There are a lot of guides, courses and coaches out there that promise you the world, but often fail to deliver. I’ve been there and done that. I started my online career by spending $8,000 on mentoring that didn’t work at all.

I then proceeded to buy products and courses that were scams and full of bad advice. I was about to give up when I stumbled on information that was truly valuable.

Article marketing is my favorite way to get traffic to my websites and help people improve their lives by recommending products and services I personally use or own. I sincerely care about people and want to help them.

If you have the same mindset, I think we’ll get along just fine. Here are three simple tips on how you can find the best article marketing guide out there:

1. Research

First of all, you want to do your research and compare all the different article marketing guides out there. While I sell an article marketing guide, I’m not going to tell you to buy it, because only you can know which guide is right for you.

I recommend you use search engines, social media and forums to see what people think of all the different products out there. If you’re objective and educate yourself, you will have no problem finding the best article marketing guide for you.

2. Proven Strategies

Only go for proven effective strategies. When I was learning article marketing I realized that the best advice came from people that had applied article marketing and made it work from them.

Simple, isn’t it? You’d be surprised how many people ignore this once a good marketer comes their way. Always look at if the person selling you the guide is using the strategies himself.

3. The Whole Package

Look at the contents of the guide and what’s included. Is it teaching you everything you need to know to get started or are they trying to sell you on something else once you buy?

It pays to keep your eyes open and your focus sharp. There are a lot of bad products out there, but if you keep looking, you’ll find the hidden gems, and I can say from personal experience that these hidden gems are more than worth the time you spend on finding them.

Start taking control of your marketing efforts today by finding the best possible information that will help you succeed!

Clearly these two elements would work well in unison however in this article we will explain to you a few tips on how you can implement your own online marketing strategy using both marketing and SEO.

It is worth noting that without full implementation and investment in time and effort, results WILL vary.

So step one is realized. You now know that without any online marketing you are stunting the growth of your company. However like they say, “on the road to recovery we first have to recognize a problem exists.”

And now comes the work.

Firstly step one is the foundation. This being the domain name. Now not always is our domain as great as we would like however we need to recognize a couple things first in regards to the URL. Does the domain contain your keyword phrase that specifically hits your target market and is something they will search for? If so then you are well ahead of the game already. If not then we simply have to put in twice the effort in order to get it ranking for the desired keyword phrase.

Tip #1: Have target keyword phrase in your domain.

Secondly you absolutely must have your meta tags. ALL OF THEM. This includes meta title, meta description and meta keywords. And all of the elements together must work together in such a fashion that is not only readable by human standards but also strategic. Meta tags are the single most important factor to onsite SEO.

Tip #2: All pages MUST include meta tags: title, description and keywords.

Third and last for the SEO part of this self Costa Rica SEO and marketing guide is backlinking. Backlinks are the prime ingredient to offsite SEO and just happens to be the “food” Google loves. There are a few things to understand about backlinking though. Try to always acquire backlinks on sites that are equal to or high in PR than your own site. Also crucial, is the fact that these backlinks need to be on RELEVANT sites to your own market. So essentially a company selling lawn mowers might not want backlinking from an industry hydraulics site.

Tip #3: Acquire backlinks from relevant, high page rank sites to your own.

Now we move in to the Costa Rica marketing tips.

Of course the following should be done secondary to the first set of Costa Rica SEO tips.

Forums, blogs and commenting sections of sites are ripe for the picking. These are great places to achieve two key ingredients to this guide. Whenever posting on forums, blogs or making comments, one needs to be relevant to the conversation or topic. So don’t go out and SPAM and expect to be received well. While posting, it is important to always have your nick/name field, have your target keyword phrase and if/where possible, one link inside your actual post.

Tip #1: Self promo discreetly done can kill two birds with one stone. Backlinks and company promotion.

Videos. These days one of the most visited sites on the web is YouTube. People are loving the videos. Clearly creating some video content might help you attract some of that attention on YouTube. Keeping in mind no one wants to watch a commercial so have an informative video with a footnote at the end about how they can reach your company for more information.

Tip #2: Develop and launch informative useful videos on sites like YouTube and Vimeo.

Socialize! Socialize! Socialize! This is relatively new to the marketing industry however if you were to compare it the ‘old school’ methods of advertising one might call it “networking”. Essentially you should have your company on Facebook, YouTube, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg, Delicious and the most dominant social site, Twitter. Once registered on all these sites you need to follow a strict routine of submitting articles to them using any URL shortener. However first and foremost, you need to acquire as many followers, subscribers and “friends” as possible. Simply put, without the listening public who will hear your announcement?

Tip #3: Socialize and get your articles and information on the social web via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and more.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this self help guide for Costa Rica SEO and marketing and I wish you all the success in the world in your venture in to the online marketing world. Pura vida!

This article from the Affiliate Marketing Guide is going to take you through the importance of keywords, and how to develop a strategy that will optimise everything you do to ensure that you are attracting as much free traffic from the search engines as possible.

Let me say first of all, that, starting out the whole concept around keywords seems like a black science – at least that is what it seemed to me! However, once you get it clear in your head then it is simply a matter of following a process!

Very simply put, keywords are those words or phrases (also known as long tail keywords) that people type into search engines on the internet to find some answers to questions they have. The challenge is to find those keywords that you are going to focus on to get yourself on the first page of the search engines, be it Google, Yahoo or Bing, which is where you want to be.

So, what are the steps to finding the right keywords, and once found, what do you do next?

1. Find keywords. One truism I am sharing with you on this – there is no substitute for continuous digging and hard work to determine your keywords. You simply have to put the time and effort into finding the right keywords for you. There are tools that can help you enormously in this exercise. For example, Google Keyword Tool is a fantastic resource and it is free! This will help you find out how many searches are made for those keywords on a monthly basis which helps you determine how big the market is for those words or phrases. But, be warned, the more popular a keyword is, the more competition you will face to get ranking on the search engines. There are other tools that can help you dig deeper and get a better understand of the competitiveness or otherwise of these keywords. Tools like Wordtracker or Market Samurai, and there are others, are really good for this type of work, but you will have to pay for them. You can get them on a free weekly trial to have a look at to see which you like best, but after that you will be paying. This is just grunt work that has to be done and there is no quick solution. However, done properly and it is giving you a great foundation for your business.
2. Select your keywords. Once you have completed this exercise then select, say, the first 10 keywords that you are going to work on. The reason I say 10 is that you want to have a number that you are working on simultaneously so that you are driving traffic to your site, or blog, from as many different places as you can. Also, 10 is a relatively comfortable number to do a really good job on before you move on to the next batch. You will end up with a long list of keywords, but tackle them in blocks of 10 to make it manageable.
3. Develop a strategy. Once you have your list you now need to have a clear strategy and plan as to how you are going to approach this part of your business. You will hear me say this time and time again in the Affiliate Marketing Guide that maximising the opportunity that using the correct keywords offers, is a critical element in the establishment and growth of your business. So, what should be included in your strategy? The first and, to me, the easiest approach to this is to ask – how am I going to communicate with my audience? If the answer is, for example, my website, my blog, articles, videos, social media, then I must have a clear strategy for each of those and they must interlink. So, how am I going to integrate all these routes to market into one clear plan? The answer to that question will give you the strategy that is right for you.

That’s it for Part 4 of the Affiliate Marketing Guide. I am writing these articles in separate parts with 3 clear action steps in each article to enable you to build your business brick by brick rather than giving it to you all in one document, that is more likely to result in overwhelm!