AP 0278: Where Do I Post My Articles to Best Demonstrate Authority?

AskPat 278 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 278 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today wherever you are at in the world right now. Thank you, because you are awesome. Seriously, this show wouldn't exist without you, the listeners, and especially those of you asking questions.

And today's question comes from Richard, but before we get to that, I do want to give a shout out to today's awesome sponsor, which is AWeber.com, the email service provider that I use to put opt-in forms on my site, to collect email addresses, to be able to send emails out, personalize them as well with people's names, since I collect first names when I have people subscribe, but also use my autoresponder to be able to keep in contact with people over time. Seriously, one of the biggest mistakes I made in my business was not starting my email list soon enough, and AWeber's been a fantastic solution. I've been using for over five years now. If you go to AWeber.com/askpat, you can see a video testimonial from me there, and get it for thirty days for $1. So you can get a thirty-day trial for $1 at AWeber.com/askpat. Awesome, here's Richard.

Richard: Hello, Pat. My name is Richard and first off, I'd like to thank you so very much from the bottom of my heart for putting out all the information that you do week after week, day after day. I just find all the information that you provide outstanding and very, very motivational. So, my question is this. I have a brand new site. It's a niche site where I sell a service. On that site, I have a blog, and so my question pertains to the articles that I'm going to put on my blog and the best approach to take. So, my question is is the articles that I have: Should I put it on my website blog right away?

My worry is that because I have no authority on my site, anybody trying to search for an article or my niche . . . my articles will never be found because again, there's no authority to my site. Or would a better approach be to put it on an article-sharing site where they have higher authority and there's a greater chance for my articles to be seen on page one of Google? And if that is the approach, being the latter, putting my articles on an article-sharing site, should I then spin the articles and then throw it back onto my blog so that it is a unique article in a sense? I just want my articles to be found, obviously, to drive traffic to my site and to increase sales. It'd be great if you can answer that question for me, and I thank you very much in advance.

Pat Flynn: Richard, what's up man? Thank you so much for the question, and first of all, thank you also for the kind words and the thanks that you mentioned at the beginning of your voicemail there. Now, let's help you out here. You have a new site which is awesome, you're selling a service, and you have a blog. A blog is great on a site like this because it's going to help prove your authority, it's going to help show that there's more than just this thing you're selling, there's actually free content there that's providing value for people. It shows there's a human being on the other end as well, and in those articles if you inject a little bit of your personality, that can go an extremely long way. I don't know what the price point is of this product you're selling, however I do know that if it's a larger ticket item, for example something that's going to cost at least $100, people are going to want to know who they're buying from.

A blog is a great way to share who is on the other end and your personality, and to let their guard down a little bit because they're going to build trust with you over time or even right away if the article's good, it's helping them out, because if you can provide value for people they're going to look for ways to pay you back and if you give enough value they're going to buy stuff from you, which is awesome. So the question being—okay, you have this blog—articles in your bank and articles in your head that you want to write and maybe you've written them already or maybe not—but these articles, where do you post them, what do you do with them? One-hundred percent the answer is to post them on your site. Keep them, that's your own content. You're going to spend time doing it, and it would also allow you to feel more comfortable with putting your own personality in it. And then when people find those things eventually, and I'll talk about that in just a second, they're going to read them, they're there, you're on there, and they're going to get into your service and the thing that you have to sell.

The best practice, and I don't want to call it really the best practice, but something that a lot of people were doing a long time ago, myself included—and by a long time ago I mean around 2010—was this article website, article forums, and putting articles that you write on there and then dropping links back to your own website which increases your own authority on your site as well. Then, you can spin those articles and have them be unique content on your own site as well. That tactic, although it still works, people are still confirming with me that that strategy, which I shared a long time ago in a post called The Backlinking Strategy That Works, it still works, however it doesn't work nearly as well, and it's far riskier to do that as well. That post, by the way, has since been updated with some more white-hat strategies for building your audience and also building up your ranking in Google as well. I would highly recommend checking that out.

So you can just look up “The Backlinking Strategy That Works” and I actually believe TheBacklinkingStrategyThatWorks.com will redirect to that page, or at least direct you to the old one where at the top it says, “Hey, there's a new version of this. Click here.” And that will give you a lot of strategies, Richard, in terms of what you can do with these articles on your site and how you can take advantage of certain situations to have links point back to your site as well. Because links pointing back to your site is sort of like a vote in Google's eyes, and that's how they understand, partly, it's just one of several parts in the algorithm, whether your site is in authority or not in a space, and then keyword rankings play off of that. Now I will say that that doesn't mean you can't post in other places outside of your site. I mean, you want to keep content on your own site for your own good because what's going to happen is over time, your site's going to build that authority.

People are going to come for various reasons, you're going to get links for various reasons, you're going to make connections and build relationships. People are going to come over to the site and link to your site, and your site's going to climb the rankings, and those articles will be there instead of somewhere else. My worry is that if you posted these all on another place, your site's just going to look like a dead zone. Lack of personality, but also when people arrive there, there's not going to be anything else to add. So having those articles on your site is really important. Having them linked to each other, depending on what categories they're in, having them link externally to sites that make sense is also going to help improve your authority in search engine rankings as well, and it's going to take a while. It's going to take several months before you see any likes coming from Google, but there are things you can do that will not only increase your rankings in Google and authority level and visibility on the online space, sort of in an organic way: You can post content on other sites, but not article forums. I don't want you to do that. I want you to post on places where there are people already looking for stuff that you have to offer.

So finding out where your target audience hangs out. What websites are there out there available already that you could potentially publish on? Maybe there are forums or communities or Facebook groups that you can get involved with where you can then show yourself as an expert and have the information you need that those people are looking for by which point people would come back to your site because they want to learn more from this person who's providing value on these external sites. That's the way to go, that's what I did with GreenExamAcademy.com in a forum about the LEED exam. That's what a lot of people are doing now to help them kickstart their start with their blogs and online businesses and services. Now depending on the service as well, one thing you could do is make sure that you have your articles on your site, but then depending on the cost of your product to buy, you could run ads.

You could run, for example, targeted Facebook ads and drive traffic back to your site and sell those items. You'd have to find out to a point … And again, this is sort of more advanced stuff, and I know a lot of us who are just starting out kind of bootstrapping, we don't want to spend on advertising, and I'll tell you the truth, I spent very, very little on my advertising. But I have spent a lot of time investing on building relationships and writing good content, and putting in the time and effort to do that, and that has helped more than anything else. There's a lot of tricks and things for SEO and climbing higher in the search engines and getting more views, but like Neil Patel said on The Smart Passive Income Podcast when was on it, he said, “You know what? Just write for people. Write what the people want to read.” Answering questions, really, is what you're doing because people are searching for those answers on Google and other areas, and Google will follow suit.

They'll eventually catch up, and that would be my advice to you. So keep those articles on your blog and this whole spinning thing, it was popular back in the day and I used it myself and now that essentially is basically telling Google that you're doing stuff that you shouldn't be doing. They were okay with it before and they decided not to be okay with it, and when you really think about it, you're not actually creating new content. What you want to do is, wherever you post, you want to put new content up that's specific for that place where it's being posted. So if you have a guest post, for example, that's going up on another site, you want to make sure that you inject things into that post that are relevant to that site. You reference that blog author, which they always appreciate, and other articles that they've written in the past.

This is stuff that you can't really do on article forums, and that's what I would do. Look for guest posting opportunities, perhaps guest interviews on podcasts because podcasts are a great way to build a relationship with people as well, and post those main articles on your site so that when people are there, they are going to find them. One thing I would lastly say, something that worked really well for FoodTruckr.com is one of my best posts on that site. Again, we're talking about my niche site at FoodTrucker.com, a site built to help people starting a food truck business or who are in it already take it to the next level. The very first post that went up was a post called what I like to call a roundup post. It included fifty different food truck owners' answers to a single question, and that went completely viral in this space because it was just a high quality article because there was a lot of great value provided by other people.

So even though I wasn't a food truck owner and I'm still not, I'm still able to get good information from people who are, and you might be able to do the same thing. For example, a roundup article with fifty or maybe even twenty or even ten of the top players in the space that you're in and their quote on something specific, that can be a very highly valuable post that people will share. Then, those people who are also featured in it potentially will share it too because they're being featured in it. So that could be a great way to kickstart some traffic to your site as well and hopefully get some sales for that product that you're offering, too. I want to make sure, and again in relation to today's sponsor which is AWeber, that you're collecting emails too because sometimes, especially for bigger ticket items, you're not going to make that sale on that first visit. You're not going to make that sale on the fifth visit or the tenth visit, but maybe it's that twelfth email that goes out over time where they're finally convinced, or maybe you share a story that directly hits home with them in that email, at which point they make a decision to buy with you.

So Richard, a lot of information there, but hopefully that helps you. I really appreciate the question. An AskPat t-shirt will be headed your way for having your question featured here on the show, and for those of you listening, if you have a question you'd like potentially featured here on the show, all you have to do is go to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page. I mentioned them twice before, but I want to mention them one more time. Today's sponsor is AWeber.com, helping you make email marketing so much simpler and taking all the stress and headache out of it. And yeah, you gotta send those emails. Again, that's the best way to connect with people. People sometimes, the first thing they do in the morning is open their email, and if you can strategically time it, this is a good tip, time it for right when they wake up. That's a great time that I found that works. Also, 6:00 A.M. Pacific works well for me. It's going to be different for everybody, but that works well for me because that's when people on the west coast are waking up, and that's when people on the east coast are getting into work and they're checking email before they get to work.

So last advice for you guys there, but as always, I also want to end it with a quote. Again, before I go on with that actually, AWeber.com/askpat to get the thirty-day trial for $1. All right, now here's the quote. Today's quote is from Michael Altshuler, and he says, “The bad news is that time flies. The good news is that you're the pilot.” I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Thanks so much.