, I’ll pay for that!

 

What these services do is spam a massive number of links to a whole bunch of non-relevant sites. That is bad for your business for 2 reasons:

 

1. Google doesn’t look very favorably on backlinks from sites that are not relevant to the destination page (although it’s still not a punishable offense, just stupid)
2. Depending on the methods that the service uses to get the links out there, it actually MIGHT be a punishable offense, in which case your entire site could get slammed and sent back to the hundredth page, or worse.

 

I actually had #2 done to me recently. I wasn’t using a paid backlink service (tried it once, never went back), but I was testing out some different techniques and theories that I had for getting my page ranked. I went from page 3 of Google for a certain keyword all the way back to page 92. You can guess that I was pretty bummed when I found out it happened. I lost a lot of revenue on that site as a result.

 

I’ve been able to build it back up to page 15 so far, but it has been a long, arduous process that could have been avoided if I had just stayed away from that one technique. Now, I know I didn’t pay for the backlinks that did this to me, but the point is that you never know what these services are actually doing to get the promised number of backlinks out there.

 

Google doesn’t tell you when it punishes you, and it doesn’t tell you what you did wrong. It just sends your page way back and leaves you to figure it out for yourself.

 

If you want to get onto the 1^st page of Google, put the effort in and do it yourself. Article directories don’t have the same sway they used to since the Google Panda updates, but they still hold some weight, so don’t count them out completely. Social networking sites like Facebook are apparently going to be given more weight, so make sure you use them as well. Ask other people to share your site on their pages to help get the word out.

 

If you are offering a quality service or have useful information on your site, people will have no problem linking to it and sharing it for you. If you want some quick backlinks, you can hire a freelance content writer to write some articles and then get them up on article directories quickly and painlessly, controlling the process so that you know exactly where your links are coming from.

A Few More Changes to HandleyNation

Well, as many of you may have noticed there have been a lot of changes going on around here at HandleyNation. I changed up the blog design again (for a good reason though!) and a few of the posts have disappeared. That’s because we finally got the handleynation.com site up and running!

 

From now on, this blog will continue to cover everything internet marketing related. The website is going to be the headquarters for my content writing services. Since I liked the theme that was on here so much, I decided to use it over on the main site, and I pulled a few of the blog posts that dealt with freelance writing and online writing to use as a starter for the HandleyNation.com blog. If you are interested in writing services, or if you’re a writer trying to get started in freelance writing, bookmark that blog because it’s going to be full of useful information.

 

I’ll be back to posting up internet marketing articles here again very soon once the waters settle down a bit. I’ve actually been in the trenches trying to figure out what sort of backlinking strategies are still useable after the Google Panda updates, and boy do I have a lot to report. I plan to have a long post up sometime soon about the subject of current backlinking strategies.

Spontaneous Human Combustion and Freelance Writing

When I’m not working for clients and practicing new internet marketing techniques, most of my time is devoted to writing for other sites around the web. It helps me stay focused and allows me to practice writing in different styles, which I think is a crucial skill for a freelancer to have. Different clients usually want different styles of writing, and while it’s possible to develop a unique writing style that’s identifiable as your own, you’re more likely to have success as a beginner if you can easily adapt the way you write to meet different needs. I can’t count the number of times a client has shown me a web page or blog and said, “I want it to sound like this.”

When I’m writing on HandleyNation I inevitably fall back into my own personal style, and if there’s a shortage of writing work it’s easy to lose track of that flexibility that comes from tailoring your writing to meet a wide variety of different needs.

Well anyway one of my favorite websites just bought one of my articles and published it on their front page. Toptenz.net is a top 10 list website that covers topics ranging from health to politics to bizarre and weird circumstances and everything in between. They work with a lot of great writers and I’m honored to have one of my pieces published on their site. The article is called Top 10 Unsolved Cases of Spontaneous Human Combustion. As you might guess, it talks about some of the most bizarre cases of spontaneous combustion in history, of which there have been over 200 documented since the 1400′s. The newest one occurred as recently as 2010 in Ireland, and despite the modern forensics technology we have it still remains a mystery.

 

You can check out the article here: Top 10 Cases of Spontaneous Human Combustion

 

-Andrew Handley

4 Easily Avoidable Mistakes Made by Article Marketers

It doesn’t matter if you’re a wet-behind-the-ears beginner or a long time veteran at internet marketing, article marketing is always going to play a vital role in your overall promotional campaign. Article marketing is the technique of using article directories and user submitted content sites to promote a business, website, or product. It’s one of the best ways to make money online writing articles. Article marketers typically put up dozens of articles each week, and with that kind of volume it’s easy to make mistakes. Here are four common mistakes made by article marketers that you can avoid with a little common sense.

Mistake #1 – Failing to Proofread

There has never been a perfect writer on this planet. Everybody makes mistakes from time to time, and in the world of internet marketing you can lose a lot of reader trust if your articles are filled with surface errors, spelling mistakes, or grammar slip-ups. It only takes a minute or two extra to read back over each article, but a lot of article marketers can’t seem to find the time. Trust is crucial in internet marketing because in this virtual arena you have literally seconds to make an impression before your reader is gone. Internet marketers base their livelihoods on trust.

In addition to basic grammar and spelling errors, sometimes the words come together in your head but don’t sound quite right when you read back over the article. Sometimes it just plain doesn’t make any sense when you go back over it a second time. Spell check may be effective for typos, but you’re the only person who has control over the flow and readability of the article. If you can’t figure out the proper flow for your articles, you can always hire a freelance writer to handle the writing while you focus on submission and promotion.

Mistake #2 – Improper Backlinking

I’ve mentioned time and time again how important backlinks are to marketing, but it’s not enough to simply put them in their; you have to make sure it’s done properly. Backlinking is one of the basics of SEO that you learn your very first day of Googling internet marketing techniques, but I’m still surprised at how many people are doing it wrong.

Backlinks need to be placed in appropriate anchor text in order to be effective. The site on which you are placing your articles also has to allow do-follow links. I’ve known several people who spent a few weeks setting up backlinks through article marketing, only to find that the site they were using implemented a no-follow linking policy.

To check if your article directory uses do-follow links, type Ctrl+U and then Ctrl+F, then type in “nofollow” in the search field. If it doesn’t find any, you’re peachy. If it does, just save yourself some time and move on to the next site.

Mistake #3 – Skipping the Terms of Service

Every article directory and user submitted content site has a terms of service, and you may not know this but ALL OF THEM ARE DIFFERENT. A lot of these places have very strict rules about what you can and cannot post on their site. It’s becoming more and more common for a site to suspend or delete a user’s account for posting affiliate links, for example. For some article marketers, affiliate links are the whole reason they’re doing it in the first place. This is one of the biggest mistakes made by article marketers because, come on, who has time to read those things?

The worst part is that sometimes these sites won’t catch your TOS violations right away. You might spend weeks, even months working on building up your articles on that site only to wake up one morning and find all that hard work came to naught because you violated one of their policies.

Keep in mind that article directories are getting stricter by the day. They have to if they want to keep up with some of the new policies being implemented by Google’s continuing algorithm changes. The easiest way to avoid wasting your time is to take a few extra minutes and skim through the terms of service each time you sign up on a new article directory.

Mistake #4 – Poor Keyword Research

If you aren’t doing this right, you have to stop and question what exactly you are doing. Keywords are the heart, soul, backbone, kidneys, and kneecaps of article marketing. There are two reasons you might be using article marketing: to a) build up backlinks or to b) sell affiliate products. For both of these, the absolutely most important, crucial, imperative, pivotal step is proper keyword research.

If you aren’t taking the time to choose high demand, low competition keywords in the proper niche, you’re just wasting your time, my friend. Content is important, yes. The number of articles you put up is important, it’s true. But keywords are the only thing making all of that worth a damn. Without the proper keywords, nobody finds your articles, search engines don’t know you exist, and you’ll wake up every single morning wondering why your articles are only getting one or two views per day.

New Blog Design and New Page for Internet Marketing Articles

I’ve got a couple new updates happening with the blog right now that I wanted to talk about. First of all, as you’ve probably already noticed there’s a new design on the blog! Let me know if you like it or prefer the old one in the comments section below. I’m always open to feedback on how to best improve the user experience here at HandleyNation.

Second, if you look to the right of this post you’ll see a brand new picture advertising my free list building e-book How to Build an Unstoppable Email List. Previously I had a post asking my readers to leave a comment and request the free e-book, but all you have to do now is subscribe. Just enter your email address and I’ll send the e-book straight to your inbox. You’ll also be notified every time I make a new post, so there’s nothing to lose!

Finally, I made one more addition to the blog in the form of a new page for articles. This page is an index of internet marketing articles, work from home articles, and motivational articles around the internet that hopefully you’ll find informative and educational. There’s 38 articles on the list right now, but I’ll be updating it constantly so check back often for some helpful guides and tips. You can click the link there on “internet marketing articles” or you can access the page in the “Articles” tab at the top of the blog.

Oh and one more thing! There’s now a Facebook like box on the right side of the blog. If you like the posts just take a second and show your appreciation by liking us on Facebook. I also post some discounts for my freelance writing services on my Facebook page from time to time, so if you’re in the market for exceptional content writing at affordable rates, go ahead and take a look at the page. You can also contact me through this blog or on my email at andrew@handleynation.com.

That’s it!

-Andrew Handley

November 2011 Earnings Report

November was an incredibly busy month. It’s finally starting to clear up down here in Costa Rica after a long rainy season, so with the sun shining I’ve been trying to spend more time outside while keeping up with all the work. I missed a good friend’s wedding due to the fact that I couldn’t get away for a few weeks, and I’m actually pretty regretful about that. If you can’t be around for friends, what kind of a friend are you?

 

Nevertheless, my spirits are higher than ever thanks to the weather change; we’re going into one of the most beautiful times of the year down here.

 

As far as earnings, November was a pretty good month. Earnings are down a little on Triond, but I’ve been pursuing other writing outlets so that’s understandable. A few months ago we got the HandleyNation Facebook page up and running thanks to the help of my lovely graphic designer.

 

I’ve been seeing a lot of traffic here on my blog from people interested in learning how to make money online, so thank you to everybody who’s been reading even when the posts were few and far between. I also have a free list building e-book available (link goes to the post)

 

Now let’s take a look at my November 2011 earnings report:

 

Triond: $8.69 (down from $16.19 last month)

 

Amazon Associates: $0.36

 

Helium: $5.26

 

Misc. Affiliates: $18.34

 

Textbroker: $10.08

 

Freelance Writing: $1,201

 

Total earned in the month of November: $1,243.73

 

Like I mentioned, I haven’t been posting much on Triond so those numbers are going down. I’m kind of getting tired of Triond’s lack of quality control, but so far it’s been a convenient outlet for anything I feel like writing at any time.

 

Helium is starting to replace Triond. Their PPV earnings are higher and it’s just a more friendly and inviting community in general. I’ll probably be doing more with them in the future.

 

Earnings are still trickling in on Amazon Associates, even though I haven’t done anything with The Twitter Experiment in awhile. It’s been months actually, so if you read those posts and wondered where the rest of the updates went, well, there you go! I’m still getting residual sales even though I haven’t touched it since about June.

 

Freelance earnings are also down, but that’s because I’ve been taking more days off. It’s Costa Rican summertime; there’s no way I’m staying inside all day!

 

Subscribe using the button at the top right of this page to get email updates whenever a new post goes up, and don’t forget to claim your FREE list building e-book.

-Andrew Handley

Hey, Want a Free List Building E-book?

**Note: I made some changes to this post and to the steps for getting the e-book. All I want you to do is put up a tweet or post a Facebook update about it.

Wow, I can’t believe it’s already December! It’s been a great year so far, and now that we’re in the month of giving I want to give all my faithful readers something in return for the support you’ve given me and my blog. I’ve written a full length e-book which I’m going to give out for free on an exclusive basis. The name of the e-book is How to Build an Unstoppable Email List, and it details all of the hardest hitting methods currently in use for creating a strong, targeted list of email subscribers.

If you have a business and you haven’t set up a subscriber list yet, now’s the time to start. This is a great guide for beginners and veterans alike, because it outlines the steps to not only bring in a ton of traffic and subscribers, but to monetize your list as well. A massive subscriber list lets you pitch your product to an audience of thousands.

In the e-book, you’ll learn how to:

• Choose a foolproof domain
• Build a basic high conversion website
• Set up an autoresponder
• Design a squeeze page and enhance it with promotions and attention grabbing giveaways
• Create a high power opt in page
• Boost your number of subscribers into the thousands with my patented START traffic method
• Take advantage of 4 simple ways to monetize your subscriber list to maximize your online income

To get this book, you basically “pay with a tweet.” When you click the link right below this paragraph it will take you to the download page for How to Build an Unstoppable Email List and all you need to do in return is either tweet about it or make a post on Facebook. That’s it! You’re paying for a full list building guide with nothing but a tweet.

Pay With A Tweet And Get This Free List Building E-Book!

-Andrew Handley

How Article Directories Were Affected By Google’s Content Farm Update

This week’s guest post is by Scott Spjut.

Several weeks ago, Google unleashed what’s been called the “Panda” or “Farmer” update – hurting the search results of several large article directories: eZine Articles, Article Base, Associated Content, among others. The update targeted low-quality sites with low-value content.

While it’s still yet to be seen if the power of content farms is coming to an end, the changes made have made many question what to do moving forward.

First of all, you can be sure that none of the websites negatively affected by this update are simply going to pack their bags and give up. They have revenue to maintain and bills to pay and employees to keep.

Moving forward, the biggest change is probably that they’re going to be a lot more careful about what they approve. In essence, we’ll see a great divide between “content farms” and “article directories.”

Content farms are just about pushing out a lot of content. Quality isn’t too important, as long as there’s plenty of text for the search engines to read. Article directories, however, are more about providing quality content and being a reliable source of good information. So with this most recent update, more websites are going to realize that – when it comes to content – quality is more important than quantity.

So what should the average individual who has used article directories in the past do now?

One option is to keep doing what you’re doing, keeping in mind that if your submissions aren’t getting accepted anymore it’s likely because you’re not really providing quality content. (I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you.) If that happens, then you switch your focus to other methods of generating traffic; you may not be the greatest writer, but there are plenty of other avenues out there to build your business.

The other option is to change your approach, keeping article submission on the back burner. Focus your efforts elsewhere for the next few months – perhaps occasionally checking in on article directories to see how they’re doing – then reassess your approach.

All in all, this update will improve the quality of content on the Internet; and hopefully, we all can be part of providing that sort of quality.

Scott Spjut is a writer and editor who has been featured in various magazines, newspapers and websites – including Newsweek, the Washington Post, CBS News and the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Scott currently works with Professional Marketing International helping people change their lives.

If you would like to become a guest blogger on HandleyNation, please sign up at My Blog Guest and contact me through my profile there (Andrew Handley).