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You must have heard about “article directory”, “viral marketing”, “pay per click”, “pay per impression”, “organic traffic”, “referral traffic”, etc. Here I am going to give you a stat of article directory site (Ezinearticles.com) and its advantage over ppc and ppi. I advised my friend to donate some quality articles to ezinearticles.com before 9 months and here is the result which clearly shows its power for pulling traffic and referring to the donator’s website later.

Article donated: 5 (300 Words Each)
Total cost in donating articles: 15 USD
Total duration since the articles are published: 9 Months
Pagerank of these pages: 0-3
Total referrals from ezinearticles.com in 9 Months: 2519
Pages visit per visitor: 3.44
New visitors: 92.81%
Average referrals per month: 280
Average earning of the website from a visitor: 5.5 cents
Total earning: $138.6
Total adjusted earning: $110.88
Net profit: $95.88
Net profit in percentage: 850% per annum

What you see at the end is the net profit after 1 year is 850%, isn’t it awesome? My friend just invested $15 and what he got in return is $110.88 through pay per click ads and little page juice after 9 months. I adjusted the net earning by reducing 20% because the average page view is 3.44 and the net average page view per user of the site is 2, hence the CTR will be low for these visitors. However, if you invest in PPC ads then you will have to pay at least 5 cents per click but here you have to pay .6 cents, around 1/10th of the PPC ads. Remember you will hardly get any traffic if you configure your max pay per click to be 5 cents.

Let me clearly write all the benefits of donating articles to ezinearticles.com

1. Cheapest way to get traffic to your site.
2. Ezinearticles.com has dofollow links so you will get page juice to your website.
3. More follow backlinks to your site will increase your chances of doing better in serp.
4. It helps in branding of your website.

Disadvantages of submitting articles to article directories like ezinearticles.com 

1. People will copy it and use it all over the places.
2. Mods at ezinearticles.com will take at least 1 week to validate and publish the article.

There is a fuss for discounting the strength of article directory sites by the search engines but I have not seen it getting true with ezinearticles.com. As you have seen over the time search engines discounted the website directory sites so there are chances that the article directory sites will be discounted but remember still dir.yahoo.com, dmoz.org and botw.org are not at all affected. If you ask me then I will surely suggest you to donate quality articles to ezinearticles.com as it is the leader of this trade and they do a great job in keeping the quality up. I don’t think ezinearticles.com is going to be discounted over the time.

Simple and straight answer to this question is NO, you should never buy a link. Don’t worry I just wrote the first line for Matt (You know who is he). If you look on the internet then you will see tons of websites giving free advices on building back links on which search engines count heavily. If you are already exhausted from those tricks and still your low pr (pagerank) is bothering you then YES, go ahead and buy links. You should buy links even though Google and other search engines hate it and a website caught doing this will be heavily penalized but if done smartly then there will be a low chance left for robots to figure out which are paid and which are natural links.

I am suggesting you to buy a link because I know almost every webmaster is involved in this process. It doesn’t mean if a backlink is paid means unfair and all other trading is reasonable. No, search engine heavily count on back links to a page to decide the authority and rank of the page for any search phrase so any strategy followed to get a back link is not fair. How many people in this world are there who just write and stay idle, don’t market their content, I guess very negligible. Either he/she doesn’t know about the power of backlink or he is list bothered.

I know you are bothered so you are reading this page, here are few pointers to consider while buying links.

How much of a worth is the page from where you are buying the link?

• Is the page is on your niche? You should always try to buy a link from your niche only.
• What is the PR? PR above 3 is a worth to buy.
• How old is the page? It is not good to buy links from a young page which just evolved before couple of days or weeks.
• How many back links and who all are they? Check the back links of the page and browse through the sites to know who all are they linking it. Are they all organic? Organic bank link pages are better to buy.
• What is the traffic to that page? Ask the seller for the expected traffic to the page so that you can get a glance over your referral from the page.
• What is the content size and how many out going links are already on the page? Content size more than 500 words are better, lesser number of out going links from the page is more suitable.
• Where your link will be placed? Is it in the footer or sidebar? Link placed in the content and in the top 200 words is better.
  How much of a worth is the site from where you are getting a paid back link?
• What is the PR of the website? PR more than 3 is better.
• Who owns the website and how long he/she has been running the site. If the person running the site is the owner and he also created the website then it is better.
• How old is the site? Older sites are good.
• Make a google search on “domain” to check the track record and what people are talking about it. Also check with internet archive website to know more about the site.
• You should check if the website has a bad neighborhood. Every result displayed is not correct, you have to understand the report in a greater form.
• What is the TLD of the site? .gov, .edu, .org are the better TLDs to buy from.
• How many back links for the site? More back links will be better for you, check for the authority back links as well.
• How many years the domain is registered from now. More number of years is always better.

Should you buy temporary or permanent link?
- You must try to buy permanent link and avoid temporary links.

Should you buy a site wide or page level link?
- Today site wide links are evaluated more but in future it will be discounted and the root page will be considered and site wide links also look spamy so avoid it.

How much to pay for a link?
- This is a tricky question and it depends on all these factors stated above. You need little experience in figuring the right price for a backlink.

Should you buy from a link vendor or from a webmaster? How to know if the seller is a vendor or not?
- It is always better to deal directly with a webmaster and in order to know the seller is a vendor or not, you need to ask him couple of questions like when a link can come live after the payment is made. If the seller owns it then he/she will reply in 2 minutes else in hours.

Keep a track of your all the links and the contacts from where you just bought. You need to crosscheck if that is still live in every 3-6 months of interval. You never know a site might get handed over to a new webmaster and due to inexperience he/she might sell links to some bad neighborhood. You need to remain vigilant and ask the webmaster to remove your link at least, it doesn’t matter what you paid for that link but it is more of a worth to take your link off else you get penalized from google.

How do I start my blog? This question was asked by my friend before couple of days, he also added this “don’t tell me various things that are associated with blogging but just describe in few steps how I get in to my first post without doing any major mistake”.

Well, it is very tough to comprehend and sink a range of things associated with blogging to one small article with few steps only. Somehow I figured out you have to follow at least these 4 steps to start your blog with wordpress.

1. Buying a top-level Domain
You need your own domain so I will suggest selecting your name as your domain with “com” as TLD. Remember we are talking here about personal blog so try to pick a domain name that is related to your name not optimized for any other keyword. If you find that is already registered by someone else then try “org” or shuffle your first and last name to finalize one.
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“Content is the King”, the most common phrase is in danger. Are you also suffering to keep your content away from being copied? Do you have issues in crosschecking the content you buy from writers? This is something I have seen many webmasters suffering from and something which I am always asked by my friends.

Here are some of the websites where you can check your content and make sure that you are safe & not plagiarized.

Paid Websites for Validating Content Copyrights
1. copyscape.com - The website which I know that gives the best service for the money it charges and I also use them for validating my content. This site charges only 5 cents for one search. This search can be a webpage or 2000 word content. If you want to save your each penny then search once after merging your content from various articles that you want to post to your website and make sure that it is less than 2000 words in order to get the best result. I have seen this working fine down to 5 words only, this means if you have just 5 words common to any other indexed web pages on the internet then this is going to find that for you. They also have an API to make life simpler for you.

List of Free Sites that Checks for Content Plagiarism
1. articlechecker.com - They don’t describe anything in details but i guess if the searched phrases are more than 1 then you are colliding some other website content.
2. plagiarismdetect.com - Needs a signup, if you wish to check them out then let us know here how they perform.
3. plagiarismchecker.com - free but I guess not the best one. This leads to google with the content in a search query and leaves to you for deciding if it is copied.
4. www.google.ie/advanced_search?hl=en – The most trivial way of validating and this works the best as long as you can break your content and search in limited words.

More tips on Saving your Content from Digital Theft

You can always find an unique sentence from your web page and trigger the google alert. The day google finds the same sentence somewhere else is going to send you one email.

If you are using popular blogging software like Wordpress then use Maxpower’s Digital Fingerprint Plugin so that it will insert customized unique fingerprints to you posts and later you can set up one google alert for that.

I know this is a common question for any starter but do you know the right answer yet. Many people copy paste others’ content, few write anything to everything under one category, some just grab all the affiliate links and make a blog but is this called a personal blog? I guess, NO!

A personal blog should be everything comes from your brain should be well represented through a navigation tool to browse it later by you or your follower. Don’t start a blog thinking in mind to monetize it. There are various ways available on web to make money so don’t get confused and start motivating your content and visitors in a wrong way for money.

I have seen people starting a blog and later getting popular either by sure SEO tricks or due to their talents but they often misguide their visitors having some paid to review content. I know a person who is very famous and claims to make $60K per month once wrote a paid review on a book which he never read. Can you imagine he is referring with some vague facts and suggesting others to go and buy that book, for God sake don’t get on to your knees for pennies.

What Should you Write on Your Blog?

• Write something about your profession, anything which you feel other should know about.
• Write about the places you go for your vacations.
• Write about the conference you attend.
• You can also write about your hi-tech gadgets.
• Write about your creative ideas.
• Write on social awareness.
• Write on your talent.
• Create your own categories to post your content so that it keeps your blog clean.

What you shouldn’t be Writing on?

• Never make a post when you are irate. Wait for few days before you write on it.
• Never steal others’ content.
• Never claim anything which you are not confident for else it will be misguiding your visitors.
• Avoid throwing some content just to meet your promises, write only when you feel writing on a matter.
• Avoid paid posting, money will bias your decisions. Your blog will be standing on your personal reputation so don’t try to sell yourself for pennies to some baseless product/service owners.

Let me know what else we can add to this list of DOs and DON’Ts. Feel free to share your thoughts on this topic. I will also guide you to create your new blog in my coming post.