Happy Earth Day everyone!

In celebration of this day, I’d like to share with you a great resource put together by my friend Carrie Lauth.

Carrie is the host of Natural Moms Talk Radio and writer of the Natural Mom Business Guide. She is a homeschooling mom of four and a breastfeeding counselor.

And even better, she has put together a Private Label Rights article pack for this day.

What is a private label rights article?

It’s called PRL. What that means is that you can reprint the article without putting someone else’s name on it. You can use it on your website, your blog or in a special report. (You just can’t say you wrote it, or resell the rights to the content.)

I’ve know Carrie for years and I know that she produced high-quality content that will bring added value to your website for your customers.

Click here to get the Earth Day Article Pack!

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As you may already know, article marketing is one of the best ways to drive free traffic to your website. When you write an article and distribute it to an article reprint directory, other website owners and bloggers can use it on their sites.

In exchange for the free web content, they will also publish a bio box at the end of the article. You can include information about your website and a link to it. Your article, and the incoming link, can be published over and over by many different people on various websites. All of these incoming links equal more traffic to your site.

In addition to article marketing, you should also be writing articles for your own site. The more content you have, the more likely it is the search engines will find you and send you free traffic. Plus, the more helpful information you have on your website, the more likely it is that your visitors will return to your site. If you have nothing to offer them, they won’t come back.

You can use ordinary everyday type of experiences as inspiration for your articles. Your readers are just like you – the types of things that are affecting your life are also affecting theirs’.

Take a look at the experience you would like to write about and find a way to spin it so that it fits your business. For instance, if you sell cosmetics, what are some types of events that happen every day that relate to cosmetics?

Many women are very busy in the morning and do not have a lot of time to spend on make-up application. Or perhaps your daughter has taken your lipstick and drawn all over the bedroom wall – this is a good opportunity to give tips on how to remove makeup.

You can also take events from your own daily life and use them as a base for your articles. If you have a website with information about marketing a home-based business, create an article about your busy day and your time management tricks.

The fact that you are writing in a way that people relate to, can get you published again and again. People will appreciate your honesty. If they are having issues with something, they will feel comforted to know that they are not alone. This can also build trust between you and the reader. Once they trust you, they are more likely to become one of your customers. Writing in this format is a win-win situation and will help you increase your profits.

Would you like to know more about how to create web content for your site or for an article marketing campaign? Click here!

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Question: My online store can’t make money unless I get traffic, but I can’t afford to keep buying advertising. What can I do? I feel so discouraged.
Signed, Lonely in my Store
Dear Lonely in my Store,
First of all, you are NOT doing anything wrong. Online businesses take time and can get frustrating, especially in the first year.

If your online store is lonely, and you’re watching the dust balls collect, waiting for traffic to come and buy, it’s easy to get discouraged. As soon as the advertising ends, so does your traffic – if you’re even getting any results from your advertising at all.

What if you could get visitors to your website – free? And, not only that, but the visitors keep coming for years? One of the best methods of generating traffic to your website is by writing and sharing articles. This is not ‘get rich quick’ and it’s not a scam. It’s just plain old fashioned marketing with a twist.

Now, even if you aren’t a writer, you can use this method of getting traffic. It doesn’t take a degree in Literature to succeed in article marketing. All it takes is a little time and energy. If you have that – you can get traffic to your website.

So, how does it work? Well, it’s working right now. Look at the bottom of this article and you’ll see … me. I didn’t pay for this advertising, but you’ll see a link to my website right there, plain as day, just for writing and sharing this article with website publishers.

It’s actually quite simple, and it is underused, especially in work at home mom businesses.

All you need to do is write a short, simple, helpful article about something related to your online store. If you sell makeup, then write an article about how to choose a foundation color, or how to care for your skin during the winter. Then, after you’ve written your article, you submit it to the article directories.

Article directories are libraries of free articles. They are collections of articles that website and blog owners can use on their sites for free. The only stipulation is that everyone who publishes your article must include your author bio at the end which is where you include your website URL and some fascinating information about your wonderful online store.

So, now that you see how simple this free method of generating traffic is, I hope you give it a try. You’ve got nothing to lose and much to gain.

Michelle’s Note: My friend Nicole Dean doesn’t pay for advertising – ever. She uses Article Marketing to get free advertising on websites and in newsletters worldwide. You can use articles to get free traffic, too. Visit Easy Article Marketing to find out how.

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Private label rights content, also known as PLR, is ready-made content that people can buy and use many different ways. As you may know, the content you have on your site is very important. The search engines will scan your site and index the content that is found on it. When someone searches for a phrase that is found on your site, your site may come up in the search results.

You will want to be wary of some PLR sources. You can find some very cheap PLR on the internet, but the content you are getting has various subject matters and may be written by someone who does not have full command of the English language. This causes the articles to be somewhat hard to understand.

The best PLR sources will have content for sale in packs of focused subject matter and will be written by people with good command of the English language as well as good grammar and spelling skills.

When you buy PLR you are buying the rights to use the content on your site or blog. The PLR articles that you buy can be published on your site as is; although you may want to rewrite them. Other people will be buying the same PLR articles packs as you are, and by rewriting them slightly, you will create a unique article on your site.

You can also use the PLR articles to create a special report. For instance, if you bought a PLR article pack that contained 10 articles about affiliate marketing, put them all together, and you have a 10 page special report. You can sell the report or give it away for free to boost the size of your mailing list.

You can also break the PLR articles you buy up into smaller pieces and create an e-course. Again, you can use this e-course as a way to grow your mailing list.

Using PLR will enable you to add quality content to your site, easily and inexpensively.
There are some things you do with PLR. Depending on the PLR membership you chose, you may not be able to add PLR articles to a reprint directory or resell them.

PLR sources I recomment:

• All Mom Content
• All Health Content
• All Private Label Content

Update: My friend Melissa Ingold and I have put together a new PLR resource just for product sellers: ProductSellersContent.com. Check it out!

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One of my clients, Meredith of Llamajama, asked if there is any advantage to using a weblog over posting articles on her site.

My short answer: Yes!

The purpose of posting articles on your site is to increase your “virtual real estate” (VRE) which means you add more pages and information to your site, for the search engines spiders to eat, which means you’ll have more links in the search engine results when potential customers search for information.

While this method is effective in building your ranking in the search engines and providing information to your clients, it doesn’t allow you to build relationships with your customers the way that a weblog will.

Building relationships with your customers is an important method of “pre-selling” them. For example, if your potential customers know that they can go to your site for up-to-date information on using cloth diapers and the cloth diaper industry in general, who do you think will first in their minds for purchasing cloth diapers? You!

Of course, blogging is a bit more complicated than just setting up a weblog and posting. You have to decide on a specific topic, figure out what software you will use, and generate traffic to your site. And, of course, encourage people to participate.

I just downloaded a product called Blogging Starter Pack, created by my friend Lynette Chandler. This product contains all the answers to those questions, and more:

• How do I start?
• How do I setup a blog under my domain name?
• Is it worth it to pay for a hosted blog?
• Is it possible to make my blog look like my website?
• How do I use my blog to promote my products?

You can learn more about the Blogging Starter Pack at her site, or you can take her free email course, Unleash The Selling Power of Your Blog.

You can also read Lynette’s blog.

Are you blogging? Has blogging helped increase your product sales?

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